Leaving Lucy Pear (17 page)

T
he dismantling of Ira's bed was dismayingly easy—two pulls and it split into parts. Bea didn't understand exactly how Emma had been charged with the decision to move the bed downstairs, but she also didn't consider herself deserving of an explanation. She was embarrassed by her willful defiance of the facts, which now appeared plain: Ira had not been pretending lameness. He couldn't walk.

Emma and Albert had already carried down the headboard with its sizable posts, inflicting scratches and dents upon the walls as they went. Now Bea, trying to prevent more damage, was directing the journey of the footboard.

“There. No, there! This way, Emma! Albert, not there . . .”

“Bea! This is completely unhelpful.” Albert set his end on a stair and dragged his forearm across his brow. “Did I never teach you left and right?”

Emma laughed. “Don't tease her.”

Albert grinned up at Bea. “Why don't you pour us some ice water? It's hot as hell.”

There wasn't space to get down around them, so Bea went back up, through the halls, down the back stairs, and into the cool of the kitchen. Like all the rooms in the house that had been built for servants, the kitchen faced north to little sunlight, and Bea found herself retreating here often on hot days. She pressed her forehead against the cabinet glass, letting Albert and Emma's banter trickle
through her. She was in love with the sensation of being their hinge, despite knowing that their light, sweet talk was meant to soothe and keep her calm. She resented their eggshell treatment. So the night of July third had been a disaster. So she'd had another fit. Nearly two weeks had passed—why should it still stand shadowlike behind her, making everyone itch? Yet Bea understood. Bea couldn't shake it either. Even when she succeeded in forgetting, the absence of the whistle buoy reminded her: on a breezy day like this one, she tensed for a cry that never came.

All Lillian would say about that was “Your nerves suffered, I pulled some threads.”

The icebox opened with a squeal, closed with a thud. (Vera had bought a refrigerator the year she died, but it had no freezer compartment, so Ira still had his ice delivered, and stored it in a seaweed-insulated chest.) Bea set the glasses on a tray, tied on an apron, and walked out upright and bright-eyed, calling, “Come and get it!”

Albert and Emma stared. She couldn't remember now what she'd intended with the apron—to show that she could tease herself, too? To prove that she was
fine
?

She rattled the tray down onto the nearest table. “I've got to get to work,” she said with a sigh, though she felt no actual regret. Her work steadied her. The speech for Josiah Story was still not finished, but that would sort itself out. The point was to drag herself back to her room, sit in the chair, and try. When she had woken on July Fourth in the sludgy wake of her wailing the night before, and Emma's aseptic green eyes, and her exit, the door's heavy thud, even the door knowing its place better than Bea, all she could think to do was dress as Beatrice Haven Cohn, walk to her desk, phone the chapter as if they might convince her of her credibility—it was closed for the holiday, the operator reminded her—and get to work.

Before that, though, she had burned the
Radcliffe Quarterly
that had given her such trouble the night before and now mocked her
from the trash bin, its pages spread obscenely. In retrospect, burning the
Quarterly
had been a mistake. The ashes in the waste bin made her look truly crazy. But that morning, it had seemed reasonable: if she couldn't make herself throw it away, she would destroy it.

“You can't work now,” Albert said. “We need you on the frame.”

This was a relief. Bea didn't actually want to work. Albert carried one end, Bea and Emma the other. It was a heavy bed, made of oak for Vera and Ira's wedding. Bea had suggested having a new one delivered to the parlor, where Ira would be set up, but Ira had said he wouldn't sleep in another bed and Emma had told him not to worry, they would make it work. Incredibly, when Emma said that, Ira stopped worrying.

“Let's take a break,” Albert said. He looked at Bea, whose corner was sagging.

“I'm fine,” she said.

“You're fine, I'm fine, let's take a break.”

They rested halfway down the stairs.

“Ira!” Albert called. “Could you bring us some water?”

“You'll excuse me, Mr. Cohn,” said Emma, “but that's not a funny joke.”

“I disagree!”

