Anna Solomon - Leaving Lucy Pear

Julian breathed in Brigitte’s flowery mushroom scent. He rubbed the painting callus on her thumb. He got so lost in her that when he heard a cry, it seemed at first to be coming from inside his wife. He raised his head, then his hand. “Shh.”

Brigitte slowed but didn’t stop her fingers.

Again, a cry, distant but distinct, clearly coming from upstairs. Bea.

“ Arrête! ” he barked.

Brigitte stopped. “ Merde, Julian. What?”

“Didn’t anyone else hear that?”

Oakes and Adeline and Rose, standing at the piano now, shook their heads. On the sofa, Ira looked to be asleep. “ Quoi? Where?” asked Brigitte, and, when Julian didn’t respond — having realized, not wanting to say — she lifted her hands, preparing to recommence. “Allons-y!” she cried. “Voilà! L’independence!”

• • •

Coming upon Mrs. Cohn rocking on her bed, Emma turned away out of shock and shame, only to look back with sudden recognition. Of course.

Mrs. Cohn sat cross-legged, a noise swelling from her as she rocked, her hands frantically working at something in her lap. The noise was part whine, part moan, part growl, part air hissing through her teeth. Her ears were stuffed with cotton. Next to her some kind of pamphlet appeared to have been beaten. Emma stood in the doorway for a moment, thinking she might leave unnoticed and return downstairs to Mr. Julian, who — obviously troubled — had sent her up with vague instructions: See if Mrs. Cohn needs anything? But Emma could not do that, not even to Mrs. Cohn. And she had been spotted. “Emma!” cried Mrs. Cohn, pulling the cotton from her ears. She appeared like a tantrumming child, her eyes pink and streaming behind her knotted hair, her upper lip shining with snot. She threw the object in her lap in Emma’s direction, then balled her hands into fists and beat her knees.

“Mrs. Cohn.” Emma’s voice quavered. She swallowed, and began again. “Calm down. Take a breath. It can’t be so bad.”

Mrs. Cohn began a new round of moaning.

“You’re panicking,” Emma said, and lowered herself to look in Mrs. Cohn’s eyes. Nerves, she’d said. But nerves were not what Emma saw, nor madness. In Mrs. Cohn’s tears she saw only misery. This was a relief. It even brought Emma a queer sense of satisfaction. She wasn’t without pity. That was not the case. But her pity gave her a new sense of power. She held Mrs. Cohn’s gaze, waiting until she saw something give, panic settling into despair. Then she bent to pick up what Mrs. Cohn had thrown: a tiny locket on a gold chain. BH. Beatrice Haven. Mrs. Cohn’s maiden name. Emma unfastened the locket. Inside was a photograph of Mr. Julian. But it wasn’t a youthful version of him, as she expected. It was Mr. Julian now. BH was for Brigitte Hirsch, she understood. She closed it.

“You’re making a fool of yourself,” she said. “You’ve got to forget him.”

Mrs. Cohn leaped. She was faster than Emma would have thought, catlike in her acceleration, powerful as she yanked the necklace from Emma’s hands. She snapped the locket in two, and fell again onto the bed. “You don’t know anything,” she said, starting to rock again. “You have no idea.”

Emma laughed before she could stop herself.

“Don’t laugh!” Mrs. Cohn dropped her head and held it, her palms pressed against her ears, her knees folded around her hands. She was like a cartoon, Emma thought, of a spoiled woman who had been a spoiled child.

“I know a lot,” Emma said. She was done, she decided. She was exhausted. She missed her children. In the last few days she had played with another family’s children more than she had ever played with her own. She would leave now, tell the older Mr. Hirsch, let him figure out what to do. And Mr. Cohn, who was supposed to come up tomorrow for the holiday — if he was still here when Emma came back on the fifth. But no one else. They were singing downstairs now — Emma could hear them as she left the room, their dissonant, off-key chorus soaring into the upstairs hallway. Who sang that loudly when they clearly could not sing? Disgust rolled through her. “That buoy’s not going to bite you,” she said gruffly. “Try to sleep.” She shut the door.

