Leaving Lucy Pear(30)

“You know a woman called Ameralda Norris?” Buzzi asked. He had moved on from the subject of the rum and was working through his docket of local news.

“No,” Emma said.

“This woman has been hiding bottles in her chimney soot and selling them outta her wood box. Very clever. Very brave. I think so. I really do. But I am only a lonely roly-poly stone carver driving a woman around. This is why I ask you. Do you agree? That this Ameralda Norris is clever and brave?”

Emma said nothing. The windshield wipers thumped.

“She got the ax last night. Four pigs. Took her to the station with another woman what’s been making wine in her cellar.” Buzzi chuckled. His dirty teeth filled the mirror, followed by his gleaming eyes. “I woulda like to know these women,” he said, and Emma shivered. She sank lower in the seat. “It’s not as if they’re dead,” she said.

Buzzi laughed again. “You are true, Mrs. Emma, you are true,” he said, beaming at her, and Emma’s cheeks burned at how wrong he was. She couldn’t help feeling that Mrs. Cohn had set her up for just this moment. The pillowcases, off doing who knows what . . . The lion, back with its mate . . . So Mrs. Cohn knew about Emma and Story or she had guessed or it was simply so obvious—Emma was so obviously a compromising woman—that Mrs. Cohn had never thought otherwise. It was as if all the years of Emma’s virtue since her bar days had been erased.

At the Washington Street railroad crossing, the car had to wait. A man peeked out from under his umbrella, called hello to Buzzi, then caught Emma’s eye in the backseat and ran on. Oh! Emma started to shake. Everyone knew this was Josiah Story’s car. They knew nurses did not wear silk dresses. (At the door Emma had asked for her dress and Mrs. Cohn said, as if she were giving Emma a car, “Oh no, you keep it, I’ll have your old one cleaned and get it back to you next week. My cousins will be in town, did I mention that? In the meantime feel free to wear this one as often as you like!”) People would suspect Emma wasn’t only being ferried back and forth from her place of employment. Roland would find out. How could she have been so stupid? Not only stupid. Impulsive. Profane. The rain on the roof grew louder. It was Story’s fault, Story with his broad forehead and his straight nose and his mouth never giving him away until the moment he kissed her. She had gone to him for money and offered him a commission in return and that was that, that was all she had intended, she was almost entirely certain that that had been all, yet now every few nights he picked her up in his Duesenberg, wrapped her legs around his waist, and turned from a plain man into an agonized, ecstatic one. It was thrilling, to see a public face rupture in front of you, for you. She would have to stop the whole business. Thank you very much but I’m not a tart so you can take back your jobs and your money, too. Thank you very much but we’ve managed, my husband and me, the money may come and go but the children have never been hungry. Thank you very much, Mr. Story. Please don’t come near my house again.

The train bellowed and was past. Emma had the urge to open the door and run but she was miles from home in a deafening rain wearing a nude-colored silk dress and if anything said poor tart more clearly than a woman running in a silk dress in the rain, well.

So Emma stayed where she was, and Buzzi drove, his voice muffled by the rain that flooded the windshield despite the steady beating of the wipers. They drove across the Goose Cove Bridge, past the glimpse of the Annisquam Yacht Club, the sleek sailboats rocking in the rain, their masts suddenly, unmistakably phallic, and Emma felt her determination grow. The next time Story came for her, she would tell him. She couldn’t simply be bought. It couldn’t be that simple.





Part Two





Twelve




The house changed when the Hirsch children arrived. First was Oakes—née Irving—the larger and louder of the boys, with his shy wife, their two children, a nanny, and a cook. Then Rose, alone as always, dragging a carpetbag so hideous it could be taken only as judgment on Oakes’s leather trunks. And last Julian, with his French and very pregnant wife, Brigitte, whose long sequined skirt (unlike anything heretofore seen on Eastern Point), when she first climbed from the car, caught the sun and flung rainbows that Oakes’s children tried to catch, their screams strikingly close in pitch to that of the whistle buoy.

The whistle buoy howled often and more shrilly. A wind had come up from the south.

Within a day, shoes and tennis rackets and hats and books and watches and wine bottles and also one gold locket were flung around the house. From the harbor, sailors noticed the windows wide open, towels spilling out the sills, music drifting on the breeze. Oakes had brought his phonograph. Julian’s wife played piano, badly. The children screamed with delight and despair. The cook tore the kitchen apart and put it back together. The nanny scowled at the dust and began to clean.

All this activity made the house’s fading stand out as it did not when Bea and Ira were alone. Wallpaper curled, paint crumbled, floors sagged at the corners. Bea and Ira themselves, the quiet routines they had built between them, the satisfactions of their bond and the safety of their fundamental distance, appeared dusty and frayed. Her cousins’ arrival made Bea feel at once invaded and like the invader, abruptly aware that this was in fact not her house. Ira was not her father. Once upon a time she and Julian might have married but that hadn’t happened and so she was—and would always be—Cousin Bea, the almost, the only child, the one they knew well and not at all, the one who had seemed to be going one place yet wound up in quite another, and because there had never been any discussion of the baby (even when she had been huge with it and living in their parents’ house) she was separated from them by yet another valley.