The fog was cool, the children silent and good, but Emma’s insides jiggled and cried, Damn fog, damn fog! Not knowing when Roland would be home was like having a rope set around her neck that might or might not be yanked at any minute, dragging her back into her real life, even as that life started to feel like a dream and this one, the one she’d built in Roland’s absence, like the real one. A couple evenings ago Emma stood in the back of the Gilbert Club, wearing a broad hat to hide her face, and listened while Mrs. Cohn regaled the crowd with reasons to be afraid—indolence, criminals, all that was new in America, etc.—though how Josiah Story would protect them from all this wasn’t made entirely clear. Story followed Mrs. Cohn’s speech with a few words of thanks and a couple inarguable remarks, his hair slicked back, signs of Susannah all over him. With his handsome jaw, Emma thought, he could have stood there silently and the crowd would have cheered. Then he smiled a smile Emma knew wasn’t real, stepped down from the stage, and kissed Susannah, seated in the front row. Emma left before Susannah could turn around, before Emma could see whether she had started to show. She was glad for them, but jealous, too, a feeling that lowered her to a new depth of self-repugnance.
What surprised her, though, as she started the walk downtown to catch the bus that would take her home, was the realization that she hadn’t gone to see Susannah or Story as much as to see Mrs. Cohn. Emma hadn’t been able to imagine Mrs. Cohn giving a speech but there she was, her hair flattened even more extravagantly than Story’s, her face in unfamiliar relief, her eyes flashing behind spectacles. “Your vote is your opportunity not to inspire but to influence, not to be trampled on by popular trends but to trample upon them!” Her voice was powerful where it often warbled, her message singular where she hedged and circled. Not too long ago, Emma would have tossed this off as hypocrisy; she would have felt a cruel pride at having proved Mrs. Cohn’s falseness, for having seen her rocking on the bed, tearing at the locket, moaning uncontrollably. Instead, she found herself worrying for Mrs. Cohn, and for herself: her own slippery costumes, her lies. She’d taken the big hat off as soon as she was out of sight of the club, and spent more time than usual that night singing the children to sleep.
Lucy Pear watched her from the stern bench, where she sat beside Janie. She was oddly moody in recent days, almost furtive when Emma tried to look her in the eye, a change Emma connected to the girl’s heavier hips—all that was coming earlier for her than it had for Emma’s other girls. But the other children were growing up, too, at a disorienting pace—even Joshua strutted around the yard now, handing his sisters nails as they put the finishing touches on the perry shack. Meanwhile Emma went off to the Hirsch house to care for another family.
She set down the oars and rubbed at her hands, as if she might smooth the nicks and bruises that hundreds of pear branches had pounded into them. “Shh,” whispered Janie, at the sound Emma’s hands made. “Shh-shh,” Joshua said from the bow, and giggled. “Hush!” hissed Lucy Pear, her eyes darting wildly, though there was nothing to look at but fog, multiplied. Even Liam and Jeffrey, three feet away in Story’s father’s boat, were barely visible: vague brushstrokes through the white-black shroud of the night.
“All of you, calm,” Emma whispered. “Sing ‘Molly Malone’ to yourselves.”
Almost imperceptibly, the boats began to rock. Water slapped against the hulls, the marsh grass shifted and sighed. Emma knew they had gotten to the chorus—Alive alive oh-ho, alive alive oh-ho, crying cockles and mussels, alive alive oh-ho . . . —when the rhythm picked up slightly. She smiled. This, she knew, Roland would approve of. It had been his invention: Silent Singing. Sometimes he was sweet like that, in a way that could still make her swoon. He surprised her regularly, with little gifts: a rose “borrowed” from Mrs. Parson’s garden, or two sticks he’d whittled—when he was supposed to be gutting fish—for putting up her hair. This was the Roland she could not resist, the slyly rebellious man who long ago had come from a job painting boat bottoms at Niles Beach and told her how, on his lunch break, he had discovered a hidden field of pear trees.
“Mum?”
A third boat had materialized. It had simply slipped in beside them, holding two men. They might have been unicorns at first, the vision was so surreal, until Emma fully registered the guns raised at their ears. She swatted the children’s heads down, felt her body depart itself, try to float.
“Federal agents, ma’am. Prohibition Bureau.”
“Mummy!” cried Joshua behind her, his voice muffled in her dress.
“Please. It’s just me and my children. Will you put down the guns?”
The larger man, his jowls softening, returned his gun to its holster, but his companion, bouncing a skinny leg, only dropped his hand slightly.
“What’s this?” he said, standing to peer into their boats.
“It’s nothing,” Emma said.
The larger man, in front, grabbed the gunwale of Emma’s boat and pulled her and the children in, as if reeling in fish. He leaned over to look, his shaggy head nearly brushing Lucy Pear, whose face twisted as if waiting to be hit—a fear Emma had not seen in her before. The man didn’t notice. “It really is,” he said as he peered into the boat. He looked quizzically at Emma. “What are you doing out here?”
She shrugged. “A tradition. The moon. We live just up the creek. We didn’t expect a fog.”
“A tradition,” sneered the thin man. “That’s what they all say. What about the moon? It’s not full, it’s not new. It’s nothing.”
“There’s nothing in the boats, Finny,” said the large man. “What’s your name, ma’am?”