Leaving Lucy Pear (21 page)

“I'm expected to.” Emma tossed the scissors into the front seat and pushed his hair around with her hand. “Done.”

He stretched to see himself, but at the first glimpse of his new bangs—trimmed so close he could see his scalp—he sighed back down onto the leather seat.

“Good choice,” said Emma. “Now. Where's my job?”

Her voice was firm, but her hand lingered on his head, traced a path down to his neck, drew a cool circle there with her fingertips.
He knew each of her calluses now, followed their journey as a record might the gramophone's needle. He didn't know the roil inside Emma, how she needed the job for the money, yes, but also to get her out of the house, away from Roland. Barely a week home and already he was inching back into himself, drinking again—he had yelled at Jeffrey until the boy stood on a chair and fetched the liquor from the shelf. The doctor had stopped in and said Roland's pain should be easing, but Roland said it wasn't and insisted on taking the nighttime pills. Emma heard him weep in bed. Once she had rolled to hold him and he had rolled to her, his chest to hers, his eyes discomfitingly close and shining in the dark. “I lost my leg,” he said. “I lost my leg, I lost my leg, I lost my leg, Emma-bee,” until, his crying done, he took Emma's hand and led it to his prick. Now, when she heard him, Emma pretended to be asleep.

Once, before his trip, Roland asked why she wasn't yet carrying another child. Emma shrugged him off with possible explanations—Joshua was barely three, she was getting older—and hid the diaphragm more securely. But the question, she knew, would not be raised again. During the day, Roland was quiet for long stretches, reading westerns Juliet brought him from the Rockport Library. Then he flashed into rages over a child tracking mud through the house or an empty bottle, rages made scarier somehow by the fact that he had to rage from his chair, which required that they come to him, as witnesses. They could not run away—his missing leg, his piteousness, was their trap. He pulled the children onto his lap and though Emma saw, in his face, a melting sorrow, a desire to be good, he handled them roughly, tickling and tossing them with gritted teeth. All except Lucy, whom he simply held, maybe because he feared losing her. The children would start school soon enough. They would not need Emma's protection. But what would Emma do?

Emma's fingers dipped inside Josiah's collar, scratched.

“When I was a kid,” he said, “I dreamed of a girl like you.”

“An Irishwoman with nine children?”

“Yes. Exactly.” He turned to find her smiling just wide enough that he could see through to her gums. Then he climbed into the back.

That was how they started up again, sometimes in the afternoon, in the woods, sometimes at night, back at the Stanton estate, in the bathhouse. Roland never woke fully. He couldn't wake, for he continued to take the pills the doctor gave him for night. He said he was still in pain and Emma couldn't see how to disprove it—twice she had taken the vial to Perkins's to be refilled.

When they were done, Josiah lay picking tiny hairs off her stomach, fantasizing about making babies with her. There was hair in his mouth, and all over the car.

“You look ten years younger,” Emma said. “She might kill you.”

Josiah nodded. He touched his head. He understood that he looked as vulnerable as a sheep after shearing. His heart bled and thumped.

“Did she lose the baby?” Emma asked.

Josiah nodded. His head rubbed against Emma's chin, which felt good, and she couldn't see his tears from here, so he kept nodding. They held each other for a while.

“They need help at Sven's,” he said finally. “Pouring coffee. Think you could do that?”

Emma sat up. She looked at him with pity. “You have a funny way of saying thank you. But sure. I can do anything.”

L
ucy loved the quarry. She loved the thunderous blasts from deep in the pit, the derricks bent like fishing rods, the collective exhale—then applause!—as a mighty block arrived safely on shore. She loved the clinking of the old shims and pen hammers and points and pneumatic drill bits in her carry bag, and she loved making money. She loved the place even more for the fact that she and her brothers were the only children there that summer. At some of the smaller pits, a kid could still drill holes for half a penny, or scoop the drill dust out with a spoon before the men went in with their shims and wedges, or clear brush, but the Finns were done even with that. Their children would write and read. And the big companies were growing wary: they saw the labor laws moving in Washington, beat back yet breathing. So the Murphy kids, because Josiah Story was still in love with their mother, felt special. At times they felt like elves, dashing through the dirt and noise, from the quarries to the sheds, between the blacksmiths and the carvers, as the men coughed up dust and complained, though never about their coughs. The quarry was not the parochial place the local history books would later paint it to be. (Even the derricks were not local but made of Douglas fir shipped in from Washington and Oregon.) The men complained about the Association of Granite Manufacturers, those shit-for-souls men who were on the lobby pot again trying to lower the minimum daily wage, and
about concrete and steel, which were taking over the world and would soon kill stone, and, as the summer wore on, about Sacco and Vanzetti, who (as Josiah Story knew) stood in their minds for themselves, not because the quarrymen were anarchists (though some of them were) or Italian (though some of them were that, too), but because they knew if they were accused of a crime, they would be treated like dogs, too.

