Leaving Lucy Pear (10 page)

Bea looked out at the rain. She felt accused, but of what? Emma was already up again, making the trip to the saucer, but this time, when she returned, instead of dumping her cup out the window, she set it on the table, picked up the Pinkham's, and drank from the bottle's spout so delicately that when she set it down, Bea wondered if what she'd seen had really happened. Emma looked at Bea. “So your nerves,” she said gently. “They're the reason you don't have a child?”

Bea cringed at the tenderness in Emma's voice. A moment ago, she had wanted Emma to believe her. She had even wanted to tell her something more, maybe something truer, but now Bea sensed a kind of greed in her, this fecund mother of nine, a ravenousness for any and all information. Bea had already said too much. She had exposed herself as Lillian had warned her never to do to the
help. If Emma chose, she could make sure the whole North Shore knew by sunset that Beatrice Haven Cohn had a nervous disorder and regretted being childless.

Bea finished her Pinkham's and set down her cup. She sat very straight. Just above the ground the rain was frenzied—it was impossible to tell which drops were going up and which down. She waited until she felt the vertebrae in her neck pop, then she said, in a calm, syrupy voice, “Thankfully, I've had the opportunity to give back in other ways. I've helped women and children less fortunate than myself and for that I'm grateful.” She smiled a smile she despised—her mother's don't-pretend-you-don't-understand-me smile. “We all make
compromises,
as I'm sure you know.”

Emma didn't smile back.

“I meant to ask,” Bea went on, “what you've done with the pillowcases. What kind of method you've devised. I find one of each pair, but not the match. It's as if they're off doing who knows what with the other missing ones. I can't understand it.”

Emma's pinkie jumped. “I'll see what I can do, Mrs. Cohn.”

“Also, my spectacles. I don't need them, which means I can see perfectly well that they're not where I left them.” How she hated herself! “And there's a bookend you must have dusted, a lion. Wherever you've taken it, I hope you'll put it back with its mate.”

They were silent for a minute. Bea felt very lonely.

“That leak is getting worse, Mrs. Cohn.”

“I can hear.”

“Do you think . . .” Emma looked stricken.

“What?”

“Isn't your uncle's bathroom in that corner, upstairs?”

It took Bea a moment to understand. Then they ran together toward the stairs, their legs, weak with Pinkham's, struggling to catch up.

E
mma sat low in the Duesenberg's backseat as one of Story's two drivers—the short one, a round-faced Italian called Buzzi whose woolly caterpillar eyebrows danced and kissed in the rearview mirror—told her about the latest craze to hit Rum Row: a purplish, syrupy concoction that originated in Jamaica, was shipped to the Bahamas for “modification,” then showed up on America's shores in pearl-colored bottles marked
SWEET
RELEASE
RUM
.

It seemed a bad sign, that he thought her the kind of woman one could say such things to. Wasn't she still Emma Murphy, of Leverett Street, of Church of the Sacred Heart? Maybe he knew about the perry press, but perry wasn't brandy or whiskey and she and Story had made a straight deal for it. Buzzi wasn't supposed to know about their other dealings. He had dropped her off this morning talking about baseball. Maybe for him nothing had changed since then—maybe the name of the drink didn't even register as vulgar. But after Mrs. Cohn's awful smile and her trilled, nasty
compromises,
everything Emma encountered seemed slightly skewed and salacious, as if she wore a pair of dark, twisted glasses. Buzzi winked at Emma and she had to hug herself she felt so exposed. She was still wearing Mrs. Cohn's dress, a ridiculous getup for a nurse and now wet, too, at the shoulders from the rain as she'd run to the car—Mrs. Cohn had not offered her an umbrella—and at the sleeves from Mr. Hirsch's bathwater.

He was fine. He had fallen asleep as the bath filled around him, but he was too large a man to drown like that. On his face was an expression of such pure, sleepy contentment that for a moment, she and Mrs. Cohn looked at each other, half drunk, and smiled. A simple moment passed. Then Emma got to work turning off the water and waking the man, who began talking at once, as if he'd only blinked, about how flood was better than fire, and did they know about the time Vera's great-grandfather, Brink Bent III, too busy in love with a milkmaid, abandoned a candle on his windowsill? This was in 1870-something. He burned the house down but kept the help, and a couple years later the same girl bore him a bastard child whom Brink visited, every Sunday, in the old barn. The kid became one of Brink's gardeners. Mr. Hirsch laughed. “I never heard that story,” Mrs. Cohn said with a far look in her eye, and Emma, who was doing her best to position herself between Mrs. Cohn and the sight of her uncle's willy floating like pickleweed, who was thinking,
Is there no end to these people's woes?
had to say, “A towel please.” Then she had to prod Mrs. Cohn to find her uncle's clothes while Emma mopped the floor. The water had risen a full inch before clearing the threshold and running into the hallway, but when Emma showed Mrs. Cohn a cracked tile, Mrs. Cohn waved her off. She said she would call the man who took care of “that.”

