Leaving Lucy Pear (22 page)

A noise. A crunching in the grass. She stopped. The crunching stopped. Of course. Her cheeks burned, her fear sang. She folded the pear into the coat, folded the coat in a neat pile on the ground, set her cap on top, pushed her hair into some kind of order, and walked on.

 • • • 

Lucy Pear walked past the place where she had been laid by her mother, and past the other place, where she had been laid by Emma. She fell into a hole—Vera's old fish pond—and climbed out. She climbed the stone wall, passed the great, comforting pine tree beneath which Bea had nearly lost her resolve, and found herself standing, exposed, on a long, rolling lawn, facing the sort of house she had glimpsed only in fairy tales. She did not see its neglect—the night was too dark and she was too young to have believed it anyway. She saw the terrace, built of granite so white it seemed to glow, and the tall windows lined with heavy drapes. Each window appeared taller than her own house! She saw the many chimneys, and the vases the size of children set out across the terrace, and the long car parked in the drive.

She crept across the lawn's lower edge, then up along its side. Her cheeks burned now with hope, her heart jigged, her mouth felt full of birds. This place! She might have come from it. She might belong to it. She might return.

Only as she reached the top of the lawn did the lower floor rise into view. The terrace had hidden it, but Lucy saw now: two lit windows. A woman on a bed, holding a glass.

Lucy knew right away. Even as she pulled herself over the railing, her cheeks began to cool. A chill swept through her. Weeds grew so densely in the terrace cracks they appeared to hold the stone together. She crouched behind a vase and watched the woman walk to the window and saw clearly that the woman's bare ankles were her ankles. The woman's skin was her skin. The woman was close to crying. It was the strangest thing, to watch a woman she had no memory of and know she was trying not to cry because that pinch in her brow, that flare of her nostrils, that was what Lucy's face did when she tried not to cry.

She heard the trucks leaving the point. She wanted to cry. Her mouth was salty with tears. As surely as she knew that Beatrice Cohn was her mother, she knew she could not knock at this window. How could that woman possibly help her? What had Lucy imagined? She had barely thought it through. She had gotten as far as asking for a train ticket. Tonight, just now, she had wanted to move in! But Beatrice Cohn looked as wrecked as the
Mendosa.
There were men who wanted to kill her. There was Roland's leg and Luis Pereira's face and Emma, who no longer worked here.

How could she have worked here in the first place?

And behind the woman in the bed lay a long lump, an old man, judging from the white scraps of hair fringing his bald head. The uncle, clearly, Hirsch. He had been the one Emma nursed. His name had been in the papers, too. Did Lucy's mother sleep in a bed with her own uncle? Was she as pitiful as that? Her stare, certainly, was pitiful, her eyes lit with misery. She swayed, as Roland used to do, when he stood drunk rather than sat drunk. She was staring, Lucy realized, at a dark window, lit from within. The only thing you could see standing at a window that way was yourself.

Lucy crawled closer. Against one of the house's dark windows
she stood, and regarded the woman's figure from the side, through the cloth of her nightgown. She was not like Emma, who joked she was built like a ruler. Beatrice Cohn was very thin but not at all straight, nor flat: her bottom lifted the gown behind her; her breasts were twice the size of Emma's; her thinness pulled at her curves, made them seem even more pronounced. Her nipples stood in a disconcerting, arrowlike way.

Lucy would have rather her mother had no breasts at all. Then at least Lucy might get her wish, to stay like a boy forever—at least some promise would have been eked from this encounter. She inched closer, trying to see the color of Mrs. Cohn's eyes, noting as she neared that she was still a head shorter than the woman. This was such a simple observation, the sort of thing people said all the time,
still a head shorter,
yet its very simplicity, its commonness, caused Lucy to break sweat again. She heard it as if someone else were saying it, a neighbor or a teacher, offering it up as thoughtlessly as any other daily remark, about rain clouds or pie.
Still a head shorter!
As if all this time Lucy had been growing to grow as tall as this woman. As if the woman had been waiting for her to arrive. Longing poured into Lucy, filled her to her neck, brought her hand into a fist, daring to knock:
Take me in!
But before she could work up the courage, Beatrice Cohn grimaced, spun away from the window, and put out the light.

 • • • 

Bea finished her rye in darkness, set the glass on the floor, wove a wide arc to make sure she cleared the glass, and lay beside Ira in the dark, her back to his side, her head spinning. She could no longer see the window but she knew it was there because she could see the quarter moon. Her eyes closed. The moon hung in the private room behind her eyelids, a white, wiggling echo of itself. She opened her eyes again, closed them, let the moon swim through her, putting her and her circles to sleep. Her eyes
fluttered. Then they were open, and she was looking at herself, on the other side of the window, a child, Bea-Bea, staring in.

 • • • 

Briefly, Lucy's mother seemed to have disappeared. Lucy pressed her face to the glass. She felt her body drain of hope, felt her knees turn to mud. Then two pricks of light gazed out at her, as startling a sight as a raccoon's eyes in the woods. Like a raccoon's eyes, they glinted, lit by the moon and apparent menace. Like a raccoon's eyes, they seemed to look straight through her, as if in warning.

