Leaving Lucy Pear(29)

“And then you went in?”

“No. I never went in.”

Emma was quiet for a while. “Most children imagine things,” she said finally.

Bea looked out at the rain. She felt accused, but of what? Emma was already up again, making the trip to the saucer, but this time, when she returned, instead of dumping her cup out the window, she set it on the table, picked up the Pinkham’s, and drank from the bottle’s spout so delicately that when she set it down, Bea wondered if what she’d seen had really happened. Emma looked at Bea. “So your nerves,” she said gently. “They’re the reason you don’t have a child?”

Bea cringed at the tenderness in Emma’s voice. A moment ago, she had wanted Emma to believe her. She had even wanted to tell her something more, maybe something truer, but now Bea sensed a kind of greed in her, this fecund mother of nine, a ravenousness for any and all information. Bea had already said too much. She had exposed herself as Lillian had warned her never to do to the help. If Emma chose, she could make sure the whole North Shore knew by sunset that Beatrice Haven Cohn had a nervous disorder and regretted being childless.

Bea finished her Pinkham’s and set down her cup. She sat very straight. Just above the ground the rain was frenzied—it was impossible to tell which drops were going up and which down. She waited until she felt the vertebrae in her neck pop, then she said, in a calm, syrupy voice, “Thankfully, I’ve had the opportunity to give back in other ways. I’ve helped women and children less fortunate than myself and for that I’m grateful.” She smiled a smile she despised—her mother’s don’t-pretend-you-don’t-understand-me smile. “We all make compromises, as I’m sure you know.”

Emma didn’t smile back.

“I meant to ask,” Bea went on, “what you’ve done with the pillowcases. What kind of method you’ve devised. I find one of each pair, but not the match. It’s as if they’re off doing who knows what with the other missing ones. I can’t understand it.”

Emma’s pinkie jumped. “I’ll see what I can do, Mrs. Cohn.”

“Also, my spectacles. I don’t need them, which means I can see perfectly well that they’re not where I left them.” How she hated herself! “And there’s a bookend you must have dusted, a lion. Wherever you’ve taken it, I hope you’ll put it back with its mate.”

They were silent for a minute. Bea felt very lonely.

“That leak is getting worse, Mrs. Cohn.”

“I can hear.”

“Do you think . . .” Emma looked stricken.

“What?”

“Isn’t your uncle’s bathroom in that corner, upstairs?”

It took Bea a moment to understand. Then they ran together toward the stairs, their legs, weak with Pinkham’s, struggling to catch up.





Eleven




Emma sat low in the Duesenberg’s backseat as one of Story’s two drivers—the short one, a round-faced Italian called Buzzi whose woolly caterpillar eyebrows danced and kissed in the rearview mirror—told her about the latest craze to hit Rum Row: a purplish, syrupy concoction that originated in Jamaica, was shipped to the Bahamas for “modification,” then showed up on America’s shores in pearl-colored bottles marked SWEET RELEASE RUM.

It seemed a bad sign, that he thought her the kind of woman one could say such things to. Wasn’t she still Emma Murphy, of Leverett Street, of Church of the Sacred Heart? Maybe he knew about the perry press, but perry wasn’t brandy or whiskey and she and Story had made a straight deal for it. Buzzi wasn’t supposed to know about their other dealings. He had dropped her off this morning talking about baseball. Maybe for him nothing had changed since then—maybe the name of the drink didn’t even register as vulgar. But after Mrs. Cohn’s awful smile and her trilled, nasty compromises, everything Emma encountered seemed slightly skewed and salacious, as if she wore a pair of dark, twisted glasses. Buzzi winked at Emma and she had to hug herself she felt so exposed. She was still wearing Mrs. Cohn’s dress, a ridiculous getup for a nurse and now wet, too, at the shoulders from the rain as she’d run to the car—Mrs. Cohn had not offered her an umbrella—and at the sleeves from Mr. Hirsch’s bathwater.

He was fine. He had fallen asleep as the bath filled around him, but he was too large a man to drown like that. On his face was an expression of such pure, sleepy contentment that for a moment, she and Mrs. Cohn looked at each other, half drunk, and smiled. A simple moment passed. Then Emma got to work turning off the water and waking the man, who began talking at once, as if he’d only blinked, about how flood was better than fire, and did they know about the time Vera’s great-grandfather, Brink Bent III, too busy in love with a milkmaid, abandoned a candle on his windowsill? This was in 1870-something. He burned the house down but kept the help, and a couple years later the same girl bore him a bastard child whom Brink visited, every Sunday, in the old barn. The kid became one of Brink’s gardeners. Mr. Hirsch laughed. “I never heard that story,” Mrs. Cohn said with a far look in her eye, and Emma, who was doing her best to position herself between Mrs. Cohn and the sight of her uncle’s willy floating like pickleweed, who was thinking, Is there no end to these people’s woes? had to say, “A towel please.” Then she had to prod Mrs. Cohn to find her uncle’s clothes while Emma mopped the floor. The water had risen a full inch before clearing the threshold and running into the hallway, but when Emma showed Mrs. Cohn a cracked tile, Mrs. Cohn waved her off. She said she would call the man who took care of “that.”