Leaving Lucy Pear(10)
And at night, when the logic was swallowed, when the gravel paths grew spectral and the pines rose up like a mountain range, a different pleasure worked at him. The barks of harbor seals sounded like feral dogs roaming the plain. A cat in heat became a moaning puma. Coyotes howled themselves into wolves, raccoons clawed themselves into boars as they ransacked the gardener’s compost heap. The noises sent delicious tremors into Caleb’s limbs—the wildness he’d longed for was here! Over time, he started taking long naps during the day so that at night he could be transported.
This was how, one night in the spring of 1927, he came to hear the loping of large bodies and think: LIONS!!!
Then he spotted them—humans—scurrying toward the bathhouse, arm in arm.
He was furious that first time, not only that Josiah and Susannah had broken his spell but that they did so for flagrantly intimate purposes. He had thought they were over trying to have children. It had been such a bad time, when Susannah’s stomach did not grow and her sadness came in, fogging her eyes and dulling her skin. She had always been the strongest of his three children—though he never would have said so to the boys—but she seemed to him suddenly, hauntingly frail. She reminded him for the first time of her mother, his late wife, Berenice, who had been ill almost the whole time he had known her, and this reminded him of all he’d been unable to fix.
Caleb had put Susannah and Josiah’s reproductive efforts out of his mind and hoped they had, too. Yet he heard the lions again a few nights later, and again a few nights after that. In his chair by the window he seized with disgust and pity.
But tonight, the fourth time, the light behind the slatted door flickered. It was a candle, Caleb realized. They had lit a candle. He melted as if Susannah were a child again, pulling on his pant leg, looking up at him with her hazel eyes. Yesterday afternoon, he had gone out to the garden and seen that the tulips had opened. He had seen a mourning dove furiously building her nest under the eave of the gardener’s shack, one seemingly inadequate twig after another, her efforts miraculously adding up to shelter. And now the candle. It was enough to recall him to his kindest self, to cause him to bring his forearm to his nose and smell the oils the sun had brought up in his skin. He gasped. Whenever someone gasped in novels (which Caleb indulged in between biography and history, having developed a regimen—history, biography, history, biography, novel, history, biography, and so on—that satisfied his idea of rigor) it struck Caleb as theatrical and false, but he had gasped like a woman and now he stood, gawking at the candle. He recalled his body, which he had neglected. He thought, This is a fine moment for new life to begin. Then he released the sleeve of his pajamas and closed the drape.
Four
Emma could not think of Roland until it was through, and then—wending around her howling guilt, bracing herself against the shock of having committed once again a sin her mother would have disowned her for, not to mention Mary, oh—it was to wonder: would he care? He would want to smash their heads in, he would threaten to tell the parish, ruin her, but would he care? Beyond his rage, would it be Emma that he wanted? He would want his Wife, yes, his Girl, an idea of her that went back to the South End saloon where he had found her working as a barmaid, allowing a pinch here or there in exchange for extra tips. He had been one of the pinchers until he fell in love with her and wheedled and begged, claiming he was now too respectable for pinching. Through the weeks of their engagement and the early months of their marriage, when Emma was learning Roland’s many base habits, she kept waiting for him to use her beginnings against her. But he never had, a mercy that reminded her, when she needed reminding, of Roland’s fundamental goodness. Sometimes, in tender moments between them, he even romanced her with memories of her bar days. Not a shred of sentiment in you, he’d growl proudly in her ear. So practical, his hand finding its way under the hem of her dress.
She believed he was right. Her sentiment had been bled out of her: incompletely by her tough, corn-haired mother; more starkly as she watched her father lose his work; and finally, wholly, when she left Banagher with her cousins and landed in Boston with nothing but her name. It was Eimhear then but became Emma within days.
And so she told herself, as she lay in Josiah Story’s office-thin arms on a deep white sofa in a bathhouse larger than her entire house, covered in an unimaginably soft quilt he called an afghan, that if Roland were ever to find out—though he must never find out—she could explain it as a sort of business agreement. An abhorrent, blasphemous agreement, but a practical one. She slept with the man in exchange for the perry press, a shack to house it, jobs for the boys down at the quarry. She would not tell about the necklace. She would say nothing of the hand cream he had given her tonight—their fourth night, she had not been able to keep from knowing, in the same way she always knew to the penny how much money she had in the jar under her bed, and always knew the number and ages of her children, even when Roland forgot. A reflex, to count and track and measure, and so, Night four, she’d thought as she lay low in Story’s backseat, bracing herself when they hit the bumps on Concord Street, and just as she started to berate herself, How can this be? Shame! Story’s pale hand fell her way across the backseat, wagging the bottle of cream like a toy, and she grabbed it, the fancy cut glass imprinting flowers into her palm, the scent of flowers making her sneeze. He laughed. “Massage it into your hands,” he said in his slow, strange, satisfied way. And she did.