Leaving Lucy Pear (30 page)

B
y the middle of November, Bea had gained twelve pounds. When her cycle came, she bled heavily. She had forgotten how nearly black the blood could be, forgotten amid the meek, irregular dribbling of the past decade that there was something reassuring about a dark, monthly, soil-smelling exodus. She had forgotten her body. It returned to her now, flesh at her hips, her chin. Proof. Padding. Shelter. She slept more deeply. Her face took on color. She hadn't realized how unreal she had often felt, how close to breaking or floating away. She started pushing Ira down to Mother Rock once a day—he could walk again, but not for any distance—and her legs and arms grew strong.

On the weekends, Albert came to do the pushing, and to sleep with Lyman Knapp. He was in the process of selling the house on Acorn Street, and looking for an apartment. A separation, they told their parents, trying to ease them in, but the realtor's assistant had snitched to the
Herald
and so it was out. Bea was surprised to find herself temporarily devastated, though about what exactly she could not say. Lyman Knapp. The house. The hissed public censure. Albert. It was almost entirely Albert. She could still point to the moment she began to love him: he said something like,
If that's politics, you must be a fine actress,
and proceeded to look at her, and look and look, with his startling blue eyes and not a hint of judgment. They had both been in hiding. Bea had seized on this as fair,
as if they were nothing more than parts in a mathematical equation. She had thought it right that they should know each other so baldly, good that they had protected themselves against surprises. But for a few days after the
Herald
ran its piece, she felt the full tragedy of their pairing—regret that it had been necessary, grief that it was now over. As if to prove the point, it was Albert who drew her out, making her laugh with stories about his colleagues at the bank, who had immediately set to work locating single women they wished
they
were free to fuck. Albert politely declined. Eventually, they would draw whatever conclusions they drew and let him be. One boss, a few years later, would close the door to his office and ask Albert outright, “Are you a faggot?” and Albert, mystifying, enraging, and humiliating the man all at once—all this he reported to Bea—would say, “As much of one as you imagine me to be.”

Down at Mother Rock, the leaves of the beach rose had bleached a bright yellow. Bea sat between Albert and Ira, thinking about Lucy Pear, who was still on Leverett Street with Emma and the others. Bea had invited them to Ira's house, but so far Emma had not come, nor said she would come. Bea kept up her lessons, sick each time she drove past the house with Mr. Murphy inside it. Soon, she thought, she would take the girl aside, give her the money, show her the timetables and routes. Or she would drive her to the train herself. Bea knew what it was like to not belong in a place. She would lock the girl into memory—her wide eyes, her long chin, one curl stuck into the corner of her mouth—and wave good-bye. But here her mind swerved. She could not do that. How could she possibly say good-bye when they had only just met? In a crook of her heart Bea fantasized about boarding the train with the girl, becoming her mother in a new place, starting again. But that would be a kind of kidnapping, of course. And Lucy, Bea knew, did not actually want her. And Bea could not start again. She had made a life, as much as she had told herself over the years that it was temporary. She had shed the cause, and made true commitments. To care for
Ira (though she would soon hire people to help, with him and with the house, and another woman to cook, forgoing martyrdom so she could do things like visit Eliza Dropstone—whom she'd recently contacted through the
Quarterly
—and her three children in Needham, and go with Rose and her new boyfriend to the theater in Boston). To teach the Murphy children. Janie was very good. If she remained disciplined, Bea thought, if she agreed to more lessons and practiced each day, eventually she might win a scholarship to the conservatory. Or Bea might pay her way.

Bea was starting to teach other children, too. Janie had told a friend, who had told her mother, and so on. In a couple years, Bea would marry the father of two of her students, a widower, a doctor, not a Jew but Lillian would forgive that. They would make a home in the house his parents had left him. Bea would become an authentic year-rounder, one of the winter people. They would have a baby, a girl. But that would not be starting over, either. It would turn out to be the opposite, a continuing, Bea awake this time, animal, humbled and astonished, and staying as the baby grew, a corner of her mourning all she had never known of Lucy while the rest of her fell deeply into her days, the baby, the stepchildren, her husband's laughter, his gratitude, his fingertip way of touching her at the hip each time he passed, his awe at her stamina, disbelief even, though she had already told him everything. They would let Lillian and Estelle take the baby to Granddaughters' Day at the Draper House, which had become a thing. They would visit Ira often. He would live to be ninety-one.

