Leaving Lucy Pear (29 page)

I
f you flew above Essex Bay—thirty years later Josiah would do this, holding Susannah's hand, bound for a month in Paris, astounded as the familiar curve of beach and dune and river came into view, the place they lived flattened into color, white and blue and green, the effect bizarrely tropical—you would have seen a rowboat and a swimmer charting a slow, steady course between the shore and Hog Island. This was the deal they had struck the night after Josiah thought she'd drowned. He'd taken her to their bed, and made love to her, and it was good, and afterward, he said, “I'm done trying to have children.” She was quiet for a long time, curved against him, her hair smelling of salt. Finally, she said, “I'd like to swim the Boston Light. I know I'm not Trudy Ederle, but I'd like to try.”

It was an eight-mile swim, nearly four times as far as she had swum before.

She needed him to come home from work when the tides were right and follow her out into the bay. Josiah's pulse began to throb. He had the sensation, as he told her he was afraid of the water, that he was meeting Susannah again, for the first time. She looked quizzical, and for the briefest moment, disappointed. “You're quite a man,” she said, and he pulled his hand away from her leg, seizing with regret for having told her. But she put his hand back. She wiggled closer to him. “So you'll have something to reach for, too.”

They had until next July to train. It was the middle of October now, the water cold enough Josiah wouldn't even put his feet in, but Susannah hated swimming pools and insisted on two more weeks in the bay. Josiah rowed. His worry for himself had shifted easily onto Susannah. She had slathered herself in petroleum jelly and lard, but what if she froze anyway? What if she swallowed water, or was taken out on the tide, and he could not save her? What if the whitecaps that rose up quickly some afternoons overwhelmed her? But he understood that she had to swim, and so he rowed. He was used to seeing the sandbar rise up beneath the boat now, the water so shallow he could see the ridges on the backs of horseshoe crabs. He was getting stronger on the oars. In a few more weeks, he would be elected mayor. Fiumara had pulled out, forced by allegations of terrorist involvement. The allegations were vague (Josiah's father had been involved in stirring them up, though Josiah would never know this) but there was the man's socialism, too, and with Sacco and Vanzetti dead, people's tentative sympathies in that direction had shriveled. The men were on their way to being forgotten.

Josiah was resolved to his fate, but determined to serve only one term. If Coolidge could pull out in front of the whole nation, Josiah thought, he could do the same in Gloucester. Granted, Coolidge's son had died—some people said this was behind the president's decision—but Josiah had his reasons, too. There was, for instance, the fact that he didn't want to be mayor at all. This, too, he had told Susannah. That had been a relief.

In the meantime, in the abstract, he would continue overseeing the quarry. But Susannah would be manager now. She would do the work she already knew better than he how to do, in the corner office that had belonged first to her father and then to her husband and from which she could see, if she pressed her cheek against the wall, an unimpeded view of Ipswich Bay. She would close the doors
some days, unable to speak for the grief that seized her, for all she had agreed to let go, but with time this happened less. She was free now, her mind unclouded with thoughts of her body, her body no longer bound by doctors and false hope. She lost track of her cycles. She kept Sam Turpa on. Her door stayed open.

Caleb was not there to naysay these changes. A month ago, he had dropped off a card inviting Josiah and Susannah to dinner in his formal dining room, where he had laid out one of his prized maps on the table.
South America!
he had cried as they entered. He would go for a few months, maybe a year. Chile, Argentina. He would see about a trek into Patagonia. He would write them. It would be good to get away.

He had gone, leaving almost no instructions about the quarry or the estate. Josiah and Susannah were left to handle paydays, the union, the shrinking demand for stone. Despite pressure from his father, Josiah had not added his own name to the company sign. He would not try to replace Caleb. The trees on the estate had not been trimmed. When Josiah looked back at it now from the middle of the bay, the buildings were barely visible, the bathhouse a little white lump behind the pines.

Susannah stopped to rest. She didn't hold on to the boat—holding on was a disqualification—but treaded water, her eyes on the still distant mound of Hog Island.

“Your lips are purple,” he said.

“I'm cold.”

“Come in.”