They began again. Bea, who got little regular physical exercise apart from walking, was astonished by her weakness. That she could lift the bed at all seemed due merely to structural facts: her arm bones hung from her shoulder bones; her finger bones locked under the frame. When they finally set it down, she sat on top of it, watching her legs shake under her skirt. Her eyes swam with sweat. Emma brought more water and Bea drank—still, it took some time before she felt she could stand again. She propped up the headboard, then the footboard, as Albert and Emma put everything back together. Assembled, the bed made the parlor feel small, the seven-foot posts carved with pineapples and vines a sudden woods. They stood, regarding it.

“Why didn't you tell me he was so diminished?” asked Albert.

It took Bea a moment to realize that he was speaking to her. In her mouth, her sweat tasted bitter. “I didn't know,” she said.

“Excuse me,” Emma said, starting to leave the room. “I'll go get Mr. Hirsch.”

“I'll get him,” Bea said.

“I don't mind.”

“But I do.”

Bea went, leaving their wary looks. Upstairs, Ira was in his chair. Bea sat next to him, on the chest that held quilts, which would also be moved. She followed his gaze out the window, trying to guess what he was looking at. The harbor in the distance? The gray sycamores? The pear trees down in the orchard, heavy now with fruit, their leaves whiffling and steaming in the hot breeze? The pears would be ready for picking soon, still hard but green, ready to soften off the stem. She would have to leave before that, go to Boston for her usual week, return only after they were sure to be gone.

“Your bed's ready,” she said.

“I won't have the view.”

“I know.”

“Do you remember, when you were small, I took you to see a rock, around the other side of the lighthouse? If you get in just the right position, she comes into view, a Puritan woman, reclining?”

“Of course I remember. Mother Rock.”

Bea nearly went on. Mother Rock was where she'd been going on her frequent breaks from writing the speech. She took Ira's binoculars as she had earlier in the summer but now, instead of the whistle buoy to stare at, there was the woman's sharp nose, her tall forehead, her square, grimly set chin. There was nothing particularly motherly about her, but neither had there been, apparently, about the king of Denmark's mother, Ann, for whom the rock—and the whole cape—had been named. Bea liked the challenge of
finding her. She liked climbing down from the thicket of beach rose, settling herself on a rock, adjusting her eyes until the woman rose out of the rock. Sometimes she was plainly there, waiting. Other days Bea had to will and pry her into focus. The binoculars weren't necessary—the problem of Mother wasn't one of distance but perspective—but Bea wore them anyway, out of habit, and sometimes, once she'd been staring successfully at the profile for a while, she would lift them to her eyes and watch as the woman, magnified, was again obscured.

“I would like to see that rock again,” said Ira.

Bea touched his forearm, the hard tendons she'd allowed to pass for strength. “You can't see it from the house,” she said. “Even if we let you live up on the roof, you wouldn't be able to see it.”

“I mean I want to go down there. In my chair. Albert could do the final lift.”

Bea looked at him. “You said you never wanted to go anywhere in your chair. You said, ‘All I'll ever do in this undignified piece of crap is
stay
right
here
.'”

Ira kept looking out the window. “Emma changed my mind,” he said.

Albert was halfway down the drive, headed for a swim, when he heard Emma call, “Mr. Cohn!”

He stood limply, soaked with sweat, unable to manage a step back in her direction. After reassembling the bed, he had moved the chest of blankets, then the wheelchair. Finally, he had left Bea and Ira sitting quietly in the great room like an old married couple, their backs to the newly appointed parlor with its fresh, morbid bedsheets.

“Pardon me, Mr. Cohn, but you asked Mrs. Cohn why she didn't tell you about Ira, and she said she didn't know. And I thought you should know I think that's true. I believe it. I think she can't bear it.”

This was more than he'd heard Emma say. “She's very attached to him,” he agreed.

Emma stood, as if expecting him to go on, then started to back-step toward the house. “Have a nice swim. I've got to get home, to the children.”

“Thank you for coming on a Saturday. Will the same driver pick you up?”

“He will. That's fine. Will you stay the rest of the weekend?”

“I haven't decided,” Albert said, because he was used to suspending those sorts of decisions. But he knew that he would stay. He had come up each weekend since Bea's fit, to keep her company and to save her from Lillian doing the same. (
I'm fine,
Bea said,
but if I have to see my mother I might not be.)
It was a relief: focusing on someone else's trouble, carrying things.