That—the new baby—was in 1930, the same year that Mother Jones finally died and Bea donated the humidor to Howard University in Washington, D.C., for its slavery collection, and other objects to other places and people who valued them more than Ira or Bea or her cousins ever would. It was also the year her father lost so much money he closed Haven Shoes and moved himself and Lillian to Gloucester. Only Lillian kept up the trips to Boston—to
shop, she claimed, though she went for her appointments with Dr. M. Henry bought a storefront in downtown Gloucester, started up a department store called Heschel Brothers, and taught his granddaughter how to measure feet, but really measure them, length, width, corns, and all.

 • • • 

Long before any of that, though, the yellow leaves would fall off the beach rose and the first snow would blow through and Bea would find herself and Ira taking in Emma and Lucy and the other children.
Only until spring,
Emma would say, and Bea would say,
Whatever you like. Whatever works.
The house would be loud. Lucy would be everywhere. She would show Bea the old shawl and Bea would bury her face in it. Over at Leverett Street, the third week of December, the perry would freeze and be ruined—the one danger neither Emma nor Lucy had accounted for—but no one knew about that yet. The children's cheeks were bright with displacement—if it made them sick, they smothered their sickness in glee. Ira nodded, following the sound of their running with his eyes, rubbing his face in disbelief, shaking his head at the noise, the house filled with life. Bea would think,
Maybe this will be enough.

 • • • 

But today, Bea was leaving Albert and Ira down at the rocks and going to pick up Julian and Brigitte, who were arriving from New York with their baby, Marlene Aimée. They were climbing haggardly down from the train, surprised to find Bea waiting for them, Bea behind the wheel, waving out the window. They were placing a crying Marlene Aimée into her grandfather's arms.

Yesterday, Bea had gone into town to have Brigitte's locket fixed. For weeks, she had avoided looking at it, at first impressed by her self-discipline—as she had been so many times before, repeating scales until her fingers cramped, surviving for weeks on apples, writing speeches she loathed—and then, finally, appalled. It was like being suddenly nauseated by the scent of her own skin. She
scooped up the pieces, drove them to the jeweler, and said, “I'd like to fix this, for a friend.”

She felt lighter today. A fist had unfisted. Ira clucked and cooed at the screaming baby, swinging her vigorously left and right, the effort making him red and happy. Bea let herself look at Julian and he looked straight back and said, “Bea. Father tells me you've been reunited with your daughter. It makes me glad to know it.” Bea thanked him. Then she gave the locket back to Brigitte—“It was trampled,” she explained, “but they made it good as new”—and went to the piano, where she began to play Brahms's lullaby. Julian shouted, “You've started to play again! That's wonderful!” and though Bea knew Ira had already told him this, she forgave him his exuberance. He worried, of course. He still expected Bea to envy them the baby. He feared, perhaps, that she would do something rash. He feared her more generally, Bea supposed, and had for a long time, ever since she had become a woman before he became a man.

Later, after supper, but not so late that the answer was sure to be no, not hesitantly or apologetically or half trying to sabotage herself, Bea asked if she could hold Marlene Aimée. The baby was quiet, and wide awake, her blue eyes wandering from Bea to the lamp behind her and back again. Julian mumbled something about how she didn't often smile at this hour, Bea shouldn't be offended, but Bea barely heard. She was looking at Marlene Aimée: her radish pink lips, the upper curling over the lower in such a way that she appeared to be on the verge of laughter, the fluffy thatch of dark hair that sprouted like a mushroom from the top of her head, the pert, puggish nose. And the things that would not last: the yellow flaking at her scalp, the fur that grew at her temples, the rash on her cheeks. Now, too, Bea thought,
Maybe this will be enough.