She swam on. Her pace was slowing, but he would say nothing more. His fear was nothing compared with her desire. The muscles in her arms twisting and pulling, the gust of her inhale when her face lifted from the water. Her beauty stunned him, and not in a brotherly sort of way.

The day after their dinner at Caleb's, he had picked up Emma
at the coffee shop and surprised her by staying parked on Washington Street, in full view. He was the opposite of artful. His sternum felt bruised. He could not look her in the eye. “I can't see you again,” he said. Why was he surprised when she did not weep or berate him but sat still as a rock, forcing him to look at her face in profile, her hard jaw, her throat visibly working back tears? “I'll get myself home,” she said after a few minutes in silence. Then she was gone from his car and walking toward Leverett Street. Josiah, feverish, thinking what did he have to lose, thinking,
Go, go, finish cleaning up the messes you've made,
drove straight from there to the Hirsch estate, to apologize to Beatrice Cohn for the way he'd dropped her from the campaign. She looked different—less standoffish. She listened. He was focused on getting back to Susannah, determined to do the deed and run, but Mrs. Cohn's face, listening, was so reminiscent of Emma's dark girl, who had looked out at him from the perry shack with her dark eyes that bore through you, asking for something, though he couldn't figure what, it shook loose a quaking in Josiah. And though he did not put it all together the way it was, he did have the thought, as he drove home to Susannah, that some people try very hard to have children and others not to have them but that there is never, ever a way to even it all out.

“Okay.” Susannah's bone white fingers gripped the gunwale. “I'm done.”

As Josiah moved to help her up, the boat tilting drastically, the dark water sloshing beneath him, he saw that he could never do what Susannah did. No matter how strong he got at rowing, he could not get into that water and swim. Nausea choked him. But he remembered to spread his legs and hold the back one firm for counterbalance and he managed, grunting, Susannah's legs nearly useless with cold, to haul her up onto the bench. He wrapped her in blankets, poured her the chocolate he'd brought, and turned the boat toward the shore. The beach swung into view, then a pair of seals, flopping up onto an edge of exposed rock. The tide was
turning. He rowed harder. “It'll be all right,” he said. “Even Ederle trains in a pool, you know.”

Susannah nodded. Her teeth chattered. Her goggles had left deep circles around her eyes. A chunk of lard had congealed at the tip of her nose. She smiled. Even her gums were purple. He had not noticed Susannah's gums before. “It'll be fine,” she said, and closed her eyes, letting steam from the cup warm her face. “I can see now that I'm going to make it.”

I
n the dug-out cellar under the perry shack, Emma and Lucy faced the barrels. There were four—a little better than Emma had feared but not a fifth of what they dreamed in their dreaming days, which seemed dream-like now: Emma hunched over the
PEAR
VARIETIES
pamphlet, Lucy reading over her shoulder, trying out the words, “bung,” “bunghole,” “wintering.” Now Emma held the bungs, and Lucy the hammer. She had been full of her usual questions last night—were the bungholes in the barrels in fact big enough, and was the juice actually done fermenting, and what would happen if they put the bungs back in before it wasn't?—but now that they stood here, ready to complete the task, which was simple after all, and so much smaller than they had hoped, she was silent. The other children had left for school. They had lost interest in the perry long ago.

“Don't be blue,” Emma said. Though she was blue, too. She had walked Lucy through all the reasons the perry didn't really matter anymore: There was the job at Sven's. The weekly check from Mrs. Cohn. There was the fact that Lucy no longer needed to go to Canada. Any time Roland called her to him, Emma called her away. What should they care about the perry? Yet they did. Perhaps its meagerness made them care more.

“Where should we start?” Emma said. “You choose.”

