Leaving Lucy Pear (28 page)

“Anyone for tea?” asked Lillian. She had stopped crying and stood awkwardly, not knowing what to do with her hands now that she had given up her gifts. When no one answered, she said brightly, “I do. I need a cup of tea. I'll just say it. I'm saying it. Henry, come. Help. We don't want to protrude.”

Bea saw Emma bite back a grin. She smiled, trying to catch Emma's eye, to tamp down the thumping at her clavicle:
Please, look at me!
It was so childish yet powerful, her longing for Emma's attention, for some sort of acknowledgment. Each Saturday Bea went to Leverett Street to play piano with the children, but Emma barely looked at her. She stayed out on the porch with Lucy, acknowledging Bea only to say a curt “Good morning” and “We'll see you next week.” Even when Bea had brought Cousin Rose to look at Emma's wrist, Emma had thanked Rose heartily yet said little to Bea. She had spoken to her plenty back when she was working in the house, but Emma had had her secret then, Bea supposed—it had been a thing she held over Bea. She had pretended to be kind but now she could not.

Still, Bea liked the visits to Mrs. Greely's house. She liked the disorder, and that no one ever remarked on it, liked that Mrs. Greely was so straightforwardly batty, which somehow did more for Bea than any treatment ever had to convince her of her own basic sanity. She liked teaching, too. It had been far simpler than she had imagined, to begin to play again: with Janie sitting beside her and the other children waiting, she had had to do it, to set her thumb upon the middle C and feel the ivory give as easily as water, and then it was done and she was doing it, just as she had begun speaking again, once upon a time, after her muteness. It was surprisingly easy, to make a different choice. It was easy to remember. She liked teaching the Murphy children. She liked seeing Lucy Pear, even if the girl shied from her and didn't want her lessons. Bea brought a check each week, enough to cover groceries and more, which she handed to Emma inside a bag of something else,
bread or sometimes chocolates, and Emma was cashing the checks now—so there was that. Bea had not managed to raise the issue of Lucy's wound, or Mr. Murphy, though each time she passed the house on her way up the road a slickness rose at her neck. He didn't want to meet her, clearly, and Bea didn't especially want to meet him. She couldn't imagine what she would do with her eyes—look at where his leg had been? Not look? Would she apologize? Would she ask him what he had to do with Lucy's leg? And if she didn't, wouldn't she fail again, as she had failed from the beginning, to protect her? But Lucy's injury was hard to categorize, and relatively minor—you could not go leaping to conclusions about such things or even asking questions without seeming hysterical. She could raise it with Emma but feared Emma would take it badly, as if Bea were accusing her, if not of inflicting the wound then of turning the other way. So she'd said nothing, only handed Emma the bag with the check tucked discreetly inside. She behaved in the most appropriate way possible, she thought, given the circumstance. She tried not to intrude. Protrude.

She could not expect Emma to
like
her. So what was it she wanted, when she stood here trying to chase down Emma's eyes? What was it Bea wanted her to acknowledge?

Bea couldn't have said exactly, but Emma knew. Even as she avoided Mrs. Cohn's eyes, she understood that the woman now grasped what she had done, and that she was sorry, and sorrowful, and grateful, that she felt she owed Emma her life. Mrs. Cohn couldn't say this, which was fine by Emma. For her part, she would not tell Mrs. Cohn that she had seen how she suffered. She would not tell her she was forgiven. There were certain things—simple, yet immeasurable things—that could not pass directly between two people without seeming false, even crass, and these were among them.

“I'm happy to make your tea,” Emma said to Mrs. Haven. “But
first . . .” She squeezed Lucy's shoulder. “Tell Mrs. Cohn where you'd like to go.”

Lucy stared at Emma. She had said nothing about wanting to go anywhere.

“It's all right. Tell her.” Emma tilted her chin toward the end of the terrace, where the stairs led down into the trees. “You'd like to see the orchard.”

Lucy's cheeks flushed the color of plums.

