Leaving Lucy Pear(15)

“Emma? She’s waiting.”

“You might have loaned me some boats,” she said. “Instead of all this. We could use a couple boats.” She swiped at her forehead with her forearm, wiped her forearm with her other hand, tried to wring her hand out, with little success. Story was too nervous to notice, she thought, but the woman would, the real woman with a face and a name who was staring down at the car now, waiting. Beatrice Cohn. Emma wished her back into facelessness even as she felt herself rising from the car. She felt her legs lift, one after the other, up the stone path, felt her fear slammed aside by a greater force. Now that she was here, her need to see Lucy’s mother, to know, was like a rope pulling her by the neck—she was nearly foaming with it. She must look preposterous, she thought, her gait halting, undecided. She did not know that from where Beatrice Cohn stood, she appeared perfectly natural, and of a piece. She looked like a poor, lovely, heavily perspiring Irishwoman treading cautiously in a place she had never been before.

“Good morning, Mrs. Cohn,” called Story, his voice overbright. “I’m ten minutes early. I like to be on time, always—out of respect. For your time, I mean. I hope we’re not troubling you.”

Beatrice Cohn smiled flatly, not even glancing at Emma. Lucy’s grace was drowned in the woman’s skinniness. She was all angles. “You couldn’t trouble me, Mr. . . . Forgive me. It’s Stanton, isn’t it?” she asked, and as Story coughed up a good-natured chuckle, Emma nearly bit her tongue. She realized with shock that she had met Mrs. Cohn before: two summers ago, on a meltingly hot day, when a group of women in plain, dark, throat-strangling dresses knocked at the Murphy door and urged Emma to deny her husband “intimate pleasures” if he would not deny himself “the pleasure of drink.” Emma had moved to shut the door but one woman, this woman, caught it with her foot and pushed a small package, wrapped in butcher paper, into Emma’s hand. At least deny him more children, she had said, in the same nasal, Brahman accent with which she had just mocked Story. Sweat had fallen from her nose, slid into her tight collar. How could Emma not have recognized her? You think he wants more children? she’d asked, before she kicked the woman’s foot out of the way, slammed the door, and pulled the curtains. She was instantly horrified by what she had confessed, and to a stranger. Worse, it was not Roland she had spoken for but herself. When the women knocked again, she ignored them. She was Emma Murphy, of Leverett Street, of Church of the Sacred Heart. She did not even know what the package contained. But she kept it, and opened it, and discovered inside a thing she had not known existed: one Mensinga brand rubber diaphragm and shocking, illustrated instructions for how to deploy it. She had used it, every time, ever since.

“Mrs. Cohn,” Story was saying. “Let me introduce you to Mrs. Emma Murphy. With your uncle ill, I thought you could use the help. Nursing him, I mean. So that your energies don’t have to be divided from your work. Divided? Diverted. You understand. Yes?” He clapped Emma on the back with comradely force.

Again, the flat smile dribbled back. “My uncle is a very private man,” said Mrs. Cohn. She appraised Emma quickly, top to bottom. Flyaway hair pinned plainly, Emma thought. Sweaty. Scrappy. Dull brown shoes. Mrs. Cohn gave no sign of recognizing her. Through the open doorway loomed a hallway crowded with impractical chairs and chests. A towering grandfather clock. A chandelier whose lower regions Emma could just make out, glittering seas of treasure she might be asked to dust. She was squeezed by a sudden hatred—she saw the design of Beatrice Cohn’s life with startling clarity. Mrs. Cohn had a hundred bedrooms and her snide accent and enough wealth to hire an entire city of nannies and she had dumped her child on Emma, shed her like an extra pair of shoes to charity, and then—then!—she had made a career out of “saving” poor women and children, a pitiful stab at redemption, even as Emma fed and bathed and dressed and disciplined and loved her daughter, until the day she had the gall to come along and chastise Emma for having too many kids. She had suffered that deadening dress but it was all a choice, a lark—Leverett Street must have seemed to her a ripe kind of underworld, and she its guardian. Emma tasted bile looking at the dress the woman wore today—lavishly flowered, silk so nice it must have been imported (even Emma could tell this), green and pink and black at ten o’clock in the morning. Her stance—feet flat, toes out, arms loose—struck Emma as a cold thing now. When Lucy stood like that, it was an offering, the kind of stillness that said, Come in. But on Mrs. Cohn, the effect was the opposite. You couldn’t trouble me, Mr. Stanton.

Emma had given so much for this woman. She had let her be the servant, envisioned her need being greater than Emma’s own. But Beatrice Cohn was a rich Jew. Beatrice Cohn needed nothing. She glanced at Emma—her little gift—as if Emma were barely there. She had forgotten that she had once been desperate, that someone had saved her. Someone! Emma was struck by an urge to hit her, followed by an understanding that Story’s money wasn’t all she wanted by being here. She wanted to trouble Beatrice Cohn’s smooth exterior, poke holes in the myth of her goodness. She wanted to remind her.

“I’m a good caretaker,” she heard herself say, in her most motherly, mollifying voice, “and very discreet. And of course,” her knees weakly curtsying, “you can always change your mind.”

Tears rose in Mrs. Cohn’s eyes, as shocking as if she’d begun to sob. Emma looked to Story, but he wore the same diligent grin he’d worn the whole time, oblivious. Emma had caused the tears, she knew. You can always change your mind. She had provoked a memory, needled, hurt the woman before she had even really tried. The effortlessness of it startled her. But Beatrice Cohn’s tears disappeared as abruptly as they had come on, simply dropped back behind her skin, water behind a wall. She smiled at Emma, her mouth closed but still a smile, disorienting Emma to such a degree that for a second she thought, She knows who I am.