Lucy walked to the nearest barrel, holding out her free hand for a bung. It was cold and dark in the cellar, the only light what drifted
down through the turnip-bin hole from the already-dim shack above, and as Emma passed Lucy the bung, she was suddenly uncertain that Lucy's hand was as close as it appeared to be. This was an illusion—the bung made a flawless trip from Emma's fingers to Lucy's—but it left Emma with a kind of vertigo, the sense that she was drifting, only half real, through a shifting scenery, the edges of things blunter or sharper or further or closer than they'd been a moment ago, the known world untrustworthy. She experienced this frequently since she overheard Mrs. Cohn and Lucy in the orchard, since she looked for herself at Lucy's leg—it was her hip, really, that nascently curving hip—a dizziness close to dread except it wasn't dread because it was a feeling about something that had already happened. And it wasn't as straightforward as rage, either, because Lucy's wounds were nothing Emma recognized, they weren't slaps or burns, they were in a category she had no name for. Lucy would not speak about them—they had to speak for themselves. Their very strangeness, their inexplicability, allowed Emma, most of the time, to be more mystified than she was angry. She was repulsed by Roland's behavior, but because she could not understand or classify it, it didn't seem quite to count. Yet she couldn't discount it either—even if Emma had been able to, Lucy would not let her. Every day at some point Lucy asked why, after the perry was put up, they couldn't go away, to Mrs. Cohn's, for instance, or somewhere else? And Emma would say, in a placid, queer voice,
He's a broken man, Lucy-boo. He'll come out of it. We've got to give him time,
even as her innards rebelled, twisting and snagging. She had the runs nearly all the time now.

Lucy set the bung in the hole, hammered once, twice.

“All set?” Emma asked.

Lucy nodded.

“Want me to do the next one?”

“I'll do it.”

No matter how many times Emma said to Lucy,
I won't let him do it anymore,
the girl's edge would not loosen. Emma tried not talking
about it, but that didn't seem to help. She tried spoiling Lucy, giving her extra honey in her porridge, singing her two songs at bedtime, but Lucy didn't want anything extra. She wanted to be like everyone else. She wanted Emma to leave her alone—if they weren't going to leave, she could at least leave her alone. Emma understood this, but she couldn't do it. Instead she crowded her, watched her incessantly. She was physically incapable of anything else.

The second bung, the third.
Thwing,
went the hammer.
Thwing.
The fourth. Lucy tapped it once more, then said, “I should get to school.”

Emma nodded. Sorrow jammed her throat like a fist. Lucy was extraordinary. Capable. Self-sufficient. Mature. But all her precociousness seemed to Emma double-sided now: a thing to behold, a thing to regret. And her body, too, how fast she was growing, changing, compared with her sisters—Emma could not think of that and she could not avoid thinking of it. If Lucy wasn't so special, Emma felt certain, Roland wouldn't have hurt her.

Which was the worst way of blaming the girl, really. It made Emma like everyone else in the world. And because it wasn't something she had said—because it didn't need to be said—it was something she couldn't take back. She could only nod as Lucy started up the ladder. The girl's trials had leaped even further beyond Emma's own—there seemed to be no way to catch her now, no way to know or comfort her.

“It's going to work,” Emma said. “You'll see. In the spring. We'll pour it out and boom! Perry of the highest order.”

Lucy turned. “How do you know?”

Emma looked around at all the barrels they hadn't filled (barrels paid for by Josiah Story, who had rejected Emma with such abrupt certainty she felt she'd been slapped). She didn't know. She didn't know how the perry would fare—or Lucy, either. She didn't know how to help her. She found herself wishing the girl would say it for her, accuse her outright:
You don't know.
But Lucy wouldn't do that.
It wasn't her job to do that. Emma was a coward. If she weren't such a coward, she would tell Lucy the truth. If she weren't such a coward, she would leave Roland. She did think of it. Of course she did. Before they left the orchard Mrs. Cohn had offered her uncle's house as a sort of way station for Emma and the children.
I know you wouldn't want to live here, but for a while . . .
she'd said, as Emma braced herself. Saying yes, she was almost certain, would be an admission of failure on an intolerable scale. She considered asking Sven's wife if she would temporarily take them in; or going to Sacred Heart, asking there, though the parish knowing the situation was almost unimaginable. Emma even wondered if Mrs. Greely would take them for a time, until Roland . . . But what? What would Emma wait for Roland to do or not do? Emma had not confronted him. She couldn't imagine what she would say. Each time she thought of it, she heard him laughing, heard her own confusion—Emma would leave because of the nonsense with Lucy, was that all?—saw herself slithering away.

