Leaving Lucy Pear(88)

Lucy waited on the ladder. Emma didn’t have to talk to him, of course. She could just leave. Women did this. They left. But Emma was scared. She was scared of what she knew people would think. Leaving was sin enough—A woman might as well run naked through a butcher shop, Emma’s mother used to say—but to leave the poor, maimed fisherman? She was scared, too, about the chimney catching fire. How would Roland put it out? How would he fetch wood in the first place? She worried about his loneliness. She worried about his dying from it, worried he was the sort of man who might, who fought people off but needed them to survive. She loved him, though the love was deformed now, much of it piled up behind her, though she felt hate for him, too. She envied Josiah, going back to stay with Susannah with such apparent confidence. That was how he’d phrased it, coldly: going back to stay. As if otherwise Emma might stand around waiting for him to defect again. No. She had gone and confessed. At last. Then she had knelt on the bare wood floor of her bedroom and done what Roland wanted her to. That was not how the priest phrased her penance—Go tell your husband you love him, he’d said—but it was Emma’s interpretation.

“I don’t know,” she said at last. “I don’t know if the perry will work.”

Lucy, on the ladder, looked at her with impatience. “I’m sorry,” Emma said, but Lucy was already disappearing through the hole above. Emma followed her up and out into the yard, where the breeze coming up off the cove bit through her dress.

“Lucy!” cried Joshua, running out of the house. “Don’t go to school. Stay with me.” He jumped up and down, tugging on Lucy’s hand, begging her, “Don’t go!” A fresh fear spun through Emma. She dressed Joshua, and bathed him when Lucy didn’t. She had not seen marks on him, but was there something she missed? She had seen nothing of what Roland had done to Lucy. When he tickled and squeezed the other children, did he hurt them in some way, too? She had thought it sweet—before the accident, he had not touched them at all. She had gone on pretending it was sweet even after seeing Lucy’s leg—she refused to watch him obsessively, refused to suspect. Who could live like that? But what if she was wrong? What if her delusion ran that deep? Nausea rolled through her. They would have to leave, she understood—it was the only way forward, the only way to live right again. She cradled her wrist, though it was fully healed now, the cradling a habit that would break of its own accord once she and the children were gone from him. She did not think to worry about herself. Other people would do that, later: her children, Sven and his wife, Mr. Hirsch. Mrs. Cohn, though she did not offend Emma by saying it. The men whose coffee she poured in a different shop, in Rockport, where she and the children were living—in Juliet’s house—by the time summer came around again. The women in her new parish. Everyone worried that Emma was lonely. And she was, sometimes. Sometimes she woke to find that she was groping herself—she woke from dreams of Roland, or Josiah, or another man, a stranger. But that kind of loneliness lived in one corner. Her days were filled with people. She did not often have time to dwell. And when she did, she found that her thoughts were not unhappy. She had a great capacity, inherited from her father and passed on to Lucy, for close, consuming observation. This was a discovery, once she broke through her pride and asked her own daughter to take her and the children in; and later, when she found a place she could afford on her wages alone; and later still, when her children did not need her so acutely: how long and with what pleasure Emma could sit watching a bird building a nest or a flag snapping in a wind or other people’s children running in circles.

“Play with me, please?” begged Joshua.

“I’ve got to go to school, boy-boy.”

Joshua’s face crumpled as Lucy patted his head. He whimpered, “Don’t go.”

Lucy looked to Emma for help, but Emma shrugged. She wanted Lucy to stay, too. She could take them both to work with her. She could set them up in the sunny part of the room, buy them pencils and paper at the penny store, watch them draw as she worked.

Lucy squatted next to the boy. “I’ll be back. Cheer up. Be good. Take care of Mummy. If you’re good, I’ll help you make a Halloween costume tonight.”

But she didn’t go. It was as if her will had deflated, as if she’d used it all up in the cellar, shutting the bungholes. She took Joshua’s hand and walked with him at his slow, tottery pace to the coffee shop and sat with him in the sunny half of the room and drew and took him down to the cove and brought him back and spent the rest of the day where Emma could see them, just as Emma had hoped.





Thirty-seven




By the middle of November, Bea had gained twelve pounds. When her cycle came, she bled heavily. She had forgotten how nearly black the blood could be, forgotten amid the meek, irregular dribbling of the past decade that there was something reassuring about a dark, monthly, soil-smelling exodus. She had forgotten her body. It returned to her now, flesh at her hips, her chin. Proof. Padding. Shelter. She slept more deeply. Her face took on color. She hadn’t realized how unreal she had often felt, how close to breaking or floating away. She started pushing Ira down to Mother Rock once a day—he could walk again, but not for any distance—and her legs and arms grew strong.

On the weekends, Albert came to do the pushing, and to sleep with Lyman Knapp. He was in the process of selling the house on Acorn Street, and looking for an apartment. A separation, they told their parents, trying to ease them in, but the realtor’s assistant had snitched to the Herald and so it was out. Bea was surprised to find herself temporarily devastated, though about what exactly she could not say. Lyman Knapp. The house. The hissed public censure. Albert. It was almost entirely Albert. She could still point to the moment she began to love him: he said something like, If that’s politics, you must be a fine actress, and proceeded to look at her, and look and look, with his startling blue eyes and not a hint of judgment. They had both been in hiding. Bea had seized on this as fair, as if they were nothing more than parts in a mathematical equation. She had thought it right that they should know each other so baldly, good that they had protected themselves against surprises. But for a few days after the Herald ran its piece, she felt the full tragedy of their pairing—regret that it had been necessary, grief that it was now over. As if to prove the point, it was Albert who drew her out, making her laugh with stories about his colleagues at the bank, who had immediately set to work locating single women they wished they were free to f*ck. Albert politely declined. Eventually, they would draw whatever conclusions they drew and let him be. One boss, a few years later, would close the door to his office and ask Albert outright, “Are you a faggot?” and Albert, mystifying, enraging, and humiliating the man all at once—all this he reported to Bea—would say, “As much of one as you imagine me to be.”