S
he boards the train as if climbing a tall, precariously tilted boulder in the Lanesville woods, her steps quick, already committed. Like a rock, the train seems to her at once alive and unthreatening, animate yet without preference—it lets her on but is unmoved by her weight. Lucy has with her clean underwear, two new dresses bought by Mrs. Cohn, the blanket Emma gave her, and a sack of sandwiches she made this morning in the dark kitchen before even the cook woke. Also, a book of children's poetry Uncle Ira left on her pillow one night, inscribed:
For Lucy, full of light.
She was going to take Mrs. Haven's rings, but then she found a stack of twenty-dollar bills in the top drawer of Mrs. Cohn's desk, so she left the rings for her sisters. The wad is stuffed deep into one of Liam's socks, though she keeps one bill, the gift from Estelle, separate, in the other sock, understanding that it did not come easily. She wears one of Liam's sweaters, too, and a pair of his trousers, and Jeffrey's extra cap, low over her eyes. Around her chest she has wrapped one of the bandages Emma saved from Roland's first weeks home. The sweater is roomy, Lucy's breasts still nearly imperceptible, but she wears the bandage anyway, as a cautionary measure. It keeps her warmer, if nothing else. She left her winter coat behind, unable to wear it—clearly a girl's—or to fit it into her bag, a brown canvas duffel Roland used to bring on his fishing trips. Emma took the bag and nearly everything else from the house, including the
bandages, the curtains, all the pillows but one. She left only Roland's clothes and a few kitchen things. The children weren't there when she did this. They were at school, except for Lucy and Joshua, whom Emma had sent down to the coffee shop. Afterward, she would say nothing of what happened, not even to Lucy. She did say that they could go back in the spring, for the perry. And she said that she had arranged for a nurse. The nurse would go to the house twice a day to check on him, keep the fire lit, keep the house. Emma looked, saying this, much older, and very beautiful.

If she were a girl, Lucy thinks, she would wrap the blanket around her shoulders, but because she is not supposed to be a girl, she hugs the duffel to her while she waits for the car to warm up and rests her feet on the opposite seat, like a boy can do. The train is not full—still, she was surprised when the conductor moved her to a place where she could have two seats, facing each other. At night, when the beds are set up, Lucy will have both the top and bottom bunks, a sort of closet all to herself. She doesn't understand how the seats will change into beds—she sees no mechanism. She tries to look out the window, but instead stares at the porter as he carries another suitcase through the car. She hasn't seen a colored person before.

 • • • 

For hours, as the train rolls north, she speaks to no one. She eats her sandwiches and wonders, as they disappear, if she has made a mistake. She was safe now, after all, with her siblings and Emma and Mrs. Cohn and Mr. Hirsch, with the cook and housekeeper and nurse. It was a kind of family—a good family, in many ways. The only man was old and sweet. There were two women, two mothers, home almost all the time. The children had space to run. There were enough beds that each child had one to herself—though often, by morning, she had found a sibling and crawled in with her—and enough money that it was no great hardship that Emma could no longer work at Sven's. The men at the long counter
glared at her. Lanesville was done with her. So she was home, and Mrs. Cohn was home, the house large enough to let them pass each other comfortably, like moons. But they were warming. The other day Lucy had seen them talking quietly on the screened porch, huddled close in their coats, Emma's new—she had relented, accepted—so that they looked like equals. Like two women, friends even, having a conversation. Then, sensing Lucy, they'd looked up, their faces instantly lit, vying for her attention, praising, worrying, making way. She was everything to them.

But that was it. They wanted to help her but they needed her, too, and their need was heavy. They thought she was older than she was, but she wasn't. You couldn't actually be older than the number of years you had lived. She was ten. She felt as if they were sitting on her head.

