Read Online Leaving Lucy Pear by Anna Solomon - Free Book Online

could use a couple boats.” She swiped at her forehead with her forearm, wiped her forearm with her other hand, tried to wring her hand out, with little success. Story was too nervous to notice, she thought, but the woman would, the real woman with a face and a name who was staring down at the car now, waiting. Beatrice Cohn. Emma wished her back into facelessness even as she felt herself rising from the car. She felt her legs lift, one after the other, up the stone path, felt her fear slammed aside by a greater force. Now that she was here, her need to see Lucy’s mother, to know, was like a rope pulling her by the neck—she was nearly foaming with it. She must look preposterous, she thought, her gait halting, undecided. She did not know that from where Beatrice Cohn stood, she appeared perfectly natural, and of a piece. She looked like a poor, lovely, heavily perspiring Irishwoman treading cautiously in a place she had never been before.
    â€œGood morning, Mrs. Cohn,” called Story, his voice overbright. “I’m ten minutes early. I like to be on time, always—out of respect. For your time, I mean. I hope we’re not troubling you.”
    Beatrice Cohn smiled flatly, not even glancing at Emma. Lucy’s grace was drowned in the woman’s skinniness. She was all angles. “You couldn’t trouble me, Mr. . . . Forgive me. It’s
Stanton,
isn’t it?” she asked, and as Story coughed up a good-natured chuckle, Emma nearly bit her tongue. She realized with shock that she had met Mrs. Cohn before: two summers ago, on a meltingly hot day, when a group of women in plain, dark, throat-strangling dresses knocked atthe Murphy door and urged Emma to deny her husband “intimate pleasures” if he would not deny himself “the pleasure of drink.” Emma had moved to shut the door but one woman, this woman, caught it with her foot and pushed a small package, wrapped in butcher paper, into Emma’s hand.
At least deny him more children,
she had said, in the same nasal, Brahman accent with which she had just mocked Story. Sweat had fallen from her nose, slid into her tight collar. How could Emma not have recognized her?
You think he wants more children?
she’d asked, before she kicked the woman’s foot out of the way, slammed the door, and pulled the curtains. She was instantly horrified by what she had confessed, and to a stranger. Worse, it was not Roland she had spoken for but herself. When the women knocked again, she ignored them. She was Emma Murphy, of Leverett Street, of Church of the Sacred Heart. She did not even know what the package contained. But she kept it, and opened it, and discovered inside a thing she had not known existed: one Mensinga brand rubber diaphragm and shocking, illustrated instructions for how to deploy it. She had used it, every time, ever since.
    â€œMrs. Cohn,” Story was saying. “Let me introduce you to Mrs. Emma Murphy. With your uncle ill, I thought you could use the help. Nursing him, I mean. So that your energies don’t have to be divided from your work. Divided? Diverted. You understand. Yes?” He clapped Emma on the back with comradely force.
    Again, the flat smile dribbled back. “My uncle is a very private man,” said Mrs. Cohn. She appraised Emma quickly, top to bottom. Flyaway hair pinned plainly, Emma thought. Sweaty. Scrappy. Dull brown shoes. Mrs. Cohn gave no sign of recognizing her. Through the open doorway loomed a hallway crowded with impractical chairs and chests. A towering grandfather clock. A chandelier whose lower regions Emma could just make out, glittering seas of treasure she might be asked to dust. She was squeezed by a sudden hatred—she saw the design of Beatrice Cohn’s life with startling clarity. Mrs. Cohn had a hundred bedrooms and hersnide accent and enough wealth to hire an entire city of nannies and she had dumped her child on Emma, shed her like an