Anna Solomon - Leaving Lucy Pear

Emma had given so much for this woman. She had let her be the servant, envisioned her need being greater than Emma’s own. But Beatrice Cohn was a rich Jew. Beatrice Cohn needed nothing. She glanced at Emma — her little gift —as if Emma were barely there. She had forgotten that she had once been desperate, that someone had saved her. Someone! Emma was struck by an urge to hit her, followed by an understanding that Story’s money wasn’t all she wanted by being here. She wanted to trouble Beatrice Cohn’s smooth exterior, poke holes in the myth of her goodness. She wanted to remind her.

“I’m a good caretaker,” she heard herself say, in her most motherly, mollifying voice, “and very discreet. And of course,” her knees weakly curtsying, “you can always change your mind.”

Tears rose in Mrs. Cohn’s eyes, as shocking as if she’d begun to sob. Emma looked to Story, but he wore the same diligent grin he’d worn the whole time, oblivious. Emma had caused the tears, she knew. You can always change your mind. She had provoked a memory, needled, hurt the woman before she had even really tried. The effortlessness of it startled her. But Beatrice Cohn’s tears disappeared as abruptly as they had come on, simply dropped back behind her skin, water behind a wall. She smiled at Emma, her mouth closed but still a smile, disorienting Emma to such a degree that for a second she thought, She knows who I am.

“I don’t see why we can’t give it a try,” Mrs. Cohn said in her clipped, humorless way, unaware of her blatant rhyme, and now, as she and Story began to make arrangements, Emma saw her smile more clearly. There was no complicity in it, only charity. It was the smile she had worn on Emma’s stoop, the one she must have worn on all the stoops she visited where women with plain hair and brown shoes answered their flimsy doors. So Emma’s pity for Lucy’s mother had been fantasy, but hers for Emma was real. As she nodded at Story, her smile stuck, a studied, stale thing, and Emma saw the thought that must keep Beatrice Cohn’s heart going, despite its early shame. She was thinking, correctly: The poor woman, married to a drunk. She was surrendering to Story for Emma’s sake.

On Saturday mornings, Lillian Haven played bridge at the Draper House on Commonwealth Avenue with the College Club. She went to be among the Protestant women, to maintain her place among them, however tenuous it might be, to let their scents (understated), their voices (soft), their movements (slight), their entire atmosphere, seep in and inflect her. She went for the chamber music, too, especially the violin, and for the sandwiches: tiny triangles of cucumber or cream cheese or shrimp pressed between bread so impossibly white and airy she felt transformed (almost) just holding one. Pinkie out, mouth closed, she bit her tongue so as not to salivate.

She could have done without the bridge, or any other game. Games worked against Lillian because she always wanted too badly to win and was never able to hide this, and so the other women trusted her, the sole Jew, even less than they would have.

They all liked to win, of course. Their very presence in the Draper House was a testament to their having won the right to be there on Saturday mornings, for three hours, before the men arrived. They hired their own musicians — all male — and drank coffee, not tea. But this was a collective triumph. It was a point they’d made, like winning the right to vote, though Draper House had come later and seemed to many of them just as significant. Whereas the way Lillian sat forward in her leather club chair, cards pressed to her collarbone, lips drastically pursed, clearly had nothing to do with anyone but Lillian.

“I’ve had the thought”—Evelyn Sharp’s hand paused en route to laying down her next card—“we should bring our granddaughters one weekend. Show them what women can do, when we put our minds to it.”

Penelope Lockhart clucked. “What a lovely idea. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it myself.”

The others murmured in agreement. Lillian murmured, too, though she was looking at Evelyn’s hand, at the slender, tan fingers, the freckles she’d contracted sailing in her youth. She focused on Evelyn’s freckles to avoid the envy that slithered through her heart. Lillian had no granddaughter, nor any grandsons either. She cleared her throat, an almost but not quite involuntary nudge to Evelyn, who at last laid down her card with an infuriatingly opaque expression. Lillian flared her nostrils but Evelyn didn’t see; she and Penelope had begun to plot the granddaughters’ visit.

Lillian’s husband told her she was like a boot, laced too tightly — a foot didn’t have a chance, in or out. He told her if her parents had had the money to send her to Miss Winsor’s, or the English to get her a scholarship, then she wouldn’t have such a great need for friendship anyway. But Lillian hadn’t gone to Miss Winsor’s, or anywhere else. She’d pinned hems for her mother, kneeling at the feet of men and women who weren’t much better off than her parents, all of them shtetl folk in one way or another, all trying to pretend that Boston didn’t terrify them. Even then, Lillian was disdainful of the cheap, prickly fabrics. She had been eleven when her family came from Bialystok, had survived an eight-year desert of pinning and pubescence, until Henry found her standing outside Elizabeth Pimm’s School for Secretaries, her knuckles white from gripping the gate. He said he had seen her beauty right away — she would never succeed in seeing it herself — and she had seen a sturdy, sunny, whistling, blue-eyed Jew in a finely tailored suit, intent on saving her.

The violinist was rotten this morning, sad when the score called for plaintive — there was a difference, Lillian knew — whiny as a fiddle on the high notes. They were playing Beethoven’s Piano Trio in C-minor, opus 1, number 3, a piece Lillian’s daughter, Beatrice, had played impeccably at age fourteen, and not just in the technical sense. Beatrice had a feel for music — not quite virtuosic, they never called her that (which Lillian had thought for the best, believing that those sorts of girls scared off the good men), but gifted, certainly, that’s what the teachers at the conservatory said. Beatrice had heard music, understood it, made it bloom under her fingertips as naturally as if it were her real language, before English, before the scraps of Yiddish she had picked up from Lillian’s parents despite Lillian’s best efforts to make them speak English in the girl’s company, and, when that failed, to keep their visits short. Music was simpler, without accent or markings, nothing to be mispronounced or misunderstood because you were one sort of person and not another. That was its beauty, Lillian thought: the way a player, playing it, was both heard and obscured. This was freedom, it seemed to Lillian. This is what she heard when she listened to Beatrice play: her daughter was free.

Lillian had never told Beatrice any of this. She never told her that during Beatrice’s lessons at the conservatory, Lillian didn’t in fact go to Filene’s Department Store, as she claimed, but to the conservatory’s library, where she sat in one of the soundproof booths and listened to Mendelssohn, Liszt, Schumann, MacDowell. She studied the music; she taught herself how it worked. This is how she knew that the violinist was off, that the whole ensemble was decent but not worth half what the club paid for them.

Not that she would ever say so.

They had reached the finale now. The violin whined toward its crescendo, causing Lillian to chew her inner cheek, a habit she had developed as a teenager to avoid talking too much, or too loudly, or in too strong an accent, or to avoid unsavory expressions such as wincing, which is what she wanted to do now. A violin is a fiddle, she thought — it’s just a whiny old street fiddle in disguise. It was like Lillian herself. This morning she had tried on eight different dresses before choosing the Lanvin she wore now, but even so she felt all wrong, misaligned and frumpy. She tasted shrimp in her throat, still strange to her after all these years, like some coppery, forbidden salt. The women were staring at her. She held her breath with shame — at her second-class status, at Bea’s barrenness. “Bea is expecting!” she heard herself say. “Finally.” She waited, stunned at her lie. Then Penelope Lockhart began to clap, and the others followed, joyous in a way Lillian had never seen them. Pleased, yes, but this was joy! This was true feeling for Lillian. She experienced a sudden bloom of faith, a warm flower unfolding in her throat. It wasn’t too late. It might even be true, she thought. Perhaps the boldness of her declaration, her very optimism, would make it true.