This morning, hours before the train to Boston was scheduled to depart, she had slipped out through the basement bulkhead, walked off Eastern Point, and ridden the bus to Lanesville. A few quarrymen sat in back but none seemed to recognize her, and even if they had, it would have been Johnny Murphy they saw. Leverett Street was dusted in snow. She climbed the hill in the trees, the duffel pulling her back, her concentration so great she nearly passed the house. The Davies' chimney trickled gray smoke, residue of last night's fire. The Solttis had bought a car—it sat like a black rock in their yard. Even Mrs. Greely's house was dark, and silent. A wan light spread through the trees. Lucy had stayed on Eastern Point through Christmas, had gone to Mass with Emma in a new church, had done what she could to avoid cruelty. January was setting in now. The door to the perry shack squealed at her touch and she stepped in quickly to find the place scentless. Her breath jumped in front of her. She moved cautiously to the window.

With the curtains gone from the house, she could see easily into the front room, and in the front room, to her surprise, she saw Roland sitting in his chair, asleep. She had imagined that to see him
she would have to creep to the bedroom window, but this—it was almost too easy, and sad. Had he slept there the whole night? She left the shack and went closer, until her face met the window and she saw that this man, covered in a blanket, was not Roland. She nearly banged on the window. What had happened to Roland? What had Emma done? Then the man's face fell to the side, exposing a peculiar, lobe-heavy ear. Roland's ear. He had shaved, that was it. She had never seen him without a beard. His face looked strange, doughy in places, the lines around his mouth deeper than she would have guessed, his skin fish white and soft. His sudden bareness seemed to suggest he had nothing to hide. Lucy went hot with guilt. She had overreacted. She had ruined him. He had brought her up as his child and she had ruined him. She let her forehead fall against the window and stared. But the noise made Roland flinch. His eyelids quivered and his hands emerged from the blanket to pull it tighter across his middle and his fingers were the same, thick and scarred, and Lucy's fear was simple enough to flatten her doubt and push her down the hill, running the whole way, the duffel banging her knees, until she reached the bus stop, a panting boy.

The trees change. The hills grow steeper. A family of deer stares calmly at the train as it roars past. Lucy wonders how they know not to be afraid.

The sun sets. Her sandwiches are long gone.

In the dining car, where the walls are still decorated for Christmas with musk-scented wreaths and velvet bows, Lucy chooses a table in the corner and keeps her eyes down. But the place is nearly full and a woman asks if the seat across from Lucy is taken. Lucy shakes her head, resisting the urge to check that her hair is still well tucked into Jeffrey's cap. She hopes Janie will forgive her for taking all her pins.

The woman is built like a tree trunk, Lucy thinks, the same from top to bottom, her brown velour dress probably bought for this trip given how she picks at it as she gets settled, pulling at the shoulders,
tugging at the neckline. Her expression is similarly scattered: apologetic yet eager. For a large woman, her eyes are small. Her fidgeting calms Lucy—it suggests the woman will not look closely.

“Are you going all the way to Quebec by yourself?”

Lucy nods. The motion is like a hand opening a gate—it shakes loose her loneliness.

The woman smiles as she examines the menu. “What are you, twelve?” she asks. She raises a thick, gloved finger for the waiter, and Lucy nods again.

Over dinner, the woman—Mary Morse—tells Lucy her story. Her parents were poor, the children always hungry, Miss Morse the oldest and hungriest. She has lived in Medford, Massachusetts, since she was sent there, at thirteen, to take care of her dying aunt. The aunt was her father's favorite sister. She was good to Miss Morse, made sure she kept up with school. She died, Miss Morse said, the way you hope a person will die, already used to the idea, and because she'd taught Sunday school, her funeral was well attended. Miss Morse became a history teacher. She met a man to marry but he ran off with her best girlfriend. (“Don't you go doing that,” she says to Lucy with a coy, surprising grin.) For a while after that Miss Morse thought she would die of heartbreak—that was like a separate life, that time, a black pit between her first life and this one—but now she knows nothing like that will kill her. She likes her students, but she's going back to Quebec, where she was born, to take care of her dying mother.

