“Exactly. That’s all you can do. You can’t make anyone believe anything.” He laid out his palms as if he himself were proof.
“I used to be able to,” she said.
“You think the women who came to your speeches didn’t have their minds already made up?”
Bea whimpered. “I’m like poor Sacco.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Ira said.
Bea rolled her eyes. “I feel that way.”
“Bea.” Albert walked softly toward her, and cupped her shoulders in his hands. “Does it matter if they believe you? If they took the money, if I got them to take it, would that be enough?”
Bea squinted at him. “Enough to do what?”
“To satisfy you. To stop your train wreck.”
“I am not a wreck!” Bea shook him off. “I am not a nut and I am not a wreck, and if I were a wreck it would be because of you!” She swung her glare at each of them. “But I’m not. I am fine! I am absolutely fine!”
“FINE!” pinged off the chandelier, flew around the room, shimmied into silence. Ira looked at his slippered feet, next to Henry’s shining Haven wingtips. Henry looked away, wishing Lillian were there. Albert stared at Bea, as if daring her to say it again. She shook, frustration and humiliation warring in her limbs. She had seen her daughter as clearly as she saw Albert now. She had followed her, but not fast enough: by the time Bea reached the orchard, she had lost her. Bea had crept, then listened, crept, listened. She did not want to frighten the girl away—this was one reason for her caution. But it was also true that Bea herself was afraid: she did not want to discover that there was no girl, that she had, in fact, made her up, drawn her from her haze of Templeton and self-pity. She trained her eyes on the darkness, willing the girl to reappear. She nearly called, Hello? but lost her courage, so neither she nor Lucy heard the other—they were both, mother and daughter, too good at hiding, too practiced at silence. And they moved synchronously, like two second hands on the same watch, driven by the same gear. By the time Bea reached the gap, Lucy was gone. Bea had seen her! But then, what if she hadn’t? Each time she had to defend herself, she felt her certainty split a little more.
She could not say this, of course. She would not give them any more reasons to think she was a loon. She held Albert’s gaze. “It would be something,” she said. Then she gathered up the confettied check and the hateful note and went upstairs, to throw it onto the piles with the others.
Twenty-seven
The paper would speculate that Josiah Story, holed up in his office with the quarry gates locked, was afraid—afraid of what his striking workers would do if he opened the gates for the scabs, afraid of the scabs themselves, Sicilians who had been trucked in from Lowell and who paced, dark-skinned, at the wall. Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution had once again been scheduled—they would die tonight, August twenty-third. No judge had saved them, not William Howard Taft or Harlan Fiske Stone, who were both summering in the North, not Louis D. Brandeis, whose wife had grown close with Sacco’s wife. Brandeis recused himself. There had been more bombings, more demonstrations, more strikes. Steelworkers, textile workers, miners (many of the same miners who would be massacred in Columbine, Colorado, that winter), mill workers, granite cutters. In Gloucester, the wreck of the Mendosa was like kerosene on an already blazing fire.
If Josiah Story wasn’t afraid, wrote Jonathan Hardy, a young reporter who had been praised in school for his impeccable logic, why wouldn’t he let them in? Why wouldn’t Caleb Stanton’s son-in-law let the scabs in?