Anna Solomon - Leaving Lucy Pear

Lucy would have rather her mother had no breasts at all. Then at least Lucy might get her wish, to stay like a boy forever — at least some promise would have been eked from this encounter. She inched closer, trying to see the color of Mrs. Cohn’s eyes, noting as she neared that she was still a head shorter than the woman. This was such a simple observation, the sort of thing people said all the time, still a head shorter, yet its very simplicity, its commonness, caused Lucy to break sweat again. She heard it as if someone else were saying it, a neighbor or a teacher, offering it up as thoughtlessly as any other daily remark, about rain clouds or pie. Still a head shorter! As if all this time Lucy had been growing to grow as tall as this woman. As if the woman had been waiting for her to arrive. Longing poured into Lucy, filled her to her neck, brought her hand into a fist, daring to knock: Take me in! But before she could work up the courage, Beatrice Cohn grimaced, spun away from the window, and put out the light.

• • •

Bea finished her rye in darkness, set the glass on the floor, wove a wide arc to make sure she cleared the glass, and lay beside Ira in the dark, her back to his side, her head spinning. She could no longer see the window but she knew it was there because she could see the quarter moon. Her eyes closed. The moon hung in the private room behind her eyelids, a white, wiggling echo of itself. She opened her eyes again, closed them, let the moon swim through her, putting her and her circles to sleep. Her eyes fluttered. Then they were open, and she was looking at herself, on the other side of the window, a child, Bea-Bea, staring in.

• • •

Briefly, Lucy’s mother seemed to have disappeared. Lucy pressed her face to the glass. She felt her body drain of hope, felt her knees turn to mud. Then two pricks of light gazed out at her, as startling a sight as a raccoon’s eyes in the woods. Like a raccoon’s eyes, they glinted, lit by the moon and apparent menace. Like a raccoon’s eyes, they seemed to look straight through her, as if in warning.

Lucy ran. She ran off the terrace, across the lawn, past the pine, over the wall, through the orchard. She found the coat and grabbed it up. She looked back, up toward the house, but saw no light. Had the woman seen her? Lucy waited. She had not seen her. Of course not. She was a woman who looked at herself in windows. She didn’t care enough to see Lucy. And if she had seen her, she wasn’t coming. No noise came from above, no light. Lucy’s stupidity was crushing. Beatrice Cohn had left her. She hadn’t asked her to come back.

Still, Lucy waited, her arms hugging Liam’s coat. The pear within split as she waited. She took a step backward, then froze, took another step, froze. She punched a low branch, knocking pears to the ground, froze again, waited. She waited until she could not bear the disappointment, until fatigue darkened her senses, until all she could do was shake the pear chunks from the coat, twist her hair into the cap, and start the long walk home.

Post for Mrs. Cohn!” the mailman sang, his voice resounding through the house, for he had taken the trouble to kneel down, poke open the flap, and push his lips into the hole. His words arrived in all their snide glory in the great room, where Bea lay on a sofa with her arms covering her face, Albert stood looking out the window, and Ira and Henry sat with three newspapers between them. Sacco and Vanzetti were supposed to have been executed the night before, but thirty minutes out, as Robert G. Elliott, widely admired as the gentlest executioner in New England, checked his voltage, Governor Fuller sent a last-minute reprieve, giving the defendants twelve days to find a judge willing to retry their case.

Bea appeared to be asleep but wasn’t, Ira knew, because when the mail flap crashed down she rolled over at once and sat up, her response as automatic as a dog’s.

Poor Bea, who had gone finally, truly, mad, who swore she had seen her baby, grown into a girl, peering in the window one night. She had told Albert, who had told Ira and Henry, and then Henry had told Lillian, which made Bea even crazier — she accused Albert of betraying her. Ira just shook his head. He knew she had drowned the baby, but he couldn’t possibly say that to her now. Henry kept reminding Bea that the baby (as far as he knew) had gone to the orphanage, and that the orphanage kept no records. Bea had nothing sensible to say about any of it. “But the pears,” she kept saying. “They didn’t come this year, for the pears. They’re still on the trees, they’ll go soft…” As if that explained anything.

They stopped responding to her. Ira kept waiting for her to admit she was wrong — if not lying, then mistaken. She had been dreaming. Everyone gets confused sometimes, he said, Vera used to get confused, even I sometimes think not entirely thought-through, thoughtful — what do you call them? — thoughts. He tried to make her laugh. But she looked at him without any sign of confusion or torment and said, calmly, I know what I saw. Her certainty was the worst part, proof of how fully she had unraveled. It sat heavy on Ira, and there was his guilt, too, at how Bea’s suffering had brought his brother back to him. The shipwreck seemed to have roused Henry from his tunnel of commerce, and then Bea’s hallucination had roused him further, so that he had come to visit each weekend and on some days, like this one, in the evening after work. Ira couldn’t have predicted the pleasure Henry’s company would bring him. For years, he had thought of his brother as a statue, made of wax, but he was real, with warm, hairy forearms and, across his balding brow, a shock of black hair which by this time in the day, in the middle of August, had started to frizz and fly. Henry hadn’t been hard about Bea all those years, Ira decided, but overcome. Or, if he’d been a little hard, Lillian had bossed him into it. But that wasn’t entirely fair, either. Ira was less inflamed by thoughts of Lillian now that Henry had returned. Even Lillian herself didn’t seem so hateful. She’d joined Henry on his weekend visits, along with Albert, who was good to all of them, taking Bea out on long walks, pushing Ira down to Mother Rock, making tea for Lillian and Henry, going out on his own once Bea and Lillian had gone to bed, walking for hours — they didn’t see him until morning — so that Ira and Henry could play chess.

Bea sat, rubbing her face with her hands, preparing to go fetch the letter. “Nah nah nah- nah!” the mailman might have shouted. The picketers had dispersed but venomous missives continued to arrive, accusing Bea of crimes ranging from attempted manslaughter and bribery to excessive wealth. Many referenced Sacco and Vanzetti in some way, suggesting that Bea was directly responsible for the persecution of the working class. Their letters mobbed Bea’s desk, spilled onto the floor, while nearly every day another piece about Bea’s fiasco ran in the Gloucester Daily Times, next to headlines about Sacco and Vanzetti. Today’s article exposed the number of extra ambulances the city had to maintain year-round for the two months when the population boomed with summer people like Beatrice Cohn. If she had been a Protestant, Ira thought, her fellow vacationers might have stood up for her. But she wasn’t. They didn’t.

“Sweetheart,” Henry said. “Don’t bother with the letter. Let me burn it. Come. Sit with us awhile longer.”

“I wasn’t sitting with you.”

“Lie with us. Lie back down. We’ll read to you.”

Bea stood. Ira shook the Globe in her direction. “Look! They’re cheering in Buenos Aires and Paris! It’s progress, at least.”