Leaving Lucy Pear(51)

Albert asked the woman her name, and when she wouldn’t give it to him, he told her to leave. He decided she was probably lying, for one reason or another. Maybe she imagined Albert might pay her for the information, or maybe Bea’s mother, unhappy with the match for a reason she had not expressed, had sent the woman to dissuade him. But after she left, he sat there for a long time, thinking about what he did and didn’t know of Bea. He knew she was strange, stubborn, smart, rich, but that was about it. Since the Purim Ball months earlier, she had told him about Fainwright, but only in the haziest, most generic terms. So he wasn’t entirely shocked that Bea might have another secret. A baby, though. He tried, sitting in his office, to locate inside himself the kind of horror, or at least judgment, that he knew such a situation called for. But he wasn’t horrified. If anything, he found it a little comforting that her sin—if the story was true—was worse than his.

After the wedding, Bea took him up to Gloucester for the first time and Albert, seeing the pear trees, knew the nurse told the truth. Those trees were one of the reasons he didn’t like coming to Gloucester. The past was past—that was how Albert preferred to live. But the instant Emma shook her head like that, like a flushing bird, his heart began to struggle, and now, as she turned toward the house, saying, “Forgive me, I’ve got to get home,” Albert felt as if he were in a children’s book in which one woman had come back disguised as another. He turned away and walked quickly in the direction of the road, his towel swinging, trying not to see, in his peripheral vision, through the line of trees that divided the drive from the orchard, the clinging, greening pears. That was Bea’s story, not his. He still hoped to leave Bea, once she was feeling better. He concentrated on the water he was walking toward, how painful it would be at first, like jumping into nails, the cold taking his breath away, staking him where he was. Then he was in it, and it was in him, so cold, a narrow, stunning release. He swam to the first rocks, then, feeling strong, he swam to the second rocks. The water focused him, and he kept swimming, out of view of the Hirsch house, beyond Bea’s reach, and past the lip of the cove and around and on until, lifting his face to catch his breath, he saw the house Teddy had once told him about, a “sprawling, medieval, very homosexual place” with Chinese wallpaper and French moldings. Teddy had been to a party there once. You couldn’t see the house from the road—Albert had tried—but from the water, well, there it was. And here was Albert, numb as a brick and filled with an escapist’s courage, kicking the last few feet to the house’s swimming raft, hauling himself up the ladder, and sitting on the warm wood, panting, letting the sun warm him, in full view.





Twenty




Emma and the children were lost. A fog had dropped down, sudden and dense, blocking the moon. At first they had stayed to the edge of the river, but they must have swung into one of the creeks that looped and split and looped again and now they were spun around, nowhere. At least the tide was high, which allowed Emma and Liam to row the skiffs onto the marsh, where they rested in the tall grass, waiting, trying not to talk, the boats unnervingly echoey without any pears covering the floor. Emma knew she should have gotten them onto the marsh sooner, but she had been too frustrated to think clearly. When the fog fell, they had been within a quarter mile of tonight’s orchard on Thurston Point, their only destination on the Annisquam and—theoretically—their easiest row. They were only a few nights into their two-week harvest schedule, the moon just fatter than half, the air still, their best night for a smooth pick. Missing tonight would require a rearrangement, maybe a reduction in overall pears and profits. (Emma had already decided they would have to skip the Hirsch orchard this year, though she had not come up with a way to explain this to the children.) Worse, it would bring them closer to the day Roland walked up the road, saw the heaps of pears waiting to be pulped on the floor of the shack, and quite possibly called it all off.

The fog was cool, the children silent and good, but Emma’s insides jiggled and cried, Damn fog, damn fog! Not knowing when Roland would be home was like having a rope set around her neck that might or might not be yanked at any minute, dragging her back into her real life, even as that life started to feel like a dream and this one, the one she’d built in Roland’s absence, like the real one. A couple evenings ago Emma stood in the back of the Gilbert Club, wearing a broad hat to hide her face, and listened while Mrs. Cohn regaled the crowd with reasons to be afraid—indolence, criminals, all that was new in America, etc.—though how Josiah Story would protect them from all this wasn’t made entirely clear. Story followed Mrs. Cohn’s speech with a few words of thanks and a couple inarguable remarks, his hair slicked back, signs of Susannah all over him. With his handsome jaw, Emma thought, he could have stood there silently and the crowd would have cheered. Then he smiled a smile Emma knew wasn’t real, stepped down from the stage, and kissed Susannah, seated in the front row. Emma left before Susannah could turn around, before Emma could see whether she had started to show. She was glad for them, but jealous, too, a feeling that lowered her to a new depth of self-repugnance.

What surprised her, though, as she started the walk downtown to catch the bus that would take her home, was the realization that she hadn’t gone to see Susannah or Story as much as to see Mrs. Cohn. Emma hadn’t been able to imagine Mrs. Cohn giving a speech but there she was, her hair flattened even more extravagantly than Story’s, her face in unfamiliar relief, her eyes flashing behind spectacles. “Your vote is your opportunity not to inspire but to influence, not to be trampled on by popular trends but to trample upon them!” Her voice was powerful where it often warbled, her message singular where she hedged and circled. Not too long ago, Emma would have tossed this off as hypocrisy; she would have felt a cruel pride at having proved Mrs. Cohn’s falseness, for having seen her rocking on the bed, tearing at the locket, moaning uncontrollably. Instead, she found herself worrying for Mrs. Cohn, and for herself: her own slippery costumes, her lies. She’d taken the big hat off as soon as she was out of sight of the club, and spent more time than usual that night singing the children to sleep.