Anna Solomon - Leaving Lucy Pear

“And then you went in?”

“No. I never went in.”

Emma was quiet for a while. “Most children imagine things,” she said finally.

Bea looked out at the rain. She felt accused, but of what? Emma was already up again, making the trip to the saucer, but this time, when she returned, instead of dumping her cup out the window, she set it on the table, picked up the Pinkham’s, and drank from the bottle’s spout so delicately that when she set it down, Bea wondered if what she’d seen had really happened. Emma looked at Bea. “So your nerves,” she said gently. “They’re the reason you don’t have a child?”

Bea cringed at the tenderness in Emma’s voice. A moment ago, she had wanted Emma to believe her. She had even wanted to tell her something more, maybe something truer, but now Bea sensed a kind of greed in her, this fecund mother of nine, a ravenousness for any and all information. Bea had already said too much. She had exposed herself as Lillian had warned her never to do to the help. If Emma chose, she could make sure the whole North Shore knew by sunset that Beatrice Haven Cohn had a nervous disorder and regretted being childless.

Bea finished her Pinkham’s and set down her cup. She sat very straight. Just above the ground the rain was frenzied — it was impossible to tell which drops were going up and which down. She waited until she felt the vertebrae in her neck pop, then she said, in a calm, syrupy voice, “Thankfully, I’ve had the opportunity to give back in other ways. I’ve helped women and children less fortunate than myself and for that I’m grateful.” She smiled a smile she despised — her mother’s don’t-pretend-you-don’t-understand-me smile. “We all make compromises, as I’m sure you know.”

Emma didn’t smile back.

“I meant to ask,” Bea went on, “what you’ve done with the pillowcases. What kind of method you’ve devised. I find one of each pair, but not the match. It’s as if they’re off doing who knows what with the other missing ones. I can’t understand it.”

Emma’s pinkie jumped. “I’ll see what I can do, Mrs. Cohn.”

“Also, my spectacles. I don’t need them, which means I can see perfectly well that they’re not where I left them.” How she hated herself! “And there’s a bookend you must have dusted, a lion. Wherever you’ve taken it, I hope you’ll put it back with its mate.”

They were silent for a minute. Bea felt very lonely.

“That leak is getting worse, Mrs. Cohn.”

“I can hear.”

“Do you think…” Emma looked stricken.

“What?”

“Isn’t your uncle’s bathroom in that corner, upstairs?”

It took Bea a moment to understand. Then they ran together toward the stairs, their legs, weak with Pinkham’s, struggling to catch up.

Emma sat low in the Duesenberg’s backseat as one of Story’s two drivers — the short one, a round-faced Italian called Buzzi whose woolly caterpillar eyebrows danced and kissed in the rearview mirror — told her about the latest craze to hit Rum Row: a purplish, syrupy concoction that originated in Jamaica, was shipped to the Bahamas for “modification,” then showed up on America’s shores in pearl-colored bottles marked SWEET RELEASE RUM.

It seemed a bad sign, that he thought her the kind of woman one could say such things to. Wasn’t she still Emma Murphy, of Leverett Street, of Church of the Sacred Heart? Maybe he knew about the perry press, but perry wasn’t brandy or whiskey and she and Story had made a straight deal for it. Buzzi wasn’t supposed to know about their other dealings. He had dropped her off this morning talking about baseball. Maybe for him nothing had changed since then — maybe the name of the drink didn’t even register as vulgar. But after Mrs. Cohn’s awful smile and her trilled, nasty compromises, everything Emma encountered seemed slightly skewed and salacious, as if she wore a pair of dark, twisted glasses. Buzzi winked at Emma and she had to hug herself she felt so exposed. She was still wearing Mrs. Cohn’s dress, a ridiculous getup for a nurse and now wet, too, at the shoulders from the rain as she’d run to the car — Mrs. Cohn had not offered her an umbrella — and at the sleeves from Mr. Hirsch’s bathwater.