“Oh!” Mrs. Cohn cried, a beat too late, as stunned as Lucy. She smiled. “Of course!”

“It's all right,” Emma said again, giving Lucy a tiny, invisible push. “Go on. I'll be in the kitchen, then I'll be right here. I'm not going anywhere.”

 • • • 

The orchard was not as Lucy had understood it to be. In the dark, it had seemed to her vast and pungent, a whole country of pears. But it wasn't an orchard so much as a field with a few pear trees in it. They were bare and gray. The middle one—Lucy's tree—looked no different. The ground was splotched with rotting fruit and overgrown with thorns. Mrs. Cohn talked about how the soil was this and the pears were that and then she started to say that she wasn't actually sure about anything she was saying because she'd heard it so long ago, and from Uncle Ira, when Lucy, unable to listen any longer, broke in to ask, “Will someone clear it? Before it's back to brambles?”

Mrs. Cohn stopped walking. “I don't honestly know.” She pointed. “That's the old fish pond my aunt Vera used to keep.”

“Did she die?”

But Mrs. Cohn was looking up, at the tree above her, or the sky. Lucy caught a low branch and started to pull it back and forth as she watched the long stretch of Mrs. Cohn's neck, its slight undulation as she spoke. “I told you, before, that I forgot about the pears this year. That was untrue.”

Lucy said nothing. It seemed to be a mild lie.

“I thought you should know.” Mrs. Cohn looked at her. “I don't forget.”

Lucy nodded. “Okay.”

“Shall we sit?”

Lucy sat. A look of regret came over Mrs. Cohn's face. “Are they painful? The prickers?”

“Not really.”

Slowly, Mrs. Cohn knelt next to her, taking care to tweeze the brambles back with her fingers, though once she was seated in her little clearing, they popped back into place, surrounding her. She smiled an effortful smile. A gull called. From the slide of its shriek, Lucy could tell it was diving. She watched a caterpillar crawl onto her mother's skirt. It was the black and gold kind, so fat and furry its progress was barely perceptible—Lucy knew it moved only because its colors rippled, and because after a little while it rounded Mrs. Cohn's knee and began the long trip up her thigh. For a long moment Lucy allowed herself to imagine that this was her life, that there was no Emma or Janie, no quarry, no hoarding of pennies, that it was just Lucy and her mother sitting in a field together until they decided to walk back up the hill to their enormous house. She imagined piano lessons in her own living room, trips to Boston, marble floors in department stores, plush red seats in theaters.

“Lucy. Remember when you showed me the wound on your leg?”

The caterpillar paused. It lifted its fat head and swung it around.

“Was it your . . . Was Mr. Murphy responsible for that?”

Woolly caterpillar,
Lucy remembered. Peter had taught her that. Also, Peter had shown her how the gulls got their meat.
Look,
he'd said, pushing her cheek to make her turn, focus: he wanted her to see how one gull dropped a mussel from the sky and another gull stole it before the first could fly down.

“Lucy?”

She didn't like how Mrs. Cohn said her name. Loo-See. The
syllables were too distinct, the thing broke into pieces. Lucy had shown her. But that didn't mean she wanted to talk about it. She wanted it to be solved, wanted it to stop. There was a new blister on her other side now, in the crease where her leg joined her hip. But it, like all the others, didn't look so bad. It could be from banging into a chair at school. It could have happened in any number of ways. It could be that Roland never meant to hurt her. It could be he couldn't stop himself. He loved her. She knew he loved her. She felt shame roll through her, a black, heavy sludge through a small, small space.

“Lucy. I don't mean . . . What I'm saying . . . I want to help you.”

Lucy jumped up. She was sure she should run, and equally sure that she had nowhere to go. The field seemed private, the road hidden, but Lucy had walked from here to Lanesville—she understood now that neither was as it appeared. Any distance could be closed, any secret stolen. Everything she'd had for herself—the quarry, Emma's nighttime wanderings, Roland's punishments, Lucy's own beginnings—had been taken from her, or exposed.

