Anna Solomon - Leaving Lucy Pear

“Are you going through?”

Emma looked past him, in the direction of the cut, where the river let out into the harbor, or the harbor squeezed into the river, depending on the tide.

“I don’t know.” Josiah spoke weakly, the unmoving oars heavy in his hands, his feet still spasming from gripping the floor of his father’s boat. The boat was his gift to Emma, to apologize for disappearing — he hadn’t been to Leverett Street for nearly two weeks — and also, most urgently, to distract himself from Susannah, who was pregnant, and hopeful, and, Josiah felt sure, bound to miscarry again. The boat was meant to affirm his power, showcase his munificence — it was something he knew he could succeed at. Or he’d thought he could. He had forgotten about his fear of the water, forgotten what it was to float above the dark surface, unable to see underneath, the jellies and fins and claws and kelp, forgotten how his own soul seemed to crouch down there, ready to jump. Raaaow! And how queasy it made him, as if cut from his roots, how there was no middle, no almost: two feet from shore and you were adrift. There was a reason Josiah had followed his father into the shop while his brothers took up fishing, but he hadn’t been on a boat in years and had managed to forget. So here he was, on the Annisquam in the middle of the night, attempting to row out against an incoming tide, trying and utterly failing to impress Emma, who exuded a kind of rage as she sat. He had been giddy imagining himself and Emma in the boat — the boat she had asked for, a boat for catching pears, a pearing boat! — gliding soundlessly across the black water, an Indian warrior and his princess, or something like that. He had presented the boat with a patrician sweep of his arm, offering to row her all the way out to the harbor, but as soon as he started rowing, he’d slammed into a moored dory, tangled an oar in a lobster line, and been cowardly enough to blame both on his father’s poor upkeep of the boat. Emma hadn’t even stuck out an arm to fend off the dory, and now she stewed silently, her eyes bled of their strange green color in the dark, and between their boat and the cut was a black stretch of water pushing them back, or in Josiah’s case forward, and this he’d also forgotten: the general awkwardness of rowing, how everything ahead of you is at your back and everything behind you at your front, then and now, here and then, a baffling arrangement. The cramp in his toes left an ache. A firework whistled somewhere, practice for the holiday. It was the first of July. At the Hirsch house, at the other end of the harbor, there was talk of where they would buy lobsters, and what had happened to the old crackers, and whether there were enough hammers in the cellar to open the beasts that way. But here, in the silence that followed the firework, Josiah heard a very distant cry of warning.

It was the whistle buoy, Emma knew but did not say. She was still angry at Josiah, and furious at herself. Her mind had been made up never to go with him again. He made it easy at first by staying away, until he made it harder, the mystery of his prolonged absence its own seduction. But even tonight, when she heard the car, she promised herself she would be good, exert her will, be like her mother, whom she had managed to emulate most of her life, a practical, disciplined woman with little patience for ambiguity. It should be easy not to rise for him, Emma thought — she was tired from all the extra work at the Hirsch house, the cousins, the children. It should be easy to gird herself to her bed. And yet. What if he punished her, took away her job? For the first time in her life Emma had enough money. Not a lot, but enough. This was like having needles removed from her skin — it was a shocking, wondrous absence, not to perform the constant arithmetic of debt. Still, Emma balled the corner of her pillow into her fist, stayed flat. She was not a whore. She shut her eyes. Into her mind slid an image of Mrs. Cohn looking at her cousin Julian with such obvious desire that Emma, thinking of them, was filled with despair. Bea-Bea, her cousins called her. Bea-Bea! It was a sort of warning, to think of Mrs. Cohn’s unhappiness, not Emma’s mother’s sort of warning, but another, powerful one. Emma had opened her eyes and there were the trees spiraling with light, and the Duesenberg’s headlights boring into the wall of her bedroom, one illuminating the rusty path of an old leak, the other a small hole the boys had made years ago, fighting over something. She flooded with want.

“Maybe this is far enough,” Josiah said. “You get the feel of it. The other one”—he was loaning her one of his brother’s boats, too—“is the same. Your average skiffs. But you said you needed boats. And they should hold a lot of pears.”

He wanted her to thank him, Emma knew. Just as he wanted her to tell him to turn around, release him from his obvious suffering. But how could she do that when he caused her so much torment?

Again the whistle buoy sounded. Emma liked the buoy’s noise, though she wouldn’t have said so to Mrs. Cohn. It put her in mind of the malt-house horn in Banagher, and of her own old innocence, as a girl. Eimhear.

“I’d like to see the harbor,” she said.

Josiah’s arms began again to lift and pull. The oars banged in the rusted locks, his knees knocked into Emma’s, the boat clanged miserably on. But why, he thought, should he be so unhappy? He didn’t used to be unhappy, and now, by all accounts, he should be happier than he’d been then. He knew the map of Cape Ann by heart. He had two of his own, one on the wall outside his and Susannah’s bedroom, and another — showing the names of roads and streets — that he kept in the glove compartment of his Duesenberg. He knew where Bayview became Lanesville and where Lanesville became Folly Cove, knew which kinds of people lived on which streets, knew about the hermits and witches supposedly living up in Dogtown, knew Magnolia from West Parish, knew where the prostitutes were and how to make a phone call, knew the view from the bell tower atop City Hall. Soon, if all went as planned, he would have his own office in the room beneath the tower. His men at the quarry (except for Sam Turpa, he hoped) would probably vote for Fiumara, even the ones who weren’t Italian — to them it was a vote for Sacco and Vanzetti, a vote for themselves — but his men did not matter in the big picture. Josiah would still win. Susannah was pregnant. He might be a father. A father and a mayor, writing a check to dredge the cut, which was officially known as Blynman Canal. Josiah knew this, too, because Caleb had made the annual and entirely uncontroversial dredging of the Blynman a centerpiece of Josiah’s platform.

Caleb had written Josiah’s speech in the end, after Josiah admitted the night before he was supposed to make it that he had written nothing at all. (He would never show anyone that first sentence.) The speech was good, Josiah thought, but giving it had made him feel ridiculous, like a character in costume, the upright one that speechified about canals and temperance while his other one, the down-low one who wheeled and dealed in his office, went on undermining everything this one had to say.

This, he supposed, was maybe part of why he was unhappy. But nobody seemed to notice. Even his father believed in Josiah For Mayor. Josiah had gone to him back when Caleb first proposed the idea, had worn to his father’s shop the suit Susannah had bought him on her last trip to Boston, and his camel and white two-tone brogues, still stiff from the box. Some part of him must have meant to offend his father, ply his insecurities, incite his judgment and gall, so that Josiah would not have to feel any of this himself. He expected his father to rant about the vileness of elected officials. But Giles Story was not himself that day, or else he had changed. He was smitten by the notion of seeing the name “Story” on campaign signs all over town. He especially liked the idea of seeing it added to the company billboard out on Washington Street, which he was sure would happen if Josiah won his campaign. STANTON & STORY GRANITE COMPANY. Giles went straight to the shop telephone — he was usually stingy with the telephone — and rang a friend who made signs.