Albert asked the woman her name, and when she wouldn’t give it to him, he told her to leave. He decided she was probably lying, for one reason or another. Maybe she imagined Albert might pay her for the information, or maybe Bea’s mother, unhappy with the match for a reason she had not expressed, had sent the woman to dissuade him. But after she left, he sat there for a long time, thinking about what he did and didn’t know of Bea. He knew she was strange, stubborn, smart, rich, but that was about it. Since the Purim Ball months earlier, she had told him about Fainwright, but only in the haziest, most generic terms. So he wasn’t entirely shocked that Bea might have another secret. A baby, though. He tried, sitting in his office, to locate inside himself the kind of horror, or at least judgment, that he knew such a situation called for. But he wasn’t horrified. If anything, he found it a little comforting that her sin—if the story was true—was worse than his.
After the wedding, Bea took him up to Gloucester for the first time and Albert, seeing the pear trees, knew the nurse told the truth. Those trees were one of the reasons he didn’t like coming to Gloucester. The past was past—that was how Albert preferred to live. But the instant Emma shook her head like that, like a flushing bird, his heart began to struggle, and now, as she turned toward the house, saying, “Forgive me, I’ve got to get home,” Albert felt as if he were in a children’s book in which one woman had come back disguised as another. He turned away and walked quickly in the direction of the road, his towel swinging, trying not to see, in his peripheral vision, through the line of trees that divided the drive from the orchard, the clinging, greening pears. That was Bea’s story, not his. He still hoped to leave Bea, once she was feeling better. He concentrated on the water he was walking toward, how painful it would be at first, like jumping into nails, the cold taking his breath away, staking him where he was. Then he was in it, and it was in him, so cold, a narrow, stunning release. He swam to the first rocks, then, feeling strong, he swam to the second rocks. The water focused him, and he kept swimming, out of view of the Hirsch house, beyond Bea’s reach, and past the lip of the cove and around and on until, lifting his face to catch his breath, he saw the house Teddy had once told him about, a “sprawling, medieval, very homosexual place” with Chinese wallpaper and French moldings. Teddy had been to a party there once. You couldn’t see the house from the road—Albert had tried—but from the water, well, there it was. And here was Albert, numb as a brick and filled with an escapist’s courage, kicking the last few feet to the house’s swimming raft, hauling himself up the ladder, and sitting on the warm wood, panting, letting the sun warm him, in full view.
Twenty
Emma and the children were lost. A fog had dropped down, sudden and dense, blocking the moon. At first they had stayed to the edge of the river, but they must have swung into one of the creeks that looped and split and looped again and now they were spun around, nowhere. At least the tide was high, which allowed Emma and Liam to row the skiffs onto the marsh, where they rested in the tall grass, waiting, trying not to talk, the boats unnervingly echoey without any pears covering the floor. Emma knew she should have gotten them onto the marsh sooner, but she had been too frustrated to think clearly. When the fog fell, they had been within a quarter mile of tonight’s orchard on Thurston Point, their only destination on the Annisquam and—theoretically—their easiest row. They were only a few nights into their two-week harvest schedule, the moon just fatter than half, the air still, their best night for a smooth pick. Missing tonight would require a rearrangement, maybe a reduction in overall pears and profits. (Emma had already decided they would have to skip the Hirsch orchard this year, though she had not come up with a way to explain this to the children.) Worse, it would bring them closer to the day Roland walked up the road, saw the heaps of pears waiting to be pulped on the floor of the shack, and quite possibly called it all off.