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.
Josiah was resolved to his fate, but determined to serve only one term. If Coolidge could pull out in front of the whole nation, Josiah thought, he could do the same in Gloucester. Granted, Coolidge’s son had died—some people said this was behind the president’s decision—but Josiah had his reasons, too. There was, for instance, the fact that he didn’t want to be mayor at all. This, too, he had told Susannah. That had been a relief.
In the meantime, in the abstract, he would continue overseeing the quarry. But Susannah would be manager now. She would do the work she already knew better than he how to do, in the corner office that had belonged first to her father and then to her husband and from which she could see, if she pressed her cheek against the wall, an unimpeded view of Ipswich Bay. She would close the doors some days, unable to speak for the grief that seized her, for all she had agreed to let go, but with time this happened less. She was free now, her mind unclouded with thoughts of her body, her body no longer bound by doctors and false hope. She lost track of her cycles. She kept Sam Turpa on. Her door stayed open.
Caleb was not there to naysay these changes. A month ago, he had dropped off a card inviting Josiah and Susannah to dinner in his formal dining room, where he had laid out one of his prized maps on the table. South America! he had cried as they entered. He would go for a few months, maybe a year. Chile, Argentina. He would see about a trek into Patagonia. He would write them. It would be good to get away.
He had gone, leaving almost no instructions about the quarry or the estate. Josiah and Susannah were left to handle paydays, the union, the shrinking demand for stone. Despite pressure from his father, Josiah had not added his own name to the company sign. He would not try to replace Caleb. The trees on the estate had not been trimmed. When Josiah looked back at it now from the middle of the bay, the buildings were barely visible, the bathhouse a little white lump behind the pines.
Susannah stopped to rest. She didn’t hold on to the boat—holding on was a disqualification—but treaded water, her eyes on the still distant mound of Hog Island.
“Your lips are purple,” he said.
“I’m cold.”
“Come in.”
She swam on. Her pace was slowing, but he would say nothing more. His fear was nothing compared with her desire. The muscles in her arms twisting and pulling, the gust of her inhale when her face lifted from the water. Her beauty stunned him, and not in a brotherly sort of way.
The day after their dinner at Caleb’s, he had picked up Emma at the coffee shop and surprised her by staying parked on Washington Street, in full view. He was the opposite of artful. His sternum felt bruised. He could not look her in the eye. “I can’t see you again,” he said. Why was he surprised when she did not weep or berate him but sat still as a rock, forcing him to look at her face in profile, her hard jaw, her throat visibly working back tears? “I’ll get myself home,” she said after a few minutes in silence. Then she was gone from his car and walking toward Leverett Street. Josiah, feverish, thinking what did he have to lose, thinking, Go, go, finish cleaning up the messes you’ve made, drove straight from there to the Hirsch estate, to apologize to Beatrice Cohn for the way he’d dropped her from the campaign. She looked different—less standoffish. She listened. He was focused on getting back to Susannah, determined to do the deed and run, but Mrs. Cohn’s face, listening, was so reminiscent of Emma’s dark girl, who had looked out at him from the perry shack with her dark eyes that bore through you, asking for something, though he couldn’t figure what, it shook loose a quaking in Josiah. And though he did not put it all together the way it was, he did have the thought, as he drove home to Susannah, that some people try very hard to have children and others not to have them but that there is never, ever a way to even it all out.
“Okay.” Susannah’s bone white fingers gripped the gunwale. “I’m done.”
As Josiah moved to help her up, the boat tilting drastically, the dark water sloshing beneath him, he saw that he could never do what Susannah did. No matter how strong he got at rowing, he could not get into that water and swim. Nausea choked him. But he remembered to spread his legs and hold the back one firm for counterbalance and he managed, grunting, Susannah’s legs nearly useless with cold, to haul her up onto the bench. He wrapped her in blankets, poured her the chocolate he’d brought, and turned the boat toward the shore. The beach swung into view, then a pair of seals, flopping up onto an edge of exposed rock. The tide was turning. He rowed harder. “It’ll be all right,” he said. “Even Ederle trains in a pool, you know.”
Susannah nodded. Her teeth chattered. Her goggles had left deep circles around her eyes. A chunk of lard had congealed at the tip of her nose. She smiled. Even her gums were purple. He had not noticed Susannah’s gums before. “It’ll be fine,” she said, and closed her eyes, letting steam from the cup warm her face. “I can see now that I’m going to make it.”