She hoisted herself into the lowest notch of the middle tree and began to climb. Up, the sky blue, open wide. But the tree was short, the trip over too quickly, and from the highest branch she couldn't see anything she hadn't been able to see before. Mrs. Cohn looked up at her and Lucy saw that it wasn't easy for her to watch Lucy up there, balanced, no hands, and so she stayed, the sun hot in her hair, and called down: “You want me to come live here, with you? That's what you're saying?”

“No! No.”

Mrs. Cohn's vehemence was startling. “You wouldn't want me. . . .”

“Of course I would! I would. But Emma . . . What I'm saying—”

“She would never.”

“Never.”

“Plus you don't want me.”

“Lucy.”

Loo-See.

“What I'm saying . . .”

“Why don't you just say it!”

Lucy waited. She wanted to be scolded, punished, but she didn't know this—she knew only that the sun was hot and her throat full with the shame. Then she saw that Mrs. Cohn was standing. She wasn't looking at Lucy anymore but at something ahead of her, something Lucy couldn't see. She noted the top of her mother's head, the pale part amidst the dark, kelpy hair, how much paler it was than the rest of her. Lucy had the urge to curl up in that narrow place, protected and unseen.

“Lucy. Come down.”

This was said firmly, by Emma. It had been her job from the beginning, to enter quietly, and now she had done it again, she had found she couldn't not do it, she had placed the teacup and saucer in Mrs. Haven's lap and excused herself, followed them, heard everything.

Lucy stayed in the tree.

“This is what you were trying to tell me? He's done something to her?”

Mrs. Cohn's voice was a threadbare string. “You couldn't have known.”

“Of course I could. I'm her mother.”

Lucy crouched in the branches. She stared at her shoes, which Emma had polished for this occasion.

“You're not to blame,” said Mrs. Cohn.

“We're all to blame.”

They were silent. The gulls, having moved on, called gently. Lucy watched as Mrs. Cohn discovered the caterpillar crawling up her arm and did not scream but—surprising Lucy, and comforting her, and breaking her heart all over again—took the thing and cradled it in her hand.

“Lucy. Come down.”

But she couldn't think how to go down, not with Emma knowing what she now knew. Not the motions of it, feet, arms, hands, and not what she might do once she was there. She couldn't imagine meeting their eyes, or letting them touch her.

They waited.

B
ea told Albert the truth that night, after everyone had left and Ira had gone to sleep. The lieutenant's courteous stride, undersized for such a tall man, as he followed the admiral into her parents' parlor. How delicately his large hands held his lowball as Lillian cornered and harassed him. How genuine his smile had been, as if he knew nothing about his own astounding teeth. How Bea had not minded at all when Lillian pushed him toward her.
A walk, a walk!
A shock, especially ten years ago, that Lillian had encouraged such a thing. But the streets would not have been empty. The common was lit. If they had gone outside, they would not have been alone.

They had not gone outside. On the stairs, instead of down, they had gone up to Beatrice's bedroom, her little writing table, her dolls, her brass bed. It was shocking, she was shocked, the whole way, the entire time. There was some talk, as if he were a friend of her father's, but she was fully grown, and she was not occupying the part of herself that spoke and nodded and smiled and fiddled with the loose knob on the bedpost as if she would momentarily lead him out of the room and back downstairs. She closed the door. A shock. But Estelle was busy downstairs. The gramophone played loudly. To blame Lillian was not entirely wrong—she had been neglectful, crass, she had thrown her daughter at the man like a souvenir—but neither was it accurate. Lillian had meant for them to walk, as Bea and Albert were
walking now, on the road out to the point. Lillian had in her mind a stroll, however ill conceived. But it was Bea who closed the door, Bea who stood, waiting, having no idea what to do, aware only of the heat that ran through her. She had felt this heat before, in the company of Julian—she knew it would scatter eventually, ache a little, wane. But she did not think far enough ahead to think of that.