Lucy ran. She ran off the terrace, across the lawn, past the pine, over the wall, through the orchard. She found the coat and grabbed it up. She looked back, up toward the house, but saw no light. Had the woman seen her? Lucy waited. She had not seen her. Of course not. She was a woman who looked at herself in windows. She didn't care enough to see Lucy. And if she had seen her, she wasn't coming. No noise came from above, no light. Lucy's stupidity was crushing. Beatrice Cohn had left her. She hadn't asked her to come back.

Still, Lucy waited, her arms hugging Liam's coat. The pear within split as she waited. She took a step backward, then froze, took another step, froze. She punched a low branch, knocking pears to the ground, froze again, waited. She waited until she could not bear the disappointment, until fatigue darkened her senses, until all she could do was shake the pear chunks from the coat, twist her hair into the cap, and start the long walk
home.

P
ost for Mrs. Cohn!” the mailman sang, his voice resounding through the house, for he had taken the trouble to kneel down, poke open the flap, and push his lips into the hole. His words arrived in all their snide glory in the great room, where Bea lay on a sofa with her arms covering her face, Albert stood looking out the window, and Ira and Henry sat with three newspapers between them. Sacco and Vanzetti were supposed to have been executed the night before, but thirty minutes out, as Robert G. Elliott, widely admired as the gentlest executioner in New England, checked his voltage, Governor Fuller sent a last-minute reprieve, giving the defendants twelve days to find a judge willing to retry their case.

Bea appeared to be asleep but wasn't, Ira knew, because when the mail flap crashed down she rolled over at once and sat up, her response as automatic as a dog's.

Poor Bea, who had gone finally, truly, mad, who swore she had seen her baby, grown into a girl, peering in the window one night. She had told Albert, who had told Ira and Henry, and then Henry had told Lillian, which made Bea even crazier—she accused Albert of betraying her. Ira just shook his head. He knew she had drowned the baby, but he couldn't possibly say that to her now. Henry kept reminding Bea that the baby (as far as he knew) had gone to the orphanage, and that the orphanage kept no records. Bea had nothing sensible to say about any of it. “But the pears,” she kept saying.
“They didn't come this year, for the pears. They're still on the trees, they'll go soft . . .” As if that explained anything.

They stopped responding to her. Ira kept waiting for her to admit she was wrong—if not lying, then mistaken. She had been dreaming.
Everyone gets confused sometimes,
he said,
Vera used to get confused, even I sometimes think not entirely thought-through, thoughtful—what do you call them?—thoughts.
He tried to make her laugh. But she looked at him without any sign of confusion or torment and said, calmly, I know what I saw. Her certainty was the worst part, proof of how fully she had unraveled. It sat heavy on Ira, and there was his guilt, too, at how Bea's suffering had brought his brother back to him. The shipwreck seemed to have roused Henry from his tunnel of commerce, and then Bea's hallucination had roused him further, so that he had come to visit each weekend and on some days, like this one, in the evening after work. Ira couldn't have predicted the pleasure Henry's company would bring him. For years, he had thought of his brother as a statue, made of wax, but he was real, with warm, hairy forearms and, across his balding brow, a shock of black hair which by this time in the day, in the middle of August, had started to frizz and fly. Henry hadn't been hard about Bea all those years, Ira decided, but overcome. Or, if he'd been a little hard, Lillian had bossed him into it. But that wasn't entirely fair, either. Ira was less inflamed by thoughts of Lillian now that Henry had returned. Even Lillian herself didn't seem so hateful. She'd joined Henry on his weekend visits, along with Albert, who was good to all of them, taking Bea out on long walks, pushing Ira down to Mother Rock, making tea for Lillian and Henry, going out on his own once Bea and Lillian had gone to bed, walking for hours—they didn't see him until morning—so that Ira and Henry could play chess.

Bea sat, rubbing her face with her hands, preparing to go fetch the letter. “Nah nah
nah-
nah!” the mailman might have shouted. The picketers had dispersed but venomous missives continued to
arrive, accusing Bea of crimes ranging from attempted manslaughter and bribery to excessive wealth. Many referenced Sacco and Vanzetti in some way, suggesting that Bea was directly responsible for the persecution of the working class. Their letters mobbed Bea's desk, spilled onto the floor, while nearly every day another piece about Bea's fiasco ran in the
Gloucester Daily Times,
next to headlines about Sacco and Vanzetti. Today's article exposed the number of extra ambulances the city had to maintain year-round for the two months when the population boomed with summer people like Beatrice Cohn. If she had been a Protestant, Ira thought, her fellow vacationers might have stood up for her. But she wasn't. They didn't.

“Sweetheart,” Henry said. “Don't bother with the letter. Let me burn it. Come. Sit with us awhile longer.”

“I wasn't sitting with you.”

“Lie with us. Lie back down. We'll read to you.”

Bea stood. Ira shook the
Globe
in her direction. “Look! They're cheering in Buenos Aires and Paris! It's progress, at least.”

Bea took the paper and read for a minute. “I wonder what made him change his mind.”

“The bombs,” Ira said with joy. “The demonstrations! London, Chicago, Brussels, everywhere. Workers standing up as one!”