“You know a woman called Ameralda Norris?” Buzzi asked. He had moved on from the subject of the rum and was working through his docket of local news.

“No,” Emma said.

“This woman has been hiding bottles in her chimney soot and selling them outta her wood box. Very clever. Very brave. I think so. I really do. But I am only a lonely roly-poly stone carver driving a woman around. This is why I ask
you
. Do you agree? That this Ameralda Norris is clever and brave?”

Emma said nothing. The windshield wipers thumped.

“She got the ax last night. Four pigs. Took her to the station with
another woman what's been making wine in her cellar.” Buzzi chuckled. His dirty teeth filled the mirror, followed by his gleaming eyes. “I woulda like to know these women,” he said, and Emma shivered. She sank lower in the seat. “It's not as if they're dead,” she said.

Buzzi laughed again. “You are true, Mrs. Emma, you are true,” he said, beaming at her, and Emma's cheeks burned at how wrong he was. She couldn't help feeling that Mrs. Cohn had set her up for just this moment.
The pillowcases, off doing who knows what . . . The lion, back with its mate . . .
So Mrs. Cohn knew about Emma and Story or she had guessed or it was simply so obvious—Emma was so obviously a compromising woman—that Mrs. Cohn had never thought otherwise. It was as if all the years of Emma's virtue since her bar days had been erased.

At the Washington Street railroad crossing, the car had to wait. A man peeked out from under his umbrella, called hello to Buzzi, then caught Emma's eye in the backseat and ran on.
Oh!
Emma started to shake. Everyone knew this was Josiah Story's car. They knew nurses did not wear silk dresses. (At the door Emma had asked for her dress and Mrs. Cohn said, as if she were giving Emma a car, “Oh no, you keep it, I'll have your old one cleaned and get it back to you next week. My cousins will be in town, did I mention that? In the meantime feel free to wear this one as often as you like!”) People would suspect Emma wasn't only being ferried back and forth from her place of employment. Roland would find out. How could she have been so stupid? Not only stupid. Impulsive. Profane. The rain on the roof grew louder. It was Story's fault, Story with his broad forehead and his straight nose and his mouth never giving him away until the moment he kissed her. She had gone to him for money and offered him a commission in return and that was that, that was all she had intended, she was almost entirely certain that that had been all, yet now every few nights he picked her up in his Duesenberg, wrapped her legs around his waist, and turned from a plain man into an agonized, ecstatic one.
It was thrilling, to see a public face rupture in front of you, for you. She would have to stop the whole business. Thank you very much but I'm not a tart so you can take back your jobs and your money, too. Thank you very much but we've managed, my husband and me, the money may come and go but the children have never been hungry. Thank you very much, Mr. Story. Please don't come near my house again.

The train bellowed and was past. Emma had the urge to open the door and run but she was miles from home in a deafening rain wearing a nude-colored silk dress and if anything said
poor tart
more clearly than a woman running in a silk dress in the rain, well.

So Emma stayed where she was, and Buzzi drove, his voice muffled by the rain that flooded the windshield despite the steady beating of the wipers. They drove across the Goose Cove Bridge, past the glimpse of the Annisquam Yacht Club, the sleek sailboats rocking in the rain, their masts suddenly, unmistakably phallic, and Emma felt her determination grow. The next time Story came for her, she would tell him. She couldn't simply be bought. It couldn't be that
simple.

T
he house changed when the Hirsch children arrived. First was Oakes—née Irving—the larger and louder of the boys, with his shy wife, their two children, a nanny, and a cook. Then Rose, alone as always, dragging a carpetbag so hideous it could be taken only as judgment on Oakes's leather trunks. And last Julian, with his French and very pregnant wife, Brigitte, whose long sequined skirt (unlike anything heretofore seen on Eastern Point), when she first climbed from the car, caught the sun and flung rainbows that Oakes's children tried to catch, their screams strikingly close in pitch to that of the whistle buoy.

The whistle buoy howled often and more shrilly. A wind had come up from the south.

Within a day, shoes and tennis rackets and hats and books and watches and wine bottles and also one gold locket were flung around the house. From the harbor, sailors noticed the windows wide open, towels spilling out the sills, music drifting on the breeze. Oakes had brought his phonograph. Julian's wife played piano, badly. The children screamed with delight and despair. The cook tore the kitchen apart and put it back together. The nanny scowled at the dust and began to clean.

All this activity made the house's fading stand out as it did not when Bea and Ira were alone. Wallpaper curled, paint crumbled, floors sagged at the corners. Bea and Ira themselves, the quiet
routines they had built between them, the satisfactions of their bond and the safety of their fundamental distance, appeared dusty and frayed. Her cousins' arrival made Bea feel at once invaded and like the invader, abruptly aware that this was in fact not her house. Ira was not her father. Once upon a time she and Julian might have married but that hadn't happened and so she was—and would always be—Cousin Bea, the almost, the only child, the one they knew well and not at all, the one who had seemed to be going one place yet wound up in quite another, and because there had never been any discussion of the baby (even when she had been huge with it and living in their parents' house) she was separated from them by yet another valley.