All this talk was part of the excitement for Lucy. At first she paid it only as much attention as she paid to the suspenders digging into her shoulders, or her ever-present fear that her hairpins would come undone, or the hard, heavy way she tried to walk. Which is to say she attended it as a way of neglecting the growing desperation she felt when she was not at the quarry. Roland was drinking again, his old self and his new one joining forces. He pulled the children in but roughly now, tickling them too hard, squeezing them to the bone. As Lucy sat on his lap he poked and pinched her, pinches that left welts: in the crease where her leg met her body, in the tender flesh near her armpit, on the undersides of her thighs, where there was more to pinch than there had been a year ago. No one noticed—if anything, he appeared to be more gentle with her than the others, not wrestling but just holding her, his fingers doing their quiet work—and she did not cry out. If she cried out, she feared he would do something worse. If she cried out, no one in the house would know what to do, not even Emma. Or maybe especially not Emma, who left the house early now for Sven's and came back late, who for the first time in Lucy's memory hummed to herself as she cooked and cleaned and bathed the little ones. She hummed to cheer them, Lucy supposed, but her hum was not cheerful and it had the opposite effect, on Lucy at least: the need for cheer proved how cheerless things had gotten. The more loudly Emma hummed the further Lucy felt from her, and from the other children, who often hummed along. They barely seemed to notice. It was that natural for them, a funnel pouring straight
from their mother's throat to their own. Lucy wondered, sometimes, if Roland pinched them in almost-private places, too, if maybe they, like Lucy, endured him silently, if all of them together were like the idiot men in the story about the emperor's new clothes. She almost wished it sometimes, shamefully: that she was not the only one. But she did not believe it, because Joshua and Maggie would not have been able to hold back their tears and because the others, all of them, even as they wrestled their way out from him, even as Lucy perceived beats of fear in their eyes, laughed as they fled.

Lucy began to sense things she could not name. That Roland did not want to hurt her but to make some kind of mark. That if he outright hit her, he would give up some of his power. That his pinches were not unrelated to his being a man without a leg and her being a girl with two growing ones. A new heaviness had begun to gather in her legs, along with a fear that soon she would not be able to climb as nimbly, or run as fast.

It was a comfort to wear her brothers' clothes. She changed in the perry shack—Janie and Anne inspected, adjusted, nodded—then darted out and down through the woods, and she was as fast as ever, her feet finding the right rocks, her toes digging into roots, launching herself like a bird-boy toward the quarry.

It was her haven. The beating hammers, the filth, the men barely noticing her as they thanked her for a drill or laid a broken bit in her palm. On breaks she sat with Liam and Jeffrey on a pallet and watched the men hammering in the pit. She admired their strength but more so the steady, thoughtful way they worked—in her mind the care they took stood for a variety of kindness. Each man had his own system for hammering, depending on his size. A left-handed man and a right-handed man would stand together to bang in an especially large set. On the shallowest shelves they moved around each other as gently as deer.

 • • • 

The only risks the men took that summer they took in the sheds. Once the foreman had passed—and sometimes when he hadn't—they rested their tools and talked about Sacco and Vanzetti. They brought the papers and folded them ingeniously so they could pinch them between their thighs and spread a given article open in their lap, peering down between jobs as if to stretch their necks. A juror's house had been bombed. The IWW was calling for strikes. Lucy began listening to their talk as she went in and out. She walked slowly to hear more. They talked about the
Mendosa,
too, which was connected, it seemed, to Sacco and Vanzetti, in that there were rich people to blame on both counts. They called Beatrice Cohn a mad bitch, and they called her a kike. One called her a cunt. One said he hoped she would marry Governor Fuller, and that the next bomb sent to Fuller's house would be a great success. One said if he was one of the men who got hurt (not noticing one of Roland Murphy's boys, listening, or not knowing he belonged to Roland Murphy) he would hitch a ride to her house and shoot her.

