Leaving Lucy Pear (4 page)

I
n 1915, tired of buying and selling railroads in the Middle West and West, Caleb Stanton stood upon a parcel of land overlooking the Essex River and told the brokers and lawyers and architects gathered around, “To live here would be to live in a painting.” He smiled. His throat ached. He was dismayed not by the land—the land was perfect—but by himself. He still had ideas about hunting lions in Africa, or sailing to the Galapagos. He could do those things now—he hadn't remarried, his younger son was at Harvard, his older one quietly taking over his own railroad company, Susannah sixteen and willing to travel with him anywhere—yet here he was, looking at the painting that was to become his life. He understood then that he was like his father: his hands were small, he couldn't grow a full beard, he was too practical to be truly reckless, and he preferred staying over going. His father had stayed in Maine, and now Caleb would stay in Gloucester. His adventure would be to purchase a rock ledge—a most immovable thing—and blow it to pieces.

The place, for the most part, had brought him pleasure. The view was a gentle one: the far dunes rising to form the mouth of the Essex River, the double hump of Hog Island's furry ridge, the beached dories of the clam diggers out at the flats, the salt marsh unfurling like a rust-colored carpet. The estate itself was laid out in the English style, with a slight, but only slight, asymmetry.
There was a rose garden, a carriage house, a gardener's shack, a crescent-shaped swimming pool, and a bathhouse. There was Caleb's house, and the house he built for Susannah. There were a dozen old pine trees he had not cut down, and lawns running down to the rocks. It was easy to look out at his gracious bay and manicured land and see the logic of it all. It was easy to feel at peace.

And at night, when the logic was swallowed, when the gravel paths grew spectral and the pines rose up like a mountain range, a different pleasure worked at him. The barks of harbor seals sounded like feral dogs roaming the plain. A cat in heat became a moaning puma. Coyotes howled themselves into wolves, raccoons clawed themselves into boars as they ransacked the gardener's compost heap. The noises sent delicious tremors into Caleb's limbs—the wildness he'd longed for was here! Over time, he started taking long naps during the day so that at night he could be transported.

This was how, one night in the spring of 1927, he came to hear the loping of large bodies and think:
LIONS!!!

Then he spotted them—humans—scurrying toward the bathhouse, arm in arm.

He was furious that first time, not only that Josiah and Susannah had broken his spell but that they did so for flagrantly intimate purposes. He had thought they were over trying to have children. It had been such a bad time, when Susannah's stomach did not grow and her sadness came in, fogging her eyes and dulling her skin. She had always been the strongest of his three children—though he never would have said so to the boys—but she seemed to him suddenly, hauntingly frail. She reminded him for the first time of her mother, his late wife, Berenice, who had been ill almost the whole time he had known her, and this reminded him of all he'd been unable to fix.

Caleb had put Susannah and Josiah's reproductive efforts out of his mind and hoped they had, too. Yet he heard the lions again a few nights later, and again a few nights after that. In his chair by the window he seized with disgust and pity.

But tonight, the fourth time, the light behind the slatted door flickered. It was a candle, Caleb realized. They had lit a candle. He melted as if Susannah were a child again, pulling on his pant leg, looking up at him with her hazel eyes. Yesterday afternoon, he had gone out to the garden and seen that the tulips had opened. He had seen a mourning dove furiously building her nest under the eave of the gardener's shack, one seemingly inadequate twig after another, her efforts miraculously adding up to shelter. And now the candle. It was enough to recall him to his kindest self, to cause him to bring his forearm to his nose and smell the oils the sun had brought up in his skin. He gasped. Whenever someone gasped in novels (which Caleb indulged in between biography and history, having developed a regimen—history, biography, history, biography, novel, history, biography, and so on—that satisfied his idea of rigor) it struck Caleb as theatrical and false, but he had gasped like a woman and now he stood, gawking at the candle. He recalled his body, which he had neglected. He thought,
This is a fine moment for new life to begin.
Then he released the sleeve of his pajamas and closed the drape.