He was fine. He had fallen asleep as the bath filled around him, but he was too large a man to drown like that. On his face was an expression of such pure, sleepy contentment that for a moment, she and Mrs. Cohn looked at each other, half drunk, and smiled. A simple moment passed. Then Emma got to work turning off the water and waking the man, who began talking at once, as if he’d only blinked, about how flood was better than fire, and did they know about the time Vera’s great-grandfather, Brink Bent III, too busy in love with a milkmaid, abandoned a candle on his windowsill? This was in 1870-something. He burned the house down but kept the help, and a couple years later the same girl bore him a bastard child whom Brink visited, every Sunday, in the old barn. The kid became one of Brink’s gardeners. Mr. Hirsch laughed. “I never heard that story,” Mrs. Cohn said with a far look in her eye, and Emma, who was doing her best to position herself between Mrs. Cohn and the sight of her uncle’s willy floating like pickleweed, who was thinking, Is there no end to these people’s woes? had to say, “A towel please.” Then she had to prod Mrs. Cohn to find her uncle’s clothes while Emma mopped the floor. The water had risen a full inch before clearing the threshold and running into the hallway, but when Emma showed Mrs. Cohn a cracked tile, Mrs. Cohn waved her off. She said she would call the man who took care of “that.”

“You know a woman called Ameralda Norris?” Buzzi asked. He had moved on from the subject of the rum and was working through his docket of local news.

“No,” Emma said.

“This woman has been hiding bottles in her chimney soot and selling them outta her wood box. Very clever. Very brave. I think so. I really do. But I am only a lonely roly-poly stone carver driving a woman around. This is why I ask you . Do you agree? That this Ameralda Norris is clever and brave?”

Emma said nothing. The windshield wipers thumped.

“She got the ax last night. Four pigs. Took her to the station with another woman what’s been making wine in her cellar.” Buzzi chuckled. His dirty teeth filled the mirror, followed by his gleaming eyes. “I woulda like to know these women,” he said, and Emma shivered. She sank lower in the seat. “It’s not as if they’re dead,” she said.

Buzzi laughed again. “You are true, Mrs. Emma, you are true,” he said, beaming at her, and Emma’s cheeks burned at how wrong he was. She couldn’t help feeling that Mrs. Cohn had set her up for just this moment. The pillowcases, off doing who knows what… The lion, back with its mate… So Mrs. Cohn knew about Emma and Story or she had guessed or it was simply so obvious — Emma was so obviously a compromising woman — that Mrs. Cohn had never thought otherwise. It was as if all the years of Emma’s virtue since her bar days had been erased.

At the Washington Street railroad crossing, the car had to wait. A man peeked out from under his umbrella, called hello to Buzzi, then caught Emma’s eye in the backseat and ran on. Oh! Emma started to shake. Everyone knew this was Josiah Story’s car. They knew nurses did not wear silk dresses. (At the door Emma had asked for her dress and Mrs. Cohn said, as if she were giving Emma a car, “Oh no, you keep it, I’ll have your old one cleaned and get it back to you next week. My cousins will be in town, did I mention that? In the meantime feel free to wear this one as often as you like!”) People would suspect Emma wasn’t only being ferried back and forth from her place of employment. Roland would find out. How could she have been so stupid? Not only stupid. Impulsive. Profane. The rain on the roof grew louder. It was Story’s fault, Story with his broad forehead and his straight nose and his mouth never giving him away until the moment he kissed her. She had gone to him for money and offered him a commission in return and that was that, that was all she had intended, she was almost entirely certain that that had been all, yet now every few nights he picked her up in his Duesenberg, wrapped her legs around his waist, and turned from a plain man into an agonized, ecstatic one. It was thrilling, to see a public face rupture in front of you, for you. She would have to stop the whole business. Thank you very much but I’m not a tart so you can take back your jobs and your money, too. Thank you very much but we’ve managed, my husband and me, the money may come and go but the children have never been hungry. Thank you very much, Mr. Story. Please don’t come near my house again.