Anna Solomon: Leaving Lucy Pear

He was about to have Sam send in the Taylors when a woman entered the waiting room, followed by one child, then another. By the time the door had shut behind them, there were seven, ranging from nearly grown to a toddler, all standing in a quiet line against the back wall. Their mother wore a plain dress and badly worn shoes. Her hair had been blown by the wind, and though she was making a great effort to gather it into a bun and tuck it behind her ears, Josiah found himself cheered by her minimal success. All that hair made her appear beautiful. Or maybe she was beautiful. And her children — they were so well behaved, so patient. Their sheer mass, that many small, warm bodies in a row, gave him a little chill. The waiting room had gone quiet at the arrival of the family.

“I’ll see the woman,” Josiah said.

“The Irish lady, sir?”

“Is there any other?”

“But she’s just arrived.”

“The others will wait.”

“And the children, sir?”

“Not the children.”

“They’ve come with the lady, sir.”

“They’ll wait peacefully.”

“There’s barely standing room, sir.”

“Send some of the others outside.” Josiah’s need to see the woman up close was inexplicable but overwhelming. A clear, sharp stab. Hunger after years of being overfed.

“It’s cold, sir.”

“Then see about ordering some hats! Certainly we should provide them with hats when they come to ask for money.”

Sam stared. “Are you in earnest, sir?”

“No! Truthfully I don’t care. If you want to give them hats, give them hats. Just bring in the woman.” And with a force he regretted, he pushed Sam out the door.

• • •

Once the woman was seated across from him, Josiah couldn’t think what to say. Everything about her appealed to him — her high cheekbones, her small breasts, her teeth protruding, just slightly, in front of her bottom lip. She hadn’t managed to fix her hair, and so she looked at him through a fringe of yellow, her gaze polite but unflinching.

“You wished to see me, Mr. Story?”

Josiah stared. “Your eyes are the color of our stone,” he said before he could stop himself, and because he couldn’t explain why he’d said it, he felt compelled to keep talking. “Olive green. Very rare. Very valuable. When my father-in-law bought this spot, he had no idea. He thought it would last a year, maybe two, thought he would cut it for paving stones, ship it to New York, be done with it. But twenty feet down the rock came up green. Almost no seams or knots. So here we are, still cutting. People pay us to ship as far as Washington, D.C., and Chicago. They want the biggest slabs so they can turn the stuff into monuments.”

Josiah stopped. The woman looked perplexed. He realized he hadn’t stood when she entered, or asked her name, or shaken her hand. Now he stood, causing her to stand, the mechanics relieving them for a moment of each other’s eyes until, upright, they appeared ready to part.

“Call me Josiah,” he said, extending his hand.

“Emma Murphy.”

Her skin was dry and rough but she didn’t look away. He thought of the creams Susannah kept lined up like little dolls on her chest of drawers. He waited to feel repelled by Emma Murphy’s hand, but the feeling didn’t come. He saw that he hadn’t been exaggerating: her eyes really were the color of Stanton stone. They were so strange, and yet so perfectly matched to the quarry, that looking at them gave him a haunted feeling, as though she had worn these eyes especially for this visit, and as he looked and she looked back he saw the closest derrick reflected in each of her eyes so that two tiny derricks looked back at him, their identical arms going through their identical slow motions, and before the shrunken derricks Josiah felt oddly free. His sentence floated into his mind— I did not come to Gloucester, I was born here… — and floated out just as easily.

He dropped her hand and motioned her to sit, all the while working to regain his sobriety.

“What can I do for you, Mrs. Murphy?”

“I’ve come with a proposition.”

He waited. A patch of pink crept up her neck. Clearly she hadn’t done anything like this before. She didn’t know that confidence was key — you had to appear entirely certain that what you had Josiah would want. The derricks were gone from her eyes now — they’d been replaced by sky and a bright, blank distress. “I’m listening,” he offered.

“Are you familiar with perry, sir? It’s a fermented drink, made from pears.”

“Like cider?”

“But less common. People will pay more for it.”

“Is that right?” He sounded interested in the money, but that wasn’t how he felt. He had noticed a small mole on Emma Murphy’s right cheek.

“We’ve everything we need to run an operation, sir.”

He waited again.

“Except the press. And the bottles. And possibly a small shed, for cover.”

“Of course.”

“But we’re not starting from nothing. I know someone who’s been making the stuff for years. We’d offer you ten percent.”

“And who is we ?”

“My family. The Murphys. Of Leverett Street, sir.”

“Josiah,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Will you say it?”

“Is that necessary? My family includes myself, my husband, and my children. I’ve nine.”

Josiah went to the window. The children stood against the wall in a tight line, their hair as pale and thin and blown as their mother’s, except for one girl in the middle whose hair was nearly black. To an onlooker, her dark eyes appeared dense and unfocused, but in fact she was calculating the number of jugs of perry they would have to sell before she could siphon off enough money to buy a train ticket to Canada. And Josiah was thinking about how Emma Murphy, clearly, was not a stranger to infidelity.

“I count only seven,” he said.

“The others are grown, sir.”

“And does your husband know you’re here?”

“He’s fishing, out at the Grand Banks.”

“So he doesn’t know?”

“He will.”

Josiah returned to his desk. He searched her face for coyness or deceit but found neither, only a frank nervousness he wanted to soothe.

“And his name would be?”

“Roland Murphy.”

“Roland Murphy the fisherman, out on a long trip. And you’re an aspiring cider woman.”

“Perry. Sir. We intend to wet the cape in it. We can give you ten percent.”

Josiah nodded, trying to appear calm, though her words aroused him. He tried to focus on the 10 percent, hoping money would bring him back to his role. He laughed, as he was supposed to. “Forty,” he countered.

“Fifteen?”

“Thirty,” he said, frowning. He snapped his mind back to Susannah, who would be preparing to eat her lunch now, fully dressed and alone; this afternoon, if it was the right time of month, she would pull back the coverlet on their bed and lay down a fresh towel as a rag — Turkish cotton, bought at Stearns — in preparation for his coming home. Susannah, who was a better businessman than him and who would tell him not to be sorry for Emma Murphy, not to go lower than 40 percent, not to frown but to smile when he negotiated. He focused on Emma Murphy’s overbite and said, “Last offer.”

She nodded. Then she surprised him by smiling. Her smile wasn’t happy but matter-of-fact, obligatory, exposing a tall, pink gum line. “Thirty,” she agreed, and it took all his strength to stop staring at her mouth.

“And your boys out there. Would they like jobs in the quarry this summer? Twenty hours, maybe thirty? That’s the most I can get away with these days, for kids. We don’t usually hire them at all anymore. But yours — are they as bright as they look?”