Leaving Lucy Pear(77)

But thirty minutes later, she had not returned. This made no sense. He had not seen her swimming away and he did not see her swimming back. He saw only cormorants, and seagulls, and a lone egret standing out in the salt hay.

He worked over the situation calmly at first, considering without believing. He had thought before of Susannah dying, not with malice but with curiosity, as he assumed all married people did from time to time. He had imagined his own sorrow. He had imagined in some detail the emptiness of the house, and the people who would come to her service, Caleb’s associates, the quarry workers, most of them people Susannah had met only once or twice, for Caleb had not kept his children anywhere long enough for them to learn how to make friends. He had imagined the Vermont black granite Caleb would choose for her headstone and the words Caleb would choose to be carved into it, and because this stirred up in Josiah the sort of irritation he was used to feeling toward his father-in-law on a daily basis, the exercise of considering Susannah’s dying had seemed a somewhat mundane activity, not at all alarming.

But twenty minutes later, when he still could not see her, he did not feel curious. Panic rummaged through his joints, his digits began to shake.

Susannah!

Josiah started to see her where she was not, in patches of sunlight on the water, in the scrubby, rustling trees out on the little island. He had killed her, he thought. It came to him plainly. Sure, he had told himself it was out of respect that he did not return to their bed. He told himself couples slept in separate beds all the time. But it wasn’t respect—she had asked him to come back. And it wasn’t to punish himself that he squeezed onto the twin bed each night, the bed meant for a child, across from another bed meant for another child, both beds equipped with hidden trundles, for the children’s friends. It was to punish her.

Susannah! His blood tried to leap up the creek, to fly out beyond the dock, over the river. He had blamed her, he realized, not only for her failure to bear children, and her unwillingness to give up, but for involving him in it, for choosing him in the first place. From the beginning he had been suspicious of her affections—he had felt mocked by the vehemence with which she’d pursued him, and by the seeming joy with which she’d upset the hopes of an entire cadre of young men, the college-educated, world-traveled sons of Caleb’s associates. He felt at least a little bit mocked by her all the time, he supposed, a state he survived by judging her. His judgments were so rampant and fundamental he had stopped noticing them. He judged her for wearing a swimming costume without a skirt, and for the fact that she had had it custom made. He judged her for her confidence, for the way she pointed, throwing her arm into it. He judged her for her long, shiny hair, hair he loved, and for her long, firm, blue-blood thighs, which he also loved. He judged her for the dock, all that teak stretching into the bay for a little swimming and one boat, and for the inboard tub her father kept tied to the dock. He judged her for the fact that her father didn’t know how to sail, which was especially absurd, since Josiah judged anyone who could sail, too.

He was sorry. He saw her winging, a cormorant, and he saw her standing, a stump at the edge of the far woods. His vision seemed at once to contract and grow stronger, so that he saw, at his feet, through a pool of water gathered in the pink crease of the rock, how the pink was made of white and gray and red, how the individual nubbles of white grew upon the gray and the gray upon the red. Susannah. He could not look up again to find her everywhere and nowhere. He had withheld affection from her, thinking it would toughen her up. He had feared if he loved her fully that her grief would become his own.

“Josiah!”

He scanned the water again, turning wildly, his sun-bleached eyes leaping with worms. He parsed out wind on the surface from a woman breaking through. Nothing.

“Joe!”

He felt mocked. He spun to face the trees. Had Caleb been watching him all this time?

“Over here, dummy!”

Susannah, out beyond the dock. Treading water. Waving. She was not coming from any direction he had expected her to come from. She must have swum straight across the bay, all the way to Crane Beach or Hog Island. More than a mile each way, and against the wind all the way back! Josiah started to laugh, a helpless, choking, hysterical laughter that heaved him forward, elbows to knees, then knees to rock. It took all his strength to lift his face to her, to lift an arm and wave. He was too pained by his laughter to call out. Susannah dropped under the water, stopping his heart. Then she was swimming toward him, her sharp, fine elbows pointing to the sky.





Thirty-two




It was Lucy’s idea that the children should use Mrs. Greely’s piano for their lessons. Emma did not want them going to Mrs. Cohn’s house, and besides, transporting them there would have required a coach, so a deal was struck: each Saturday Mrs. Cohn would come to Leverett Street and, on the Steinway Mr. Greely had given Mrs. Greely as a wedding gift, teach the children and Mrs. Greely how to play. The piano was a black-painted upright with vines carved into its front, through which you could see the hammers strike and retreat.

The first Saturday, Lucy sat beside Mrs. Greely on Mrs. Greely’s cat hair–covered sofa as Jeffrey made his first tentative pokes at the keys. She had seen Mrs. Greely only once, on her way to the woods one night. Mrs. Greely had been leaning out an upstairs window without any clothes on, her breasts swinging like sinkers. Lucy had run. But up close, apart from a jiggle in her chin and her long white hair, the woman did not appear crazy: her skin was smooth and pink, her cheeks almost plump, her eyes sparkling. After Jeffrey went Liam, then Janie, then Maggie, then Anne, and all the way down to Joshua, who giggled as Mrs. Cohn showed him how to hold his wrists. Lucy winced, waiting for him to be admonished. It was her turn next. But Mrs. Cohn giggled back, and Lucy, bewildered, jealous, went outside to the porch, where she found Emma sitting by herself on the top step, her back to the music, like a guard dog.