She stayed upstairs with Ira and Emma, except when Julian came up to sit with his father. Then Bea slipped past him, able to meet his eyes only for a fraction of a second, a bright, hot instant that stretched into her girlhood and down to her toes, and walked down to the point and out the granite bed of the breakwater where the noise of the house was far away and the water beat hard enough between the stones to drown out the whistle buoy, seeing his long, angular face. She fixated on the place where his tall nose met his brow, the place he would furrow once upon a time when they played their duets, where his purpose, and his feeling, seemed most strongly to reside. Two wrinkles had grooved the skin there now.

Bea played backgammon with Rose a few times, listening as her cousin gossiped, envying the way Rose sat in her chair with one leg flung over the arm and her skirt stuffed brazenly between her legs. Bea asked polite questions of Oakes's wife, Adeline, who had been a scholarship girl at Miss Winsor's and appeared perpetually appalled by the entire family: their flagrant, neglected wealth, the wet rings they left on tables without looking back. Bea listened to Oakes brag about his recent conquests as the communications director for Haven Shoes, which seemed to involve trailing along to lunches, handing out cigars, spinning tales about the wonders of the patented
rubber Haven heel, ensuring the company its weekly ad spot in the upper right-hand corner of page three of the
Globe,
and more generally doing Henry's bidding. Oakes saw Bea's father more than she did, and in this he held some interest for her, but when she suggested he encourage Henry to come out for the Fourth, Oakes said, “Sure, I'll ask,” gave a vague snort, and changed the subject to Sacco and Vanzetti and—his favorite subject—the “foreign element.”

A couple times, she put on a bathing suit and set out with her cousins for the yacht club. She had not swum in years and was genuinely excited to dive into the pool. She indulged a hope that everything there, which she trusted remained the same—the old teak lounge chairs with their scratchy, striped cushions, the people standing around with yellow, sour cocktails while the children splashed and dove—would return them to their childhoods, if not to the time then to the sensation of it, that transcendent floating platform on which you didn't look forward or back but existed only as you were. Cold water, hot sun, salt stinging your eyes.

But Brigitte had to walk very slowly, which meant Julian walked slowly with her, which left Bea, walking ahead with the others, with the feeling that he was watching her from behind, which led to all sorts of other feelings. They were eleven or twelve when Julian's shoulder, rubbing against hers as they sat on the piano bench, flooded her legs with a heat so startling she had to close her eyes. They played for years like that, their shoulders touching, legs touching, feet touching at the pedals, a vibration humming between them, making the music really very good—everyone agreed that it was good. Sometimes, when others left the room, they kissed, kisses that began as pecks and devolved quickly into huge, wet messes. Then, one evening, he said,
Let's get married.
She laughed, but only for an instant. Of course. It was done often enough: first cousins. It might be done quietly, but it was done. He would finish Harvard, she would finish Radcliffe, then they would marry. It was so obvious. Who else? Bea kissed him hard, nodding yes, then
Lillian called for her to leave and she pushed off him and ran, close to vomiting with excitement.

She was seventeen. Two weeks later the lieutenant came with his boot-loving admiral and the next time she saw Julian—she at the Hirsch house for her “rest,” he home from Harvard for a weekend—her stomach had started to bulge. He wouldn't look at her. He felt betrayed, she knew, but she wished he felt something else. She wished he felt complicit in some way, wished he would wonder if their secret engagement caused their trouble. An immaculate conception! It was an absurd but irresistible fantasy: Julian smiling at her knowingly; their marrying sooner than planned; their raising the child together. She watched him desperately for a sign of recognition but he hadn't once, not even when he brought her glasses of water as Vera instructed him to do, looked her in the eye. Now he'd said little more to her all week than “Looking good, Bea. What a pleasure,” as though she were his great-aunt, and he plodded behind her with his beautiful, bursting wife, likely noting that Bea owned no sandals, only covered shoes, or that the robe she wore over her bathing suit was one of Ira's old ones, for she didn't have a swimming robe either. And so forth. No doubt he would pity her her frizzy hair, compared with his own smooth locks, which of all the gifts Vera had passed on to her children were the most instrumental in allowing them to fit in at the club, whereas Bea would stand out. She had always stood out. Despite the name Haven, despite all her parents' efforts to tame and gloss themselves and their daughter, still her cousins won, because their mother was not a Jew.

She turned back, citing some need of Ira's, or an order of business for the cause—the word gross in her mouth, her cheeks raging with humiliation. But they didn't notice. Or she was so good at hiding—how many years she had spent hiding!—that they couldn't see. “B'bye, Bea-Bea,” they called cheerfully. “B'bye, see you later!”

She returned, and took off her dry suit, and sat in her room. Ira was asleep. Emma was helping Helen, the nanny, set up a game or
make beds—of course she liked the help better than she liked Bea. Everyone was doing what they ought to be doing except Bea, who dreamed of the pool and of Julian kissing her and of Oakes's deep, fat voice filling the house as she sat on her bed listening to the whistle buoy wail.