“See how it goes? New year, old journey. Nothing extraordinary in it, not the least little bit. Most people want to be extraordinary. Make a mark in the world. But for what? In my experience it's the extraordinary people what aren't happy, always expecting something better than they get. Whenever anything at all happens to me, I tell myself it's happened to everyone else, too. It's actually very comforting. I feel steady almost all the time because I know that nothing out of the ordinary will ever happen and if it did, or
if it seemed like it did, it wouldn't be, anyway. Well, aren't you patient. I bet you want to be the next Charles Lindbergh when you grow up. But don't you see how that makes you ordinary, too?”

Lucy nods vaguely. She hears little of the woman's words—it's the cadence of her voice she likes, its carelessness, an almost frothy cheer, and that it keeps on coming, like a tide.

 • • • 

Her bunks have been made up. She climbs into the top one and opens the book Uncle Ira gave her to a poem about a bluebird who is saying good-bye to a girl, but he can't tell her himself because he has already flown away. He has told a crow, who tells another child, who will have to tell the girl. But before that happens, the poem ends. Lucy reads it twice, then shuts the book and turns out the light. Tears spill down her face. Her stomach is full in a way she's unused to, the passing sky milky with clouds. She longs to be in bed with Janie. There are questions she would have liked to ask Miss Morse:
Did you know, when you left, that you would one day go back? Why did your father live so far from his favorite sister? How can you be sure that the dangers you already know are worse than the ones you're heading for?

The conductor passes through the car, telling a few people to talk more quietly, and Lucy is sorry for the silence that spreads behind him. She hears his accent as he nears her bunk,
Quiet down, please, a bit quieter, please . . .
Irish, she thinks, a different kind of Irish, maybe from a county near Emma's, and Lucy lets this idea soothe her a little. She thinks of the first letter she will write, and wonders what she will have to say. (This: that she has found Peter, that he is the same, that he makes her go to school, that she has learned a little French, that they are neither rich nor poor. And this: She is sorry. She misses Emma. She misses them all. She addresses the letters to Emma, though everyone who can write writes to her, including Mrs. Cohn. She thinks she will devastate Emma if she writes to Mrs. Cohn and she is right, though this devastation would
be nothing compared with what Lucy has already put them through. For months they wake to footfall and think it is her. They wonder silently which of them is more to blame for her leaving. They wish out loud that they had chained her to her bed.)

Lucy is wrong about the conductor. He is British. Thirty-one years ago he was hired to watch over a bunch of pear trees en route from Sussex to Massachusetts, and he never went home. He has worked as a water boy in the quarries, a messenger in Boston, a busboy in Providence, a conductor for the last fifteen years, always carrying things, or people. He knows where Lucy is. He noticed the boy alone, of course. He notices everything. He stops at the kid's bunks. Hasn't said a word. Doesn't seem to know about the curtain. He's lying there in full view, facing the window, not asleep—the conductor can tell by the stiff way his head doesn't quite rest on the pillow. He hasn't taken off his cap. Most people who ride the Pullman think it's going to be their chance to play high class. Then he sees their faces change as night falls, sees their fear. He hears them call for the porters, a glass of water, an aspirin, this or that, and the porters think it's despotism—which maybe in part it is—but the conductor knows it's also fear. The ghostly shapes of trees, the moon behind a cloud, old stories of wolves. He lets the people be. By morning they have forgotten. They revise the night's demons, boast to their fellow passengers how civilized it is, traveling this way. But the boy can't be more than ten, maybe eleven. The conductor wasn't much older when he left home. He rises on his toes next to the bunk and, though this is the porter's job, asks quietly, “Is there anything you need?” After a pause, still facing away, the boy shakes his head. Black curls escape from his cap, snarled, but not dirty. Long. The conductor itches to touch one, pop it, see just how long. “I'll be back in the morning,” he says. But he doesn't go. He won't go back to his compartment tonight. He'll stay awake, watchful. He lifts himself closer. He murmurs, “It'll be all right.” Then he pats the long pile of the kid, pulls the curtain, and snaps it
shut.