Emma could not know how much she sounded like Nurse Lugton, how the impatient rigor of her voice, and the unmistakable tenderness that rode its flank, would pitch Bea into another round of weeping. Other patients complained about Fainwright but to Bea it had been a great reprieve, for a time, not to strive. She liked her class in basket weaving, her hands in thoughtless motion. She liked watching the cows stand around at the hospital’s little farm, their doomful eyes, liked the sweet smell in the greenhouse. The plants seemed to her exotic (though they were not), for she had never lived with plants. She wept now for the plants, and for Nurse Lugton. She wept as the whistle buoy careened through her earholes, as its screeching, predatory arrows burrowed in her brain. Stop the whistle buoy, she would cry, if Nurse Lugton were here. Stop the whistle buoy, though the whistle buoy was not a quarter of her suffering. It was Julian she cried for. It was Bea herself, Bea as she had been. But she could not speak of that, so she would cry whistle buoy, just as she had sobbed at Fainwright about the lieutenant — his rough hands, his pushing her against the wall, his forcing her — when really it was the baby she grieved.

“Every heart beats true, to the red, white, and blue!”

She lay down. She sat up. Tut-tut! Nurse Lugton commanded, her gruff alto a rope. She tried to hang on. She wadded the cotton balls again and stuffed them into her ears. She wiggled her toes, checking — they had not seized — and forced herself to walk to her desk, to pick up her pen. But the speech was so dull, and the Quarterly on the bed so bright, its crimson cover and raised seal beckoning. Until recently, the Quarterly had been printed in a flat, dull gray. At least there had been that.

Katherine Graver is getting on famously at Physicians and Surgeons. And speaking of doctors, Dina Papineau begins her internship in a Midwestern hospital shortly. What a lot they must know!

Hannah Bugbee reports that she has never been so busy or so happy in her life! College not excepted? She is to be the Song Director at Aloha Camps next summer.

Our class is now the proud possessor of thirty-one infants and children, according to the secretary’s records.

Dorothy Sprague is at the Hampton Institute again. I will quote from her own words: “I am thoroughly absorbed in my work here of teaching to eager, interesting, appreciative human Negro boys and girls. I feel glad to be making a concrete difference rather than the quite lofty speeches I used to deliver on campus. I am not engaged. I am particularly happy that Radcliffe has proved open on the race question!”

Roberta Salter I have seen at the New York Radcliffe lunch very gay and enthusiastic. Her activities include choral singing and a course at the Metropolitan Museum. She enjoys entertaining and welcomes visitors — let Ro-Ro know if you are in New York!

What could Bea possibly add? She did not recognize a single name. Her blood rattled in her ears. She pulled out the cotton. The noise of the whistle buoy exploded in her chest: What about youuuuu? She had not graduated from Radcliffe. She had barely lasted ten weeks, and half her time there she spent fiddling with the wicked brace Lillian had had made for her. Shrinks the stomach, strengthens the back, reforms a girlish posture! the advertisements promised. The brace’s top edge dug into her ribs, its bottom into her hip bones or, if she was sitting, into the tops of her thighs. During her lessons at the conservatory, she shifted and sagged, her fingers cold, her stomach empty. A tiredness overtook her. She floated outside herself, the floating part watching the playing part falling asleep as it played. The music reeked of competence. Master B. smiled painfully. His disappointment was clear. She wasn’t to be his star pupil after all; she would not make him famous. His certainty was like a blade through Bea’s ribs. She had not been taught to bear up against people’s judgments. She had been taught to take them seriously because until the trouble with the baby, she had only been judged well. She turned Master B.’s hostility on herself. Her supposed talent at the piano was a lie, her true mediocrity another secret she would have to keep. (She refused to perform.) The brace made her body a lie. Not a single person, not even Uncle Ira, knew the full truth. When she considered confessing to her roommate, an Eliza Dropstone from Needham, a kind, horsey, not-very-serious student who told Bea her secrets in a loud, conspiratorial whisper (she liked a boy, she couldn’t understand a word Professor M. said, she had kissed her dog before she’d left home, but really kissed it, like a boy), Bea’s throat began to close.