As Sacco and Vanzetti's day neared, as more facts came out about Beatrice Cohn and her factory-owning father, not to mention her conniving mother, the men's breaks grew longer, their courage greater. Lucy walked more slowly. The papers were not allowed in the Murphy house since the wreck. Who were these anarchists? Who was this woman Emma had worked for, and why had she dared work for the family they stole the pears from? One afternoon Gap Palazola, rushing for the outhouse, left his paper on the floor next to his bench. It was folded open to advertisements for garage doors and piano lessons and an adding machine and Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound and there, in the far-right column, the second part of an article about Beatrice Cohn. Above the article was a small photograph of the woman. It was so small Lucy had to squat, then squint, then bring the paper to her
face, to make sure she was seeing it clearly. She was. She ripped it out and stuffed it into her pocket. “Whatchyou doin'?” chuckled one of the blacksmiths. But Lucy was already walking toward the next shed, her carry bag clanking, so he muttered, “Crazy kid,” repaired Gap's paper the best he could, and got back to work.

B
ea drank Templeton Rye, two bottles of which Oakes had left in the pantry. She had begun by rationing it into a jigger and sipping slowly, then had moved on to Vera's crystal lowballs, which provided room for an ice cube, which allowed Bea to imagine herself drinking less even as she drank more, because by the end of a glass the stuff tasted mostly of water.

She wasn't at the end of a glass. It was nearly midnight and she had just poured herself another, plopped in an ice cube, plopped herself down on the edge of Ira's bed, and taken a large, stinging swallow. Before he fell asleep, they had argued again, Ira saying the people were right to hate her, which wasn't the same, he pointed out, as her deserving their hatred, and Bea saying if there was a difference then it had no effect on the hated, and why, anyway, couldn't he put aside his politics and see that she was suffering? “I can't even begin to parse that question,” Ira had said, laughing in a way that might have seemed gentle to Bea if she weren't in such a grave mood, but she was and so she took it as admonishment.

He had drifted off. Again she had forgotten to change his sheets while he was out of the bed.

Drinking rye fast was a little like drinking fire.

She and Ira had been over every inch of the situation too many times to count. There was nothing left to talk about. Still, it was easier to talk than to sit by herself with her infinite circling,
If only
this, if that, if that then this, if this then not that, if only . . .
the tired, torturous track she'd been circling since she was seventeen. The specifics were new—introducing the shiniest, latest-model engine, the shipwreck!—but the rails were the same, and they led, circling, back and back, a seamless heritage of regret, the genealogy of her mistakes, a lurid line in her mind from the shipwreck to the whistle buoy to her fit to her jealousy and disappointment to her first temperance meetings to dropping out of Radcliffe to more fits to leaving the baby like a parcel, all the way back to the lieutenant pressing her up against the wall.

Looking at it like this, Bea could see that Lillian was a monster, for it was Lillian who had thrown the lieutenant at her and Lillian who had taken Bea's complaints about the whistle buoy as a request to have it removed. It was Lillian, too, who had accepted Bea's dropping out, doted on her at Fainwright, watched as she quit the piano and fell into the movement. She had let Bea make decisions Bea was not prepared to make. She had manipulated, cajoled, done nothing, done too much.

Sitting on the bed, sucking Templeton through her teeth, Bea fantasized about killing her mother. This was not new, either—it was a familiar little detour off the circle, a daggerlike path leading to a cliff, off which she pushed Lillian, or on top of which she strangled Lillian before she pushed her off. This was satisfying, somewhat.

Ira whistle-snored. He slept on his back since being moved to the parlor, the blankets wearing into peaks at his feet, knees, belly. He was always cold. On his face was an expression of frank bemusement, the expression she'd associated him with and loved him for when she was a child. Watching him age was like watching herself, early in her adolescence: not wanting to see the disfiguring changes taking place yet unable to turn away.

She should remember to change the sheets when he was next out of the bed, or learn to change them with him in it, like a real
nurse. Emma had done that, too, rolled him, understood how it was done. Now she would do it for her husband, Bea supposed.