“You think a few bombs scared Fuller?” Henry huffed. “They sent one to his house in May, didn't change his mind. You think he cares about the mighty granite cutters threatening to strike?” Henry shook his head. “He's got two hundred million in riot insurance, tear gas by the truckload, machine guns stacked like wood. It's not up to him anyway. It's the judges who decide.”

“That's what Fuller would have us think,” said Ira.

Bea handed the paper back. “They should get a fair trial. I do believe that, even if the throngs think I'm a beast. But it won't make any difference in the end. They criticize America. Their English is bad. I wouldn't execute them. But they'll be executed.”

She left the room.

“I wouldn't bother her with the news while she's still in it,” Albert said from his spot at the window. He was thinking of Lyman Knapp, the man who owned the huge, strange house on the harbor and who was a great success in interior design in Boston. On the afternoon Albert had dared climb onto his raft, Lyman had swum out to say hello. He was gaunt, with an easy grin and a hairless chest. They were lovers now.

Ira and Henry looked at each other, then Henry shut the paper and slid it under his left buttock. Ira smiled. Even as his ever-roving mind drew lines from Sacco and Vanzetti to Bea (for wasn't it all about money, in the end? didn't class oppression work both ways?), his brother's boyish charm titillated him. So what if Henry was, politically speaking, a simpleton and a jackass? He knew how to get things done, which was more than Ira could say about himself. Ira slid the
Globe
under his own haunch and circled his hands on his wrists, then straightened his right leg and circled his foot, then straightened his left leg and circled that foot, and the maneuvers, undone for decades, brought him back to the loud, tiled lunchroom at the William Cabot School for Boys, where each morning, before lunch, the headmaster would direct them to rise from their chairs, stretch their arms and legs, and perform twenty jumping jacks. Ira remembered how anxiously he had watched the gaggle of younger boys. Where were Henry's hands? Had he fallen? Did he not understand the rules? Later, Ira learned that Henry had been sitting calmly on the floor, out of the headmaster's view: already he had devised the most efficient route to success. His brother was extraordinary, Ira thought now. Even in that bouncing sea of silken, Gentile hair, Henry had understood how to win.

Bea walked in swinging a torn envelope. “What am I supposed to do now?”

“Sweetheart, why don't you sit down?”

“It's from Luis Pereira's wife.” Bea shook the envelope upside down, releasing a flurry of torn paper. “My check. They don't want
my ‘dirty money.' The Murphys haven't deposited theirs, and now the Pereiras rip theirs up. What am I supposed to do?”

“Bea—”

“Why don't they believe me?”

No one answered.

“Oh,” Bea said. “Of course. You don't believe me either. You're awful. All of you. I
did
see her. I saw her. She was here. The pears . . .”

“Sweetheart.”

“She was! Besides, I'm not talking about that.”

Albert turned. “What is it you want them to believe, Bea?”

“That I'm sorry.”

“You've written your apologies. You've sent your checks.”

“Exactly!”

“Exactly. That's all you can do. You can't make anyone believe anything.” He laid out his palms as if he himself were proof.

“I used to be able to,” she said.

“You think the women who came to your speeches didn't have their minds already made up?”

Bea whimpered. “I'm like poor Sacco.”

“I wouldn't go that far,” Ira said.

Bea rolled her eyes. “I feel that way.”

“Bea.” Albert walked softly toward her, and cupped her shoulders in his hands. “Does it matter if they believe you? If they took the money, if I got them to take it, would that be enough?”

Bea squinted at him. “Enough to do what?”

“To satisfy you. To stop your train wreck.”

“I am not a wreck!” Bea shook him off. “I am not a nut and I am not a wreck, and if I were a wreck it would be because of you!” She swung her glare at each of them. “But I'm not. I am fine! I am absolutely fine!”

“FINE!” pinged off the chandelier, flew around the room, shimmied into silence. Ira looked at his slippered feet, next to Henry's shining Haven wingtips. Henry looked away, wishing Lillian
were there. Albert stared at Bea, as if daring her to say it again. She shook, frustration and humiliation warring in her limbs. She had seen her daughter as clearly as she saw Albert now. She had followed her, but not fast enough: by the time Bea reached the orchard, she had lost her. Bea had crept, then listened, crept, listened. She did not want to frighten the girl away—this was one reason for her caution. But it was also true that Bea herself was afraid: she did not want to discover that there was no girl, that she had, in fact, made her up, drawn her from her haze of Templeton and self-pity. She trained her eyes on the darkness, willing the girl to reappear. She nearly called,
Hello?
but lost her courage, so neither she nor Lucy heard the other—they were both, mother and daughter, too good at hiding, too practiced at silence. And they moved synchronously, like two second hands on the same watch, driven by the same gear. By the time Bea reached the gap, Lucy was gone. Bea had seen her! But then, what if she hadn't? Each time she had to defend herself, she felt her certainty split a little more.

She could not say this, of course. She would not give them any more reasons to think she was a loon. She held Albert's gaze. “It would be something,” she said. Then she gathered up the confettied check and the hateful note and went upstairs, to throw it onto the piles with the others.