Deep down, maybe, she wanted to punish Lillian, show her. And Julian? She did not want to punish Julian, she wanted to marry him. And yet. She could see her life so clearly, now that he'd come out and asked, now that she'd nodded
Yes
: Radcliffe (or really, why bother with Radcliffe?), marriage, babies, the piano's natural retreat into hobby, a toy into its corner. Lunches with Lillian. She would be the exact woman she was raised to become.

Some part of her might have flinched at this. Some part of her might have wanted to blow it all down. But even that wasn't fair—she wanted to do what she was doing. She stood, and waited. He hesitated, and she waited, and then she lay under him on her own bed, not against a wall, not even crying out when it hurt, which it did, though not badly. He was very gentle. Mostly what she felt was fascination; mostly what she wanted was to know. He was apologetic, flustered. He left the room immediately and waited for her in the hall.

It was a terrible lie she had told. It was cheap, and she had told it enough that she had come to a way of believing it: she had built in her memory his forcing, her resistance.

“When I think of Lucy,” she said (she had told Albert what Mr. Murphy did to the girl, just on the periphery of violence, just bizarre enough not to warrant straightforward punishment), “it's like I've been mocking her.”

They had passed the yacht club and were nearing the end of the point. The lighthouse rose up before them, forever like a man to Albert, spreading its affections, one, two, three, four, until it shone for him, briefly, and withdrew again.

“It was what was expected of you,” he said. “To cry rape. Lillian practically fed it to you.”

“I never had any trouble refusing her food.”

“She cooked?”

“No, though that's not my point and you know it. Estelle cooked.”

“Good. Then I'm only in for one surprise tonight.” He laughed, throwing an elbow at Bea, but she walked heavily, her eyes straight ahead.

“I've told worse lies, you know,” he offered.

Without pausing, Bea stepped out onto the first slab of the breakwater. She thought he meant their marriage, he realized—she thought he was exaggerating his sins for her benefit, making a joke.

“Really,” he said. “In college . . .”

“I'm planning to give her money,” Bea said. “To help her get to Canada.” She was taking the stones in large strides, though the moon was skinny, the night dark—apart from the intermittent sweeps of light, Albert could barely make out the gaps between the rocks, some as long as a man's foot.

“You can't do that,” he said.

“I told you, didn't I, about her brother?”

“Still, you can't do that.”

“I can.”

“What about Emma?”

“She'll understand.”

“Bea. Think about this.”

“I have. The girl is stronger than she looks.”

“You think strength has served you well?”

Bea didn't respond. Albert stopped walking. He let her get two stones, four, six ahead. “You think you can just step in with your money and be forgiven?” he shouted.

She was a shadow. The breakwater ended in a few hundred yards—she would have to return. He sat down to wait, the granite
damp through his trousers, his fingers finding a snail that had been tossed up by the last high tide. He put his thumb in the hole, felt the thing retreat. He thought of last week's party, at Lyman Knapp's house. Like all of Lyman's parties, it had consisted of small groups around cocktails, people spilling onto the terrace, mostly artists and musicians and poets who, thank God, didn't bother to ask Albert what he did, the women in short dresses and the men without neckties. The talk was of travel and music and politics and, sometimes, in low tones, of baseball, as if Ruth and Gehrig's home-run race should not be of interest to imaginative people. There was a general apathy at the news that Coolidge would not run again—what difference would it make? After the execution there had been a communal moment of silence, followed by a debate over whether the communist intelligentsia had really wanted them kept alive or whether they were worth more to the movement dead. But last week, the guests were raucous again, dancing and laughing. Albert, as usual, stood at the edges—he had been taught wit with different sorts of people—feeling stiff and too obviously handsome, watching as Lyman poured and greeted, waiting to see if he would be chosen again. He always was—each time, when all the guests were gone, Albert was the one Lyman chose, the one he brought to various bedrooms, each elaborately decorated in a different style, with angled ceilings and oddly shaped windows, Albert he laughed with about the name Knapp, for he loved to nap, and the name Lyman, and about Albert's long ago hearing Lyman's house described as “the homosexual house” (Albert didn't mention whom he'd heard this from). Albert was attracted to Lyman's boniness (like someone else's), to the traveling knob of his Adam's apple. But last week, hours into the party, he started to despair, for beyond filling his glass, Lyman had yet to acknowledge him. The decision, it seemed, had to be made again. The entire procedure—waiting to be picked, being in a place as himself, belonging (in the most unacceptable way) and not belonging at all (in more acceptable ones)—felt like a
small chastening. It made Albert feel a little better. A little cleansed. But unhappy. Until at last Lyman brushed hard against him, and Albert flushed.

