Leaving Lucy Pear(5)
“Poor you.”
“I need a hand on this ladder.”
“Give ’im a hand—let’s go!”
Small mountains of pears began to slide toward the gap. Bea started to cry.
A figure fell off from the group, and another—the woman with the child on her back, and the boy who had found the baby. They walked toward the bundle with high, quiet steps. The woman picked it up.
“Can we call it Pear?” the child asked.
“Hush.”
The woman dropped her face into the blanket, as if sniffing. Bea thought she was trying to decide, but the woman was already decided. She knew the story of Ruth, even if Bea didn’t. A second later, she and the boy and the child and the baby were gone, following the others through the gap and disappearing into the woods. Soon Bea heard the sound of boats being dragged off the rocks. The high, whining creak of oars in their locks, moving offshore. Another whine, coming from Bea herself, a piercing, involuntary sound running from her stomach to her throat: all she could do not to wail. She clamped a hand to her mouth, then vomited into her cupped palm as quietly as she could.
One
1927
The Stanton Quarry was 230 feet deep and half a mile long, the largest granite operation on Cape Ann, and since the woods around it had been cleared to make room for derricks and cutting sheds and garymanders and the locomotive that hauled the rock down to the piers, a man could now stand in the corner office of the Stanton Granite Company headquarters and see the wide, whitecapped sweep of the Ipswich Bay. On the clearest days, he could see all the way to New Hampshire or, if he squeezed himself against the office’s western wall and looked due north, as Josiah Story did now—his cheek taking on the shape of the wood paneling—the whaleish hump of Mount Agamenticus in Maine. Josiah waited for revelation. On his desk sat an optimistically thick stack of paper, all blank except for one sentence: I did not come to Gloucester, I was born here, just like my dear wife Susannah was born here, and just how our children and grandchildren will be.
Maybe it wasn’t a very good sentence, as far as sentences went. Josiah didn’t worry about that. Susannah would fix his grammar, smooth any awkwardness, tweeze out just enough but not too much of his townie roots, clean him up, as she always did. And he liked the idea behind the sentence. He thought it established not only his nativity but his inescapable devotion to the place, and he guessed that was important when a person was running for mayor. The trouble came when he tried to speak the sentence aloud and his tongue went limp on the word “children,” which he and Susannah had been trying and failing to produce for the entire seven years and three months they had been married. He knew the numbers because Susannah kept track in a small leather journal and updated him on their progress, or rather lack thereof, each month. She might have kept track of the days and hours, too, though if so, she spared him that. Josiah did want children. The thought of their smooth heads running around provoked a drumming in his chest—he liked the idea of two, one boy, one girl, disturbing the order of his and Susannah’s house. But he also liked order. He liked quiet, it turned out, a discovery since leaving his clamorous childhood home. He didn’t mourn, as Susannah did, on a daily basis, the dreamed children’s absence. But then he tried that first sentence and his mouth wouldn’t do it—his tongue simply stopped, a flaccid rebellion. The children flung themselves at him with their sweet-smelling hair and noisemaking and he felt at once a crush of grief and the cold humiliation of having told a lie.
“Sir?” Through the door came the muffled plea of Josiah’s assistant, who was already being bombarded by men waiting to see Josiah. It was Friday morning. By ten o’clock, the line might be twenty deep. He had arrived hours ago, when the sky was still pink, determined to finish the speech before anyone arrived.
“Just a minute,” Josiah called. He removed his face from the wall, straightened his jacket, and, to bolster himself, took a minute to regard the activity down in the pit. From this height, a ten-foot slab of granite rising through the air on dog hooks appeared light as a child’s toy. The ladders looked like matchsticks, the men on the ledges like ants, their movements—swinging hammers, setting drills, maneuvering hooks—barely visible. Here you are, Josiah told himself. Running the quarry. Running for mayor. Last winter, his father-in-law, Caleb Stanton, had retired from the company’s day-to-day business and put Josiah in charge and here he was, in Caleb’s warm, leather-scented office, entrusted with Friday Favors, a tradition begun years ago by Caleb to enhance the company’s reputation. Caleb, it seemed, had created or invented almost everything in Josiah’s life, including his mayoral aspirations, for Caleb himself was too old now to run, and besides, too many powerful people envied him. Josiah, the rookie, the native-born son-in-law, was the perfect foil. So what if he had left school after eighth grade, like most of his friends? He had spent more time in front of the bathroom mirror than his mother and three brothers combined, regarding his strong chin and sky blue eyes, the both-feet-planted-shoulders-back bearing he had never been taught, and now a muckraker at the Gloucester Daily Times had dug up proof that Josiah’s opponent in the mayoral race, Frankie Fiumara, once attended a rally for the socialist Eugene Debs. That Fiumara was Italian didn’t help him. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were once again dominating the news: the findings of Governor Fuller’s Lowell commission were soon due, the public waiting to see if the shoemaker and fishmonger would finally be executed. It had been seven years since their first trial for the murder of a payroll clerk and his guard in South Braintree, and six since their second, and still, though no evidence linked them clearly to the crime, the anarchists remained in prison. Around the world, people had risen up in protest. They had marched, gone on strike, bombed American embassies, named streets and cigarettes after the men. The cry was foul play: Sacco and Vanzetti had been tried for their politics and convicted for their foreignness. All this might have worked in Fiumara’s favor—Gloucester was full of Italians. But there were more Irish, and plenty of blue-blood WASPs, and still more people who, though it didn’t make them proud, simply didn’t like the look of the two wops. And so Josiah Story, boy from Mason Street, was likely to be mayor, if he could just give a few decent speeches and rally the women’s vote.