Leaving Lucy Pear(2)
But really, he said, Catholics. A poor Irish family who had found a market for pears. And Bea believed him, maybe because she had to. She didn’t know any Catholics. Catholics weren’t Jews, but they were like Jews in that they weren’t Protestants. So there was that. And back home Bea had seen the Irish children walking in packs through the common and envied them, even the poor ones, the company. There looked to be a certain freedom in being one of many: the right to go unnoticed, unattended. Neglect, Bea’s mother would call it, she who had rarely let Bea out of her sight.
Until she had, quite suddenly.
And look at the consequences.
Bea steadied herself against one of the near trees, a tall, straight pine so bare of low branches it entered her consciousness as more human than plant. An idea came to her of sliding down its rough side, lying down on the cushion its needles made beneath her feet, and falling back to sleep with the baby in her arms.
The infant snorted. Bea wouldn’t have guessed that babies snorted but this one snorted all the time, followed by a tremulous sigh. The sigh came. Bea shifted the infant to her shoulder. High above them, a branch creaked and shifted, making way for moonlight. Already its angle had changed. If Bea waited for the people to arrive, she would lose her resolve, or she would keep it and be seen and the people would tell Uncle Ira and he would tell her parents and her mother would make her give the baby to the awful woman who had come last month from the Orphanage for Jewish Children, reeking of camphor and assuring Aunt Vera and Uncle Ira that she did not believe in spoiling, kissing, or otherwise unnecessarily touching babies.
She began to walk. Her neck was wet with the baby’s breath and to counter the sensation, and whatever emotion it might lead to, she did what she had trained herself to do over the months of carrying the baby, as rigorously as she had ever trained herself to play a Beethoven sonata or pen a thank-you card in the microscopic, finger-cramping script that satisfied her mother: she thought of other things. The pear trees, which she could see more clearly with every step. They were Braffets, she knew, not because she understood anything about fruit or trees but because Uncle Ira talked about his pears all the time, as though they were the children he wished he’d had, braver and brighter than his own. Have you seen the Braffets, battling the frost? Look at those Braffets, blossoming like little gods. Who knew I would be so lucky to have such Braffets. Thirty-one years ago, he had imported the trees from Sussex, England, paying their fare not in cargo but in third class, where each one, wrapped in burlap, its roots watered daily by a hired boy, occupied its own bunk. The Braffets are in the orchard, fermenting the revolution. Bea tightened her hold on the bundle of baby and shawl. She had reached the stone wall that marked the orchard’s western boundary. She squinted into the dark, straining to hear the first sounds of feet and wheelbarrows, but heard nothing apart from the lazy slap of water on the rocky beach down below. The pears waited on their branches. Vera’s exotic fish swam silently in their little pond. The infant made no sound but Bea covered its mouth with her hand anyway, half knowing its lips would move to suck her palm, half pretending to be surprised at the warm, wet mouth as it burrowed and groped. Braffet, she said in her mind. Braffet pears were named after a duchess. Braffet pears appear on the branch a bold yellow and turn green when ripe. Braffet pears are often marred by rough brownish gray patches but these do not affect their taste or texture beneath the skin. All this Bea recited silently as she unbuttoned her dress to her waist, shrugged one shoulder from its sleeve, and lowered the waking infant so it could suck.
She gasped as the mouth clamped onto her nipple, but the pain was a distraction, too, welcome in its own way. If the choice had been up to the Orphanage for Jewish Children woman, the infant would have been taken away before Bea even woke up. Aunt Vera was the one who noticed Bea, during the woman’s visit, turn bone white. Vera was weak but she had summoned the stick-straight posture she had been taught at Miss Winsor’s School and argued for a two-week delay. They would hire a wet nurse, she promised. And maybe because Vera was so ill, or so rich, or both, the woman relented. But then Aunt Vera hired a regular nurse and shocked Bea by putting the baby to her breast and Bea had gone along, in part because it justified her holding the baby, which she was desperate if terrified to do, and in part because the whole business was so uncomfortable it called up in her a resentment and resenting the baby had been a relief.
As the sucking went on, the pain quieted. She leaned forward, trying to make out the gap in the honeysuckle that was the lower entrance to the orchard. Still she saw no one. She heard nothing new. The baby pulled at her breast until the pain abandoned her entirely, leaving behind a fluttering twinge that was recognizable to Bea, despite herself, as pleasure.
? ? ?
A crack sounded from beyond the gap. Bea held her breath. She heard no footsteps on the road, no wheels scraping the dirt ruts. She had assumed they would push wheelbarrows for the pears, but the scuffling she heard now came from the small woods across the road. Beyond the woods were the rocks that led down to the harbor. So they had come by boat. Bea stuck a finger in the infant’s mouth, dislodged it from her breast, and started to walk toward the pear trees. The infant wailed. Bea stuck her finger back in its mouth and the baby sucked again, quiet, but the echo of its cry winged out over the trees. Bea’s blood began to pound. She worked to breathe, even to swallow, but her throat was full of the pounding; each step she took through the tall grass exploded in her ears. She looked back at the house. Vera’s hearing was weak and Uncle Ira slept like a stone, but the nurse was always half awake, it seemed, springing catlike when the infant so much as stirred.