E
mma could not think of Roland until it was through, and then—wending around her howling guilt, bracing herself against the shock of having committed once again a sin her mother would have disowned her for, not to mention Mary, oh—it was to wonder: would he care? He would want to smash their heads in, he would threaten to tell the parish, ruin her, but would he
care
? Beyond his rage, would it be Emma that he wanted? He would want his Wife, yes, his Girl, an idea of her that went back to the South End saloon where he had found her working as a barmaid, allowing a pinch here or there in exchange for extra tips. He had been one of the pinchers until he fell in love with her and wheedled and begged, claiming he was now too respectable for pinching. Through the weeks of their engagement and the early months of their marriage, when Emma was learning Roland's many base habits, she kept waiting for him to use her beginnings against her. But he never had, a mercy that reminded her, when she needed reminding, of Roland's fundamental goodness. Sometimes, in tender moments between them, he even romanced her with memories of her bar days.
Not a shred of sentiment in you,
he'd growl proudly in her ear.
So practical,
his hand finding its way under the hem of her dress.

She believed he was right. Her sentiment had been bled out of her: incompletely by her tough, corn-haired mother; more starkly as she watched her father lose his work; and finally, wholly, when she
left Banagher with her cousins and landed in Boston with nothing but her name. It was Eimhear then but became Emma within days.

And so she told herself, as she lay in Josiah Story's office-thin arms on a deep white sofa in a bathhouse larger than her entire house, covered in an unimaginably soft quilt he called an afghan, that if Roland were ever to find out—though he must never find out—she could explain it as a sort of business agreement. An abhorrent, blasphemous agreement, but a practical one. She slept with the man in exchange for the perry press, a shack to house it, jobs for the boys down at the quarry. She would not tell about the necklace. She would say nothing of the hand cream he had given her tonight—their fourth night, she had not been able to keep from knowing, in the same way she always knew to the penny how much money she had in the jar under her bed, and always knew the number and ages of her children, even when Roland forgot. A reflex, to count and track and measure, and so,
Night four,
she'd thought as she lay low in Story's backseat, bracing herself when they hit the bumps on Concord Street, and just as she started to berate herself,
How can this be? Shame!
Story's pale hand fell her way across the backseat, wagging the bottle of cream like a toy, and she grabbed it, the fancy cut glass imprinting flowers into her palm, the scent of flowers making her sneeze. He laughed. “Massage it into your hands,” he said in his slow, strange, satisfied way. And she did.

This was the new trouble in her life. This was what she had known the first night she woke to the milky arc of Story's headlights sweeping the walls of her house: she was susceptible. For as long as Emma could remember, she had been the opposite, anchored and hard. Her earliest memories were of infants crying, of holding, changing, feeding them. She prided herself on her steadiness, her lack of surprise no matter what occurred. There was the filthy South End, there was Roland, there was Gloucester, there was the little drafty house in the woods whose chimney liked to catch on fire, there were Emma's hands always figuring out what
to do. The children were never planned but neither were they unexpected; even Lucy Pear, of whom Emma had had no warning, had not come as a shock. She fed them all, clothed them, washed their messes, didn't blink at their cries, watched her oldest two go off and fall for a little bit of attention, an adventure. Juliet was married to a successful cabinetmaker now. Peter was up in Canada. And through it all Roland had been gone more than he'd been home and Emma had never, not once, felt lust when she looked at another man, or complained about Roland's comings and goings, or allowed the children to speak of missing him, or warned the older boys off becoming fishermen themselves. It was as if she'd believed, if she held the world at a constant distance, that it would hold her back, if not close then at least upright and unscathed.

She had ignored his flirtations in his office, resisted answering his eyes the afternoon he came to the house bearing the wad of cash and the necklace, but then she had woken to those lights. Lost motorist was her first thought, because automobiles so seldom drove that far up the road and because it went by twice before settling into an idle. Then she rose to her knees and recognized the whitewalls of the Duesenberg's six tires.

