Anna Solomon - Leaving Lucy Pear

In fact, he was so unfamiliarly calm he experienced it as a kind of elation. There was nothing he wanted to be doing apart from what he was doing. Just as extraordinary, he was doing nothing. He was standing in his office watching the empty pit: a bird drinking at a sludgy puddle, a pile of bright, rusted bits, a vision of himself down there, drill in hand. This vision mesmerized him. He knew the figure was himself, Josiah, yet from this height and distance he couldn’t see his own eyes and so he doubted what he knew. The figure moved like him, but maybe it was his father as a young man. Josiah and his father had the same high-arched feet (like ballerinas, his brothers laughed) and walked a bit on their toes, chests forward. They were steady with their hands but slow, the way Josiah down in the quarry was with his drill, setting it, seeming to consider, setting it again half a foot farther along the seam. Josiah’s father had never worked in a quarry, but his father’s brothers had. They had worked in the quarries and Giles had worked in the shop just as Giles now worked in the shop and Josiah worked in the quarry. Not in it — above it. But there he was in it, busy with his drill, not allowing Josiah to tell if he was Josiah. Josiah thought it extraordinary, how immersed he could be in the vision and also aware of it as fantasy. What was it in him that he could stand here, doing nothing, allowing his men their strike, pretending — almost — not to consider the consequences? He felt so calm. Unified, really. With himself, with the lone bird, the thrown-off bits, the quarry, its green mouth open to the sky. It wasn’t sexual, he didn’t think so, though the only thing he had to compare it with was what he felt when he slept with Emma, his urges narrowed, his priorities clear, his clear urging toward the light. But that was in his body, whereas this was everywhere. The word “spiritual” occurred to him. It rode across his mind the way he’d seen kites, bearing advertisements, slip across the sky behind airplanes, a surprising, doubtful sight. It rode out again. Down in the pit, he had chosen his spot. He was readying his drill, without wonder or guilt.

It took Josiah a full minute to register his father-in-law in his face, throwing a finger, hauling it back, throwing it again, his face contorted. First, Josiah heard his men chanting, though he couldn’t make out their words. My men, he thought. I’ve been brainwashed. He saw the white hat in front of him dripping with sweat, saw dark maps appear at the armpits of a custom-made poplin shirt. Only then did Josiah feel the worm in him waking, anxiety slithering up his innards.

“What are you doing?” Caleb growled.

Josiah realized he’d heard a pistol shot. “Did you shoot them?” he heard himself ask, his voice far away and oddly measured.

“Are you insane? I was simply announcing… I was making… Why am I defending myself to you ?”

“I don’t know,” Josiah said. He waited for his father-in-law to rear up and attack again, to say he knew about Josiah’s affair. Even if Susannah, against all odds, didn’t know (when she’d asked about his mangled hair and he told her he cut it himself, she believed him! she laughed, then fixed it herself without another word!), wouldn’t Caleb? Josiah waited for his self-sabotage to be complete: the quarry, the campaign, and now his marriage. But Caleb simply stood there, shaking his finger. Josiah was struck by what a remarkably undersized finger it was. He leaned left to see around Caleb. Down in the quarry, the figure was gone. Josiah lowered himself into his chair.

“This is my office!” roared Caleb. “Stand!”

Josiah sat. What could Caleb do? He was small, and old.

“Please,” he said. “Sit.”

Caleb leaned across the desk. “You will end this strike or I’ll destroy your campaign.”

“Would you really do that, sir?”

“I don’t give a damn about you becoming mayor.”

“Of course you do,” Josiah said, in awe of his own steadiness, a warm courage through his throat, the worm held at bay. “It’s your campaign. And it looks like you might lose anyway. People are a little fired up, if you haven’t noticed. Sacco and Vanzetti. Beatrice Cohn. The tide is turning. Fiumara’s looking like a beleaguered butterfly right about now.”

Caleb breathed like a bull.

“I’m doing my best, you know. Trying to play up my working-class roots. Reverting to the accent you taught me how to lose. Did you let the scabs in, sir?”