He hummed to the snail. Ira had taught him this, down at Mother Rock—it drew the things out. Ira said Vera had taught him, and one of her brothers had taught her. (Who had taught the brother?) Albert guessed the snail might mistake the humming for water, or maybe the company of another snail,
something,
in any case, to see or do or eat, which is why, half a minute after he'd started humming, he stopped, feeling guilty. His growing sense was that promises were almost impossible to keep, even if you seemed to have kept them, because by the time the thing panned out, whatever you had imagined and wanted when you had made or received the promise had changed. He and Bea had done what they had said they would do, they had borne each other up, they had loved each other, if one was flexible with terminology. Their vows had served them, to a point. But the point was behind them now—they had outgrown the arrangement. Bea would not ask him to tell her about his lie. She had barely heard him. And so they had failed, in fact, to do what they had promised, which was, if you stripped it all down, yanked off the pretty shell, to protect each other from themselves.

“Let's not talk about that anymore.”

She stood over him, her voice gentle. He patted the rock, realizing too late that he was growing cold. But Bea was warm from her brisk walk, and leaned into him, apologizing, so he leaned into her, fending off his chill.

“I'm going to find my own apartment,” he said.

Bea shrank. “Because I'm giving the girl money?”

“That has nothing to do with it. That's your decision to make. But you won't make it. You'll bring her here. You'll bring them all here.”

She was silent for a minute.

“But you don't need your own apartment.”

“You've lived in a box,” he said. “I'm letting you out.”

“You can't. You didn't put me there.”

“But I can let you out. I'll push, if I have to. Imagine a mother duck, shoving her young from the nest.”

“Don't flatter yourself.”

“Imagine a man, then, pushing you out of a box.”

“You're talking about yourself. Every time you say ‘you,' you mean ‘I.'”

“I mean both of us, maybe.”

“I can't keep the house myself. Where will I go?”

“You're already here.”

She shrank further. It always surprised him, how well he knew her body though he had never seen it unclothed, how he could perceive the slightest shifts in her temperature or heart rate. He held her hand. “It's not a tragedy, Bea, to do what you want to do. Even if it feels right—or easy, God forbid.”

She was silent for a while. “Ira won't live forever.”

“And you can drive now,” he said encouragingly. “You can travel. I'll travel with you.”

She sniffed softly, in a way he knew to be laughter. “You'll travel with Mr. Knapp.”

“Do you know, Beatrice Haven Cohn, that in some parts of the world, twenty-seven is not so old?”

He'd forgotten the snail, tucked into his palm between their hands, but she took it from him now and chucked it into the water. They waited for the plonk. “So you're not asking me.”

“No.”

“Will you go to Knapp's tonight?”

“Probably.”

He followed her gaze across the harbor, to the lights of the town. She sat for a while, seeming to consider, then leaped to her feet. “Let's get you back, then,” she said, and started to walk.

“Slow down,” he said. “You'll twist an ankle.”

“Again, you're worried about yourself. Enough. I'm hungry,” she added, with a bare little whimper that made him want to cry. But she slowed, and they walked home arm in arm, and after he had warmed soup for her, and toasted bread, and toasted more bread—he had never seen her eat so much—he went out again. It was later than he'd gone before, the guests gone home, and still, again, Lyman let him in.