She walked to the dark window, drawing close enough she could feel her breath coming back at her. Her nose, from this perspective, was bulbous, her eyes deep-set and dark. She felt watched. The house wasn't visible from the road, but yesterday another group of locals had marched up the drive, shouting and holding signs, demanding that Bea issue an apology. In the week since the
Mendosa,
she had removed herself almost entirely from public life. She had stepped down from her post in the Boston chapter, issuing a vague statement about Mabel Willebrandt in Washington having everything under control. Bea had withdrawn her endorsement of Josiah Story. She had sent cards and flowers and checks—for one thousand dollars each—to the families of the injured men.
To Roland and Emma Murphy . . .
Bea was so sorry. Still the picketers came.
MURDERER. THINK FISHERMEN DON'T MATTER? GO HOME, KIKE.
She and Ira had watched, the drapes drawn, and eventually, the people had left. This morning, Bea had drafted a letter to the
Gloucester Daily Times
. It had not been difficult, for she felt what she wrote she felt, a profound remorse. Yet she knew, as she handed it off to the mailman, who refused to look at her, how inadequate her words were, just as she had known, when she sent the flowers and cards and checks, that none of it would make any difference. Emma's husband and another man were still maimed. Bea could try to blame Lillian for that, but Lillian wasn't the one who'd had the fit. Lillian hadn't known, when she appealed to the navy, that there was sometimes a drama to Bea's episodes that seemed to stretch beyond her, a liminal moment in which she chose—albeit not quite willingly—to fall apart. Bea had never told anyone how sometimes falling apart before she fell apart seemed the only way for her not to
actually
fall apart, how screaming could be a refuge from having to talk, or think. That night, as she went upstairs, as the banister fell away from her palm and the rug in the
hall wanted to trip her and the image of Julian rubbing Brigitte's belly lingered and the whistle buoy wailed and the music chased her—
. . . stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni!!!—
she had known, even as she tried the cotton balls, tried picking up her pen, that she would let herself go, that she would unfasten herself as once upon a time she had unfastened her brace at Radcliffe and that her release would flood her with relief and shame.

She stepped back from the glass, took in her length, touched her hard boy's stomach through her nightgown, regarded her diminished breasts. She felt the usual stab of pride these facts brought her. But her face was not as she imagined it. There were dark cups under her eyes, there were lines etched into the skin around her mouth. She looked hollow and old, and above her hollow, old face was the frizzy grove of her lengthening but still grievous bangs pointing in all directions, the bangs she had let Lillian's hairdresser talk her into while Lillian sat with her own head wrapped in an inky turban so that her hair would remain forever black.

Bea drank slowly, watching herself warp through the thick-bottomed glass. Her tongue was tired and thick, her mind slowed to a sweet, fractal mud so that although for a moment she thought of the pears down below, heavy and green and . . .
In a few nights it will have been ten years, I shouldn't be here, wasn't supposed to stay this long, promised myself. . . .
the thoughts swam out of her and in came Albert, saying,
That's fine, Bea. It'll all be fine.
He'd been calling her every day, to check in; tomorrow he would be back, for the weekend. She had told him about Josiah Story coming up the drive, to ask her to withdraw her endorsement, no doubt—which she would do, she said, before he could ask, of course she would do it. (To hear him ask for it, that she couldn't do. The speech at the Gilbert Club had taken too much out of her, the women with their unpainted, upturned faces, trusting her. That felt like years ago now, though it had been just before the
Mendosa
went down.) She
had told Albert about the rye, and how she'd fallen asleep on the floor the night before, and when he said, “Fine, that's fine, Bea,” she knew she must be lost in a way she hadn't been lost before.

In the window, her reflection looked close to crying. But she didn't cry. She thought of Emma, surrounded by her children on the other side of the cape, and felt a pang of envy for what she imagined must be the clarity of Emma's grief, the simple square of her house. No matter the situation with Mr. Story—Bea didn't allow that to factor in. Emma was certain in her suffering and had come by it honestly and Bea envied her this. Which made her even more despicable, she knew, but there it was. There was her irreparable haircut, her old face, her bare feet so pale they appeared blue.

She turned off the light so she wouldn't have to look at herself anymore.

 • • • 

Somewhere between Folly Point and Hodgkins Cove, in a part of the woods called No Man's Land, in a cave blown into one wall of an old two-man pit that was mostly filled in now with scrap, a great quantity of whiskey was stored. The quality varied, depending on what was running—
Blues or herring?
the men liked to wink—but quantity could be counted on. “Bottles'll be there” is how Lucy heard it said in one of the paving sheds. “Eastern Point schmancies tonight. Story's got his pinkies in this one. 'Leven o'clock.”