“I think it's good for her,” Emma said. “To have you here. Though perhaps it's not my place to say so.”

“How does she seem during the week?”

“Honestly, all right. Not chipper. But.”

Albert smiled. “But she isn't a chipper person.”

“Does she—pardon me—but Mrs. Cohn said—does she ever—does she still talk about wanting a child?”

Albert, not knowing what else to do, looked at Emma's hands. They were large for a woman, and visibly strong, and bore a disturbing number of scratches—nothing moving Ira's bed could have caused. “She spoke with you about a child?” he asked.

Emma shrugged apologetically and started again to back away.

“Never,” Albert said. “She's never said a thing about it.” Which was at once true, factually speaking, and also so bound up with lies—omissions, evasions—as to feel almost sinister. He pulled at the towel he'd hung around his neck, as if to hide the clawing of his heart, while Emma, visibly embarrassed, shook her head in a particularly vehement, sorry way, the way another Irish nurse had shaken her head at him long ago, overwhelming Albert with confusion.
Mr. Cohn, forgive me,
the nurse kept saying. She had shown up at his office at ten in the morning, a few weeks before he and Bea
were to be married. She wouldn't talk until he shut the door. She saw the announcement in the papers, she said, recognized Bea's name, knew her picture unmistakably. She had seen her name through the years, a speech here or there. She had felt no obligation to anyone until now, she said, now she couldn't live with it—she tapped her firm bosom—if she didn't tell the girl's husband-to-be.
Forgive me, forgive me.
She told him about the baby, told him it was supposed to go to an orphanage but that one morning, before dawn, she went to fetch the infant for its usual diaper change and found it gone.
I woke the uncle. We looked everywhere, then found the mother down in the pear field, asleep in her nightgown. Filthy. Forgive me. But the baby . . .
her head shaking that quick, almost angry shake, like a bird flushing.
The aunt dismissed me.

Albert asked the woman her name, and when she wouldn't give it to him, he told her to leave. He decided she was probably lying, for one reason or another. Maybe she imagined Albert might pay her for the information, or maybe Bea's mother, unhappy with the match for a reason she had not expressed, had sent the woman to dissuade him. But after she left, he sat there for a long time, thinking about what he did and didn't know of Bea. He knew she was strange, stubborn, smart, rich, but that was about it. Since the Purim Ball months earlier, she had told him about Fainwright, but only in the haziest, most generic terms. So he wasn't entirely shocked that Bea might have another secret. A baby, though. He tried, sitting in his office, to locate inside himself the kind of horror, or at least judgment, that he knew such a situation called for. But he wasn't horrified. If anything, he found it a little comforting that her sin—if the story was true—was worse than his.

After the wedding, Bea took him up to Gloucester for the first time and Albert, seeing the pear trees, knew the nurse told the truth. Those trees were one of the reasons he didn't like coming to Gloucester. The past was past—that was how Albert preferred to live. But the instant Emma shook her head like that, like a flushing
bird, his heart began to struggle, and now, as she turned toward the house, saying, “Forgive me, I've got to get home,” Albert felt as if he were in a children's book in which one woman had come back disguised as another. He turned away and walked quickly in the direction of the road, his towel swinging, trying not to see, in his peripheral vision, through the line of trees that divided the drive from the orchard, the clinging, greening pears. That was Bea's story, not his. He still hoped to leave Bea, once she was feeling better. He concentrated on the water he was walking toward, how painful it would be at first, like jumping into nails, the cold taking his breath away, staking him where he was. Then he was in it, and it was in him, so cold, a narrow, stunning release. He swam to the first rocks, then, feeling strong, he swam to the second rocks. The water focused him, and he kept swimming, out of view of the Hirsch house, beyond Bea's reach, and past the lip of the cove and around and on until, lifting his face to catch his breath, he saw the house Teddy had once told him about, a “sprawling, medieval, very homosexual place” with Chinese wallpaper and French moldings. Teddy had been to a party there once. You couldn't see the house from the road—Albert had tried—but from the water, well, there it was. And here was Albert, numb as a brick and filled with an escapist's courage, kicking the last few feet to the house's swimming raft, hauling himself up the ladder, and sitting on the warm wood, panting, letting the sun warm him, in full view.