Ira kept looking out the window. “Emma changed my mind,” he said.
Albert was halfway down the drive, headed for a swim, when he heard Emma call, “Mr. Cohn!”
He stood limply, soaked with sweat, unable to manage a step back in her direction. After reassembling the bed, he had moved the chest of blankets, then the wheelchair. Finally, he had left Bea and Ira sitting quietly in the great room like an old married couple, their backs to the newly appointed parlor with its fresh, morbid bedsheets.
“Pardon me, Mr. Cohn, but you asked Mrs. Cohn why she didn’t tell you about Ira, and she said she didn’t know. And I thought you should know I think that’s true. I believe it. I think she can’t bear it.”
This was more than he’d heard Emma say. “She’s very attached to him,” he agreed.
Emma stood, as if expecting him to go on, then started to back-step toward the house. “Have a nice swim. I’ve got to get home, to the children.”
“Thank you for coming on a Saturday. Will the same driver pick you up?”
“He will. That’s fine. Will you stay the rest of the weekend?”
“I haven’t decided,” Albert said, because he was used to suspending those sorts of decisions. But he knew that he would stay. He had come up each weekend since Bea’s fit, to keep her company and to save her from Lillian doing the same. (I’m fine, Bea said, but if I have to see my mother I might not be.) It was a relief: focusing on someone else’s trouble, carrying things.
“I think it’s good for her,” Emma said. “To have you here. Though perhaps it’s not my place to say so.”
“How does she seem during the week?”
“Honestly, all right. Not chipper. But.”
Albert smiled. “But she isn’t a chipper person.”
“Does she—pardon me—but Mrs. Cohn said—does she ever—does she still talk about wanting a child?”
Albert, not knowing what else to do, looked at Emma’s hands. They were large for a woman, and visibly strong, and bore a disturbing number of scratches—nothing moving Ira’s bed could have caused. “She spoke with you about a child?” he asked.
Emma shrugged apologetically and started again to back away.
“Never,” Albert said. “She’s never said a thing about it.” Which was at once true, factually speaking, and also so bound up with lies—omissions, evasions—as to feel almost sinister. He pulled at the towel he’d hung around his neck, as if to hide the clawing of his heart, while Emma, visibly embarrassed, shook her head in a particularly vehement, sorry way, the way another Irish nurse had shaken her head at him long ago, overwhelming Albert with confusion. Mr. Cohn, forgive me, the nurse kept saying. She had shown up at his office at ten in the morning, a few weeks before he and Bea were to be married. She wouldn’t talk until he shut the door. She saw the announcement in the papers, she said, recognized Bea’s name, knew her picture unmistakably. She had seen her name through the years, a speech here or there. She had felt no obligation to anyone until now, she said, now she couldn’t live with it—she tapped her firm bosom—if she didn’t tell the girl’s husband-to-be. Forgive me, forgive me. She told him about the baby, told him it was supposed to go to an orphanage but that one morning, before dawn, she went to fetch the infant for its usual diaper change and found it gone. I woke the uncle. We looked everywhere, then found the mother down in the pear field, asleep in her nightgown. Filthy. Forgive me. But the baby . . . her head shaking that quick, almost angry shake, like a bird flushing. The aunt dismissed me.