She hid behind a boulder, leaning out to watch the men work. The wind had fallen, the night was hot. A bullfrog groaned. A pine needle came to rest on one of her hands.
I could hear a butterfly fart
is what Roland would say—it was that kind of night. When the last box was loaded, the men gathered on the other side of the trucks, their cigarettes twinkling, their voices soft, Lucy slipped into the middle truck, balled up on the floor between the front seat and the back—on the left side, where the seat above her was loaded with boxes—and waited.

The trucks kicked to life and rattled out of the woods, knocking
Lucy's nose against the floorboards. She had been on the bus, but not in a car. It was very loud. When her face stopped bouncing, she knew they had turned onto Washington.

Frankie Silva found her with his foot. He was sitting on the other half of the seat, one arm stretched mightily across the wall of whiskey, a cigarette in his other hand, the most relaxed he'd felt in ages, when his left foot hit a thing that was not made of steel. He reached down and felt her cap. He slid his toe under her forehead, lifted it like a ball, then pulled her up by the nape, calling into the front, “Got a boarder!” Lucy's hands flew to her head. She wore Liam's dark coat. Sweat filled her ears. “Johnny Murphy,” she whispered. “Please . . .”

“And I'm Frankie Silva.” The man snorted. “That don't make no difference.”

But the caravan had already rounded the last bend before the Goose Cove Bridge, where Dirk Parsons collected his toll. What could they do? The road was narrow—there was no room to turn around. Even if there were, Dirk and his brothers had seen their headlamps and would know if they changed direction. And that was no guarantee anyway: there was one dirt road they could try through Dogtown, there was the long way up and around the cape, but men ran rogue tolls along those routes, too. There was too much booze in Lanesville not to collect on it, booze in other caves, booze underwater, booze in chimneys and woodpiles and trees. Ten thousand bottles of whiskey were buried in Salvatore Santorini's kitchen garden alone. The Feds came with steel rods, poking, poking, but they couldn't find every cache. (In 1983, Salvatore's great-grandson, digging for treasure, would pry up an unlabeled bottle of brown liquid and pour it into his boots.)

Dirk Parsons and his brothers had good rifles. Josiah Story had money invested in this trip. What could Frankie Silva do? He stuffed the kid back down, the drivers paid up, the caravan rolled on.

 • • • 

Through the yacht club gate Frankie rode with his foot on Lucy's back. “Stay put,” he grumbled. “Stay, we'll get you home. Won't tell nobody. Not worth our time. Stupid kid.”

She was gone before they got back for their second load. She did not run. She slipped like a shadow over the club's wall, clambered down through beach rose until the breakwater slid into view, judged by its distance how far she had to go, then stayed to the side of the road, to the hedges and walls, until she reached the gap in the honeysuckle.

It wasn't until she was through, to where the air was thick with sugar and the pears hung in her face, that she felt afraid. She had been too worried about getting there to fear being there. But the smell choked her, and the pears were so close, and she was alone, very alone, her aloneness as abruptly apparent as if until a moment ago Janie had walked beside her, as if the whole Murphy clan had been wading together into the field, the children grabbing at once for the low fruit, hissing,
Look how much I've grown! Last year I was only this high. Look!

And Roland would laugh and say,
Who needs a doctor to measure you when we can go begging for pears? Now get to work!
And a glow would run among them as they started to pick, a shared, almost sacred kind of joy, like what happened when they went to church on Christmas Eve but even more so, even better, because the orchard, and the joy they felt there, was never spoken of.

Lucy listened. Could she flag down the trucks on their way off the point, beg Frankie Silva to take her back? In a few days she would turn ten. Janie would bake her a cake. They would all sing to her. It could be as if she had never come here.

The night hung so still she heard her own breath. She heard her dress shift against Liam's coat. She heard the photograph she'd torn from the newspaper rustle deep in the coat's right pocket. She heard sweat roll off her nose and land in the grass.

She shed the coat. She pulled at a pear and it dropped into her palm like a stone. The stem was intact, the flesh firm under her thumb. Perfect.
Look!
she wanted to shout.
Look how easy that was, how tall I am. Look how brave I am. Look! Come get me. Come and take me home.

She turned once, in a circle, as if Janie and Anne might be hiding behind the trees, tricking her, as if everything had been a trick and they would all come out now, Roland on his two legs and Emma all devotion and Lucy, too, before she had grown, before Roland started pinching her, before she had been split so definitively, irrevocably, from the others.