Anna Solomon - Leaving Lucy Pear

He was talking to her now. He could see her in the backseat of Josiah Story’s car, flying past hedges. She had been a bad wife. Vile. And now — what kind of mother was she? What was she doing? When Lucy was a baby, a woman had hovered at the fringes of Emma’s thoughts, without face or name, a receptacle for whatever Emma might feel for her at any given moment. Pity. Incomprehension. Disgust. Pity again. She even felt guilty toward her, as if Emma had stolen Lucy against the woman’s wishes. Her guilt, perhaps, helped explain why the Murphys had not found another orchard for their pears. Maybe, though her heart did not stop clanging the entire time they picked, Emma felt she had to give the woman the chance to take Lucy back. Maybe, too, each time the woman didn’t come, Lucy became more irrevocably, rightfully, hers.

She made her a servant of the house, rather than a daughter. Always Emma returned to pity, settled there — it was easiest on her heart. Then, for years, the shadow woman had retreated, replaced by the reality of Lucy, her ever-growing body, the habits of her tenderness, her deer-quiet footsteps in the house. Lucy belonged there as firmly as any threshold or drawer. They were so far from the beginning now. Why risk going back? What was wrong with Emma that she could not say, Turn the car around, I’ve changed my mind ? But the car was slowing and turning up a long, sycamore-lined drive, and Emma saw, up ahead, the old gravel path the Murphys tiptoed across each year. The Duesenberg sailed it without pause, knowing nothing of the sharp pebbles and ruts. Through the sycamores, Emma saw the pear trees, in full flower. She wiped her hands on her skirt. Despite her stillness and the mild day, she was sticking to the seat; creeks of sweat ran from her underarms. The house came into view, the first time she had seen it in daylight: mortar flaking, hedges mushrooming, shutters missing slats, an ailing monument of stone. A woman’s figure appeared at an upstairs window and Emma’s fear cracked open.

“Tah-dah!”

A poem came to Emma, one her mother had sung to her and her siblings to scare them off straying:

Come away, O human child

To the waters and the wild.

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

“Emma?”

She had not sung it to her own children. It was too sad.

“Here we are!”

The figure was gone from the window. Story’s eyes in the rearview mirror twitched with nerves. He had trimmed his hair, Emma realized. Or more likely Susannah had trimmed it. His nape was visible: a dark, clean point.

“Did you tell her”—Emma’s voice a husk until she cleared it, began again—“Did you tell her we were coming?”

“I told her I was coming. With a little gift.”

“A gift?”

“I don’t know what I said. A token of my appreciation for all her hard, important work. And so on.”

Emma’s annoyance was swamped by dread as the front door to the house opened and the figure from upstairs stepped out into the sunlight. Sweat pooled in Emma’s elbow cracks and between her thighs. Even from a distance, the resemblance was unmistakable. There was Lucy’s formidable brow, her dark, springy hair, her stance: feet flat, toes out, arms loose at her sides. Lucy had been the only person Emma knew to stand comfortably like that. Not an hour ago, Lucy had stood like that in the yard, her hammer cocked in one hand, her head cocked to one side, watching as Emma ducked into the Duesenberg. Emma had not told the children where she would be working, only that the new job was on the other side of town.

“Emma? She’s waiting.”

“You might have loaned me some boats,” she said. “Instead of all this. We could use a couple boats.” She swiped at her forehead with her forearm, wiped her forearm with her other hand, tried to wring her hand out, with little success. Story was too nervous to notice, she thought, but the woman would, the real woman with a face and a name who was staring down at the car now, waiting. Beatrice Cohn. Emma wished her back into facelessness even as she felt herself rising from the car. She felt her legs lift, one after the other, up the stone path, felt her fear slammed aside by a greater force. Now that she was here, her need to see Lucy’s mother, to know, was like a rope pulling her by the neck — she was nearly foaming with it. She must look preposterous, she thought, her gait halting, undecided. She did not know that from where Beatrice Cohn stood, she appeared perfectly natural, and of a piece. She looked like a poor, lovely, heavily perspiring Irishwoman treading cautiously in a place she had never been before.

“Good morning, Mrs. Cohn,” called Story, his voice overbright. “I’m ten minutes early. I like to be on time, always — out of respect. For your time, I mean. I hope we’re not troubling you.”

Beatrice Cohn smiled flatly, not even glancing at Emma. Lucy’s grace was drowned in the woman’s skinniness. She was all angles. “You couldn’t trouble me, Mr…. Forgive me. It’s Stanton, isn’t it?” she asked, and as Story coughed up a good-natured chuckle, Emma nearly bit her tongue. She realized with shock that she had met Mrs. Cohn before: two summers ago, on a meltingly hot day, when a group of women in plain, dark, throat-strangling dresses knocked at the Murphy door and urged Emma to deny her husband “intimate pleasures” if he would not deny himself “the pleasure of drink.” Emma had moved to shut the door but one woman, this woman, caught it with her foot and pushed a small package, wrapped in butcher paper, into Emma’s hand. At least deny him more children, she had said, in the same nasal, Brahman accent with which she had just mocked Story. Sweat had fallen from her nose, slid into her tight collar. How could Emma not have recognized her? You think he wants more children? she’d asked, before she kicked the woman’s foot out of the way, slammed the door, and pulled the curtains. She was instantly horrified by what she had confessed, and to a stranger. Worse, it was not Roland she had spoken for but herself. When the women knocked again, she ignored them. She was Emma Murphy, of Leverett Street, of Church of the Sacred Heart. She did not even know what the package contained. But she kept it, and opened it, and discovered inside a thing she had not known existed: one Mensinga brand rubber diaphragm and shocking, illustrated instructions for how to deploy it. She had used it, every time, ever since.

“Mrs. Cohn,” Story was saying. “Let me introduce you to Mrs. Emma Murphy. With your uncle ill, I thought you could use the help. Nursing him, I mean. So that your energies don’t have to be divided from your work. Divided? Diverted. You understand. Yes?” He clapped Emma on the back with comradely force.

Again, the flat smile dribbled back. “My uncle is a very private man,” said Mrs. Cohn. She appraised Emma quickly, top to bottom. Flyaway hair pinned plainly, Emma thought. Sweaty. Scrappy. Dull brown shoes. Mrs. Cohn gave no sign of recognizing her. Through the open doorway loomed a hallway crowded with impractical chairs and chests. A towering grandfather clock. A chandelier whose lower regions Emma could just make out, glittering seas of treasure she might be asked to dust. She was squeezed by a sudden hatred — she saw the design of Beatrice Cohn’s life with startling clarity. Mrs. Cohn had a hundred bedrooms and her snide accent and enough wealth to hire an entire city of nannies and she had dumped her child on Emma, shed her like an extra pair of shoes to charity, and then — then! — she had made a career out of “saving” poor women and children, a pitiful stab at redemption, even as Emma fed and bathed and dressed and disciplined and loved her daughter, until the day she had the gall to come along and chastise Emma for having too many kids. She had suffered that deadening dress but it was all a choice, a lark — Leverett Street must have seemed to her a ripe kind of underworld, and she its guardian. Emma tasted bile looking at the dress the woman wore today — lavishly flowered, silk so nice it must have been imported (even Emma could tell this), green and pink and black at ten o’clock in the morning. Her stance — feet flat, toes out, arms loose — struck Emma as a cold thing now. When Lucy stood like that, it was an offering, the kind of stillness that said, Come in. But on Mrs. Cohn, the effect was the opposite. You couldn’t trouble me, Mr. Stanton.