His being there was so bold—so stupid, Roland would say—that she found herself smiling. What made him so certain he'd wake her and not the children? What made him think she wouldn't shoot him, let alone that she'd be willing to get in his car? She was unaccustomed to such optimism. Yet it shone on her and made her feel supple, and as though she had no choice but to go out and meet it.

She crept out the back door. Her rope cut, just like that.

Massage it into your hands.

Roland would call Story's way of talking
fancy,
like the bottle, but Emma heard it wasn't simply that; she heard the effort it took him to push certain words around his mouth.
Off-gone,
he'd said, drawing the heavenly blanket over her, and she could feel him go hot at the exotic syllables. They lay under it now, their sweat
cooling, the bathhouse flickering whitely around them. Four nights and still she knew almost nothing about the man, apart from what anyone could easily know. He ran the quarry but didn't own it. He had a wife and a house that looked large enough for four, maybe five bedrooms, but no children. She assumed a sorrow in him. But anyone could do that.

“Are you sleeping?” he asked.

“No.” She touched the back of the hand that rested on her stomach. It was hairless, and soft, everything that Roland's was not. She wasn't certain that she felt a great desire for these hands, but they fascinated her, and they touched her as though she fascinated them.

“Don't worry,” she said. “I won't fall asleep.”

“I'm not worried.”

A scurrying beyond the door made them sit up. The sound stopped, then began again on the roof, louder, before resolving into the pattern of a chipmunk or squirrel. They lay back down, Emma's head on his chest, which was nearly as hairless as his hands. A sudden vertigo washed through her, guilt and revulsion entwined. She sat up.

“Your wife must sleep well, for you not to worry,” she said.

“Very well, yes. It was part of her education, when she was small. She and her brothers would roam all over with their father—this was for timber, and then the railroad—staying in hotels or strangers' houses, she and her brothers sharing beds, and she would find a way to sleep, no matter what. Sometimes, she says, they would be directly over a depot, where the men repaired the engines all night, clanking and banging. One time she slept through the whistle of a night train they were meant to board, and her brothers carried her between them onto the train, set her down on her bunk, watched her sleep through the night all the way to Omaha, then carried her to the house of their father's friend, where she slept right through the rooster's crow in the morning.” He paused. “She tells it better than me. Susannah's a very good storyteller.”

“You tell it fine,” Emma said. He loved his wife, she thought, but not in the way he should have—not in the way that would have made him ashamed to go on about her to Emma in such bland, friendly detail. Last time he had told her about Susannah's childhood pets, and the time before that about Susannah's love of the stars and her skills with a telescope, and the time before that—the first time—about Susannah's remarkable strength as a swimmer. Somehow the more sweet things Story told her about Susannah, the more unreal she became to Emma. She was a tale of a wife, a character.

Emma let herself touch his hair. It was as soft and thick as felt. She hooked one of his curls, then watched it spring back.

Story stopped her hand. “Do you think my hair needs cutting?”

Emma waited, thinking the question must be a joke. But Story didn't laugh—against her ear, beneath the skin and bones of his chest, his heart sent up its steady effort. She considered him. His hair was different, certainly, from the rest of him. It flopped in his eyes, crept down his neck, ferned out across his ears so they showed through only occasionally, like buried treasure. Emma liked the overall effect. She thought the moppish wilds of his hair suited his broad brow and strong jaw, kept things in proportion. And maybe it was also true that all this hairiness made up in some way for his hairlessness elsewhere, and for this pristine, white cave of a room, for everything about the current situation that reminded her how far she was from home. Emma's father and uncles had all been hairy. She cut her children's hair so infrequently that the boys wound up looking like girls—they had to put the scissors into her hands, remind her. And when Roland returned from his trips looking and smelling like a woolly mammoth, when other women would have shaved and scrubbed and scolded, Emma wanted him more frankly at those times than at any other.

“Is it such a difficult question?”

