“You’re already here.”
She shrank further. It always surprised him, how well he knew her body though he had never seen it unclothed, how he could perceive the slightest shifts in her temperature or heart rate. He held her hand. “It’s not a tragedy, Bea, to do what you want to do. Even if it feels right—or easy, God forbid.”
She was silent for a while. “Ira won’t live forever.”
“And you can drive now,” he said encouragingly. “You can travel. I’ll travel with you.”
She sniffed softly, in a way he knew to be laughter. “You’ll travel with Mr. Knapp.”
“Do you know, Beatrice Haven Cohn, that in some parts of the world, twenty-seven is not so old?”
He’d forgotten the snail, tucked into his palm between their hands, but she took it from him now and chucked it into the water. They waited for the plonk. “So you’re not asking me.”
“No.”
“Will you go to Knapp’s tonight?”
“Probably.”
He followed her gaze across the harbor, to the lights of the town. She sat for a while, seeming to consider, then leaped to her feet. “Let’s get you back, then,” she said, and started to walk.
“Slow down,” he said. “You’ll twist an ankle.”
“Again, you’re worried about yourself. Enough. I’m hungry,” she added, with a bare little whimper that made him want to cry. But she slowed, and they walked home arm in arm, and after he had warmed soup for her, and toasted bread, and toasted more bread—he had never seen her eat so much—he went out again. It was later than he’d gone before, the guests gone home, and still, again, Lyman let him in.
Thirty-five
If you flew above Essex Bay—thirty years later Josiah would do this, holding Susannah’s hand, bound for a month in Paris, astounded as the familiar curve of beach and dune and river came into view, the place they lived flattened into color, white and blue and green, the effect bizarrely tropical—you would have seen a rowboat and a swimmer charting a slow, steady course between the shore and Hog Island. This was the deal they had struck the night after Josiah thought she’d drowned. He’d taken her to their bed, and made love to her, and it was good, and afterward, he said, “I’m done trying to have children.” She was quiet for a long time, curved against him, her hair smelling of salt. Finally, she said, “I’d like to swim the Boston Light. I know I’m not Trudy Ederle, but I’d like to try.”
It was an eight-mile swim, nearly four times as far as she had swum before.
She needed him to come home from work when the tides were right and follow her out into the bay. Josiah’s pulse began to throb. He had the sensation, as he told her he was afraid of the water, that he was meeting Susannah again, for the first time. She looked quizzical, and for the briefest moment, disappointed. “You’re quite a man,” she said, and he pulled his hand away from her leg, seizing with regret for having told her. But she put his hand back. She wiggled closer to him. “So you’ll have something to reach for, too.”
They had until next July to train. It was the middle of October now, the water cold enough Josiah wouldn’t even put his feet in, but Susannah hated swimming pools and insisted on two more weeks in the bay. Josiah rowed. His worry for himself had shifted easily onto Susannah. She had slathered herself in petroleum jelly and lard, but what if she froze anyway? What if she swallowed water, or was taken out on the tide, and he could not save her? What if the whitecaps that rose up quickly some afternoons overwhelmed her? But he understood that she had to swim, and so he rowed. He was used to seeing the sandbar rise up beneath the boat now, the water so shallow he could see the ridges on the backs of horseshoe crabs. He was getting stronger on the oars. In a few more weeks, he would be elected mayor. Fiumara had pulled out, forced by allegations of terrorist involvement. The allegations were vague (Josiah’s father had been involved in stirring them up, though Josiah would never know this) but there was the man’s socialism, too, and with Sacco and Vanzetti dead, people’s tentative sympathies in that direction had shriveled. The men were on their way to being forgotten.