Lucy waited on the ladder. Emma didn't have to talk to him, of course. She could just leave. Women did this. They left. But Emma was scared. She was scared of what she knew people would think. Leaving was sin enough—
A woman might as well run naked through a butcher shop,
Emma's mother used to say—but to leave the poor, maimed fisherman? She was scared, too, about the chimney catching fire. How would Roland put it out? How would he fetch wood in the first place? She worried about his loneliness. She worried about his dying from it, worried he was the sort of man who might, who fought people off but needed them to survive. She loved him, though the love was deformed now, much of it piled up behind her, though she felt hate for him, too. She envied Josiah, going back to stay with Susannah with such apparent confidence. That was how he'd phrased it, coldly:
going back to stay.
As if otherwise Emma might stand around waiting for him to defect again. No. She had gone and confessed. At last. Then she had knelt on the bare wood floor of her
bedroom and done what Roland wanted her to. That was not how the priest phrased her penance—
Go tell your husband you love him,
he'd said—but it was Emma's interpretation.

“I don't know,” she said at last. “I don't know if the perry will work.”

Lucy, on the ladder, looked at her with impatience. “I'm sorry,” Emma said, but Lucy was already disappearing through the hole above. Emma followed her up and out into the yard, where the breeze coming up off the cove bit through her dress.

“Lucy!” cried Joshua, running out of the house. “Don't go to school. Stay with me.” He jumped up and down, tugging on Lucy's hand, begging her, “Don't go!” A fresh fear spun through Emma. She dressed Joshua, and bathed him when Lucy didn't. She had not seen marks on him, but was there something she missed? She had seen nothing of what Roland had done to Lucy. When he tickled and squeezed the other children, did he hurt them in some way, too? She had thought it sweet—before the accident, he had not touched them at all. She had gone on pretending it was sweet even after seeing Lucy's leg—she refused to watch him obsessively, refused to suspect. Who could live like that? But what if she was wrong? What if her delusion ran that deep? Nausea rolled through her. They would have to leave, she understood—it was the only way forward, the only way to live right again. She cradled her wrist, though it was fully healed now, the cradling a habit that would break of its own accord once she and the children were gone from him. She did not think to worry about herself. Other people would do that, later: her children, Sven and his wife, Mr. Hirsch. Mrs. Cohn, though she did not offend Emma by saying it. The men whose coffee she poured in a different shop, in Rockport, where she and the children were living—in Juliet's house—by the time summer came around again. The women in her new parish. Everyone worried that Emma was lonely. And she was, sometimes. Sometimes she woke to find that she was groping herself—she woke from dreams of Roland, or Josiah, or another
man, a stranger. But that kind of loneliness lived in one corner. Her days were filled with people. She did not often have time to dwell. And when she did, she found that her thoughts were not unhappy. She had a great capacity, inherited from her father and passed on to Lucy, for close, consuming observation. This was a discovery, once she broke through her pride and asked her own daughter to take her and the children in; and later, when she found a place she could afford on her wages alone; and later still, when her children did not need her so acutely: how long and with what pleasure Emma could sit watching a bird building a nest or a flag snapping in a wind or other people's children running in circles.

“Play with me, please?” begged Joshua.

“I've got to go to school, boy-boy.”

Joshua's face crumpled as Lucy patted his head. He whimpered, “Don't go.”

Lucy looked to Emma for help, but Emma shrugged. She wanted Lucy to stay, too. She could take them both to work with her. She could set them up in the sunny part of the room, buy them pencils and paper at the penny store, watch them draw as she worked.

Lucy squatted next to the boy. “I'll be back. Cheer up. Be good. Take care of Mummy. If you're good, I'll help you make a Halloween costume tonight.”

But she didn't go. It was as if her will had deflated, as if she'd used it all up in the cellar, shutting the bungholes. She took Joshua's hand and walked with him at his slow, tottery pace to the coffee shop and sat with him in the sunny half of the room and drew and took him down to the cove and brought him back and spent the rest of the day where Emma could see them, just as Emma had hoped.