Leaving Lucy Pear(28)

“I’ll go get a bucket.”

“Don’t trouble yourself.” Bea slipped her saucer out from under her cup and handed it to Emma. “Here.”

Emma looked at the saucer, then at Bea. She walked to the corner and placed it under the leak, taking some time to figure out how best to lower herself in the silk dress—bending at the waist first, then attempting a squat, and at last going down gently onto her knees. By the time she returned to the table, Bea had drunk the rest of her tea and poured them both some more Pinkham’s. She was starting to feel a little drifty. “Now. What do you want to know?”

Emma looked at her lap. She crossed her legs one way, then the other. Then she snatched up her teacup, swallowed what was left in two gulps, and met Bea’s eyes. “What is it you would like to tell me, Mrs. Cohn?”

“I . . .” Bea was unprepared. “I’m from Boston?”

“And why don’t you live there, with your husband?”

“Uncle Ira . . .”

“But don’t you miss him?”

“I do. Of course. But. Maybe you know. Your husband’s often gone, isn’t he?”

She poured, and Emma drank. “I miss him awfully,” Emma said without emotion. “I barely know how to live without him.” She made a briefly pitiful expression of forlornness before continuing: “And what about children, Mrs. Cohn? Did you never think to have any?”

“Albert didn’t want them. He thought it would interfere.”

Emma looked away, toward the pinging of the leak into the saucer. Bea knew she had turned into a woman about whom others say, She doesn’t like children and It’s hard to imagine her ever having been one. She used this to her professional advantage, setting herself apart from the maternal melodrama that had defined the cause for years, the mothers on their knees, singing and weeping. She wore to her talks a man’s tuxedo jacket and spectacles—though she didn’t need them—and ironed her hair back so severely people speculated she might have Indian blood in her. Bea had envisaged her costume, she’d sussed out her niche, at the very first meeting Lillian brought her to, after “the trouble” (with the baby) and “the episode” (with her nerves). Lillian had had to drag her there, saying it wasn’t too late for Bea to make something of herself and that it would do her good to think about someone else for a change. She’d had no idea how far Bea would take this.

Bea was a success. A public, well-armored success. Never mind that in the early spring, when she’d last been working in the office of the Boston chapter, she found herself unable to focus on what the women who came to her were saying. She was looking at their children. She was distracted by their beauty. Even children who wouldn’t grow into beautiful adults were somehow beautiful.

“In a way, I have children,” she heard herself say to Emma. “All the children whose fathers beat their mothers, or don’t come home at night, or can’t stay sober long enough to earn a decent wage. My work. I do it for them.”

Emma regarded her blankly for a moment, then she stood, carried her teacup over to the saucer on the floor, dumped the rainwater from the saucer into her cup, and put the saucer back. “I should check on your uncle,” she said curtly, her back still to Bea, her long, motherly back, and Bea felt so acutely aware of her own insignificance that she curled her fingers around her thumbs just to feel herself. Then, as often happened, she went toward the bad feeling instead of away from it. She said to Emma’s back, “I don’t even know if I’d have been a good mother.”

Emma opened the window near the card table and emptied her cup out into the yard. The room was loud with rain, then she shut the window and it was quiet again, except for the drip in the corner, which dripped faster now.

“Why do you say that?”

“Nerves. It’s nothing.”

Emma poured more Pinkham’s, drank hers, and looked skeptically at Bea. “I really should go check—”

“When I was very young, maybe seven or eight, I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet. And just as I was about to open the door, or just as it did open, in that moment when it went from being closed to being open, that point you can’t pinpoint where something solid becomes air—do you know what I mean?—in that moment, I saw all these green lights, flickering. And I was sure, suddenly, that there was this whole other life going on behind the door, a world, really, a tiny, very old forest, not a Massachusetts wood but a dripping, savage forest full of lizards and monkeys and lions and half-dressed people who were calling to me to join them.”

Bea paused. Emma watched her blankly, hands neatly folded in her lap. The only sign of her tipsiness was one pinkie, on her left hand, which kept jumping up, then lying back down. “And?”

“And.” Where had Bea been going? She had been talking to talk, to keep Emma from leaving. She hadn’t told this story to anyone. It wasn’t a story, really, just a fantasy she’d had as a kid. It had nothing to do with her nerves, or her balled-up feet. Yet talking about it she felt at ease, much as she had felt answering the doctors’ questions at Fainwright, telling them what she knew they wanted to hear. It was like talking about a subject that was at once her and not her at all—as if, the more she talked, the further the subject grew from her, making it easier to talk. “I was scared. But also tempted. I started waking up every night just to stand at the bathroom door and be scared. I waited for something to happen. I didn’t know if I was supposed to make it happen, by opening the door, or if the people were supposed to come for me—if the door might just disappear and I would be in the forest. I had this idea that my grandparents might be there, too, my mother’s parents, who were dead. I waited like that every night for a week, maybe longer, and then I wouldn’t be able to sleep afterward because I was too excited and still hadn’t relieved myself.”