“It’s nearly one! Let them in to go down and come back up? I got a call from Babcock. He got covered trucks to bring men in from New Hampshire. His stone is moving! He wanted me to know mine wasn’t. Do you have any idea how much you’re costing us? Of course you don’t, you have no idea about how anything is actually done, you just shake the hands, make the deals.”

“I thought that’s what you wanted me to do.”

Caleb narrowed his eyes. “After everything I’ve done for you. Your speeches, your car. It’s all mine.” His lips drew back, baring his teeth. “If you had a daughter, you would understand. You wouldn’t screw with me. If you had any children at all.”

“That’s very cruel, sir.”

“It’s not half of what I’ll do to you. You’ll be out of a job! Mark my words.”

“But who will take my place? One of your sons?”

Caleb sat then, on the chaise against the wall, which was so low, and his descent so abrupt, that once he was down, he appeared helpless. He didn’t look at Josiah — he looked at the wall behind Josiah, where a portrait hung of Caleb Fiske Stanton, Caleb’s grandfather. Caleb was thinking, Josiah supposed, of his family’s greatness, and of their imminent ruin at the hands of Josiah Story. Exaggerations both. Why should Josiah feel such pity for him? Not the glinting slash of pity he’d felt in odd moments before, when Caleb was in front of him, telling him to do something. That pity was for Caleb’s not being able to tell whether Josiah obeyed out of respect or duty; that was for how vulnerable Caleb’s power made him. That pity quickly evaporated because Josiah wanted power, too. But in this moment, having disappointed Caleb in the worst ways possible, Josiah was free of obligation and could see the man’s tired sorrow.

“If they strike tomorrow, you’ll bring in the scabs.”

Josiah didn’t even nod. He pretended at nothing, only sat with his hands in his lap, his chest open to whatever Caleb would say next. The man in the pit was within him now. The chant was clear. Justice. That was all.

“So you think those wops are innocent,” Caleb said.

“I have no idea,” Josiah said.

“You read Thayer’s decision? Fuller’s report? You think a man like Lowell, a Harvard president, would lie?”

“I think all sorts of men lie. I think maybe that’s the whole point, sir.”

Caleb was silent. He looked toward the pit, where nothing moved but the bird, and two more that had joined it at the puddle. The birds hopped, flew off briefly, and returned, pecked at each other’s wings. Josiah watched Caleb watch them, his fingers propping up his chin, his face slowly softening, like clay. His silence stretched on for so long Josiah started to worry he’d had a stroke. Then Caleb looked up.

“Our poor Susannah,” he said. “She’s had enough.”

Josiah waited, unsure what his father-in-law meant. But Caleb only looked at him, his face soft, and expectant, and because what he’d said was true, Josiah nodded. He nodded and nodded, until Caleb got up and left.

The men were executed, their heads encased in Robert G. Elliott’s ingenious leather helmets, their stomachs full. There was some picketing outside the State House — the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and a few others would appeal their ten-dollar fines — but mostly the people were tired, the crowds small. All the insurance the city had bought against riots and bombings, the mobs of state troopers armed with rifles and tear bombs, the former was regretted, the latter sent home. In Paris, thousands of people marched in the streets shouting, “Death to Fuller!” They smashed the windows of restaurants serving American diners, mauled billboards advertising American artists, hurled stones and seltzer siphons at police — the papers called it the worst violence Paris had seen since the war. In Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, Havana, Sydney, Mexico City, Geneva, London, workers marched, their heads bared; U.S. embassies were bombed; boycotts were called against American goods. The Giornale d’Italia declared: “Democratic and liberal in theory, the United States desired to show that in practice it does not admit other laws than its own, not even the law of humanity.” But Boston, the morning after, nearly echoed with silence. In Gloucester, quarrymen returned to the quarries, dockworkers to their docks, and by late afternoon the Heschel brothers, Ira Hirsch and Henry Haven, sat in lumpy, intricately carved armchairs built for the Bents a century before, their eyes traveling between the papers and Bea, who lay in her usual spot on the sofa, her arms heavy across her face.