No,
Emma could say,
no, it's not so difficult and no, your hair doesn't need cutting, in my opinion.
But lurking behind his plaintive tone she
grew aware of Susannah in the room, not the faultless myth of Susannah but the real one who must not have liked her husband looking frowsy. Susannah was with them as unmistakably as the candle and the ridiculously heavy white robes on their hooks, which Story had asked Emma not to use because he really didn't know her at all, didn't know that she would never even think to wear another person's robe. Emma shivered with disgust. She had no intention of entering into a debate with Susannah—however indirectly—about her husband's hairstyle.

“No,” she said. “And yes, it does need cutting.”

He groaned and was on top of her, catching the afghan in his teeth and backing down the couch, uncovering her as he went. The wool tickled, raised her hairs, made Emma gasp despite herself. How could it be? And yet it was. Later, composed, she wouldn't be able to explain it to herself. She would decide it was time to go to confession. (She had not been in nearly three weeks.) But now, here, she was on her back in a glowing bathhouse, a man she barely knew biting her hip bone, licking it, now her legs opened and she was barely required to give in because she already had.

 • • • 

“Will the children miss you?” he asked, once they were cooling again under the afghan.

“If they wake. Maybe. But they won't wake.” They were like Susannah, she thought, trained early to sleep through anything. And this was mostly true. But it was also what Emma had to tell herself, to stave off the part of her that wondered, as she lay here on a white sofa in West Parish, divided from them by the winding, dark river:
What if?
She was hateful, to have left them.

His chin nodded against her. “Do the boys like their duties?”

“They tell me you've moved them straight to carrying drills. You didn't have to do that. I thought you'd make them water boys.”

“You want them in mortal danger?”

“Of course not.”

She was quiet for a moment. “Let's not talk about the boys.”

“All right. Let's talk about you. You came to me with a proposition, now I have one for you. A position, to be exact, nursing a wealthy old man. Thirty dollars a week, funded by yours truly. You can't spend all day making a perry shack, can you?”

She lifted her head to look him in the eye. Thirty dollars was more than many men were paid, more than Emma made in a month cleaning rooms at the Blue Heron Hotel, and that job had lasted only one summer, two years ago. They wanted younger, unattached women who wouldn't frown, as Emma had, when guests leered at their too-short uniforms. Emma had knocked at other hotels. She had inquired at restaurants and tennis clubs. She had applied for situations she had no real skill at: assistant to a seamstress, arranger in a flower shop. She had looked until Roland had made her stop looking. He was embarrassed by his wife roaming about, embarrassed by their need, which had grown sharp that summer after he showed up late too many times to the boat he'd worked on for a dozen years, furred and sloshing in his boots, violent with remorse. Roland had always liked to drink, but without warning he'd become a drinker. The men came to Emma for help, but what could Emma do? Since then he had worked shoveling gurry on the docks, and sometimes pulling traps for the few lobstermen willing to take him. He worked at everything that was offered to him, but it still wasn't enough, even with fewer children in the house. Peter had sent money from Canada a couple times, which Emma had used for food and clothing, hiding it from Roland until it ran out. She grew a kitchen garden but the rabbits and deer and coyotes always managed to outwit her fence and make off with half the crop. She tapped a few maple trees out back but Roland insisted they have store sugar on birthdays and there was always a birthday. Juliet offered to help with groceries but Emma refused her even as she wished that Juliet would simply stuff flour, sugar, and butter into Emma's pantry without her permission. Emma was not as proud as Roland. She had put her
perry idea into action as soon as he left for the Grand Banks. But her anxieties about the perry were only growing. She worried they didn't have enough manpower for the rowing (to Ipswich!) and picking and pressing, worried people wouldn't pay as much as she was counting on, worried that even if they could squeeze a good drink out of the wrong pears, it was too late in the wet game to introduce a whole new libation to the market. By next year—when this year's crop would be ready—it would be even later. She worried about Roland, who might come home in the middle of their pressing, as Lucy said, and, ashamed they'd had to do it, put an end to the whole thing. Then he would feel regret, which would increase his shame, which would cause misery for them all.