Chapter 10 - The Ground on Benefit Street
The flat on Benefit Street did not have an ocean view.
It had three windows that looked out on a row of red-brick chimneys and an iron fence where the streetcar had turned around until forty-eight. Inside, the ceilings were ten feet high, with white plaster roses in the center that had been painted over so many times they looked like heads of boiled cauliflower.
Emily sat at the mahogany desk from the butler’s pantry, typing the final page of a transcript for a probate lawyer whose office was two blocks from the state house.
In the matter of the Estate of Arthur Vane, deceased:
The undersigned commissioner reports that all claims concerning the Sakonnet coal property have been satisfied by the delivery of forty-two shares of the common stock of the Narragansett Pier Railroad to the surviving heirs.
The Remington hummed—a steady, clean vibration that made the small brass key rattle where it sat inside an empty tea cup beside the ink bottle.
A car stopped in the street below.
It was not the sound of a yellow cab or the baker’s delivery van. It was the heavy, low-geared rumble of an old Dodge wagon with an eight-cylinder engine that needed its tappets adjusted.
Emily did not go to the window.
She finished the line.
Witness my hand and seal this fourteenth day of November, nineteen hundred and eighty-four.
The bell in the hall gave its single, dry ding.
She walked through the kitchen, where her mother was paring turnips over an enamel basin, through the dark vestibule with its smell of dry pine and yellow varnish, and opened the door to the street.
Silvio was not there.
Coyle was not there.
Santino Ferrara sat in the Dodge wagon, in the passenger seat, with the window rolled down three inches against the sleet that had begun to tick against the slate roofs of College Hill. He was wearing his oilskin coat, the collar turned up to his cheekbones, his hands flat against the horn ring of the steering wheel.
He did not get out. He couldn't.
He looked at her through the three inches of open glass.
"The pear tree," he said, his voice carrying over the sound of the idling eight-cylinder engine.
Emily pulled her cardigan tight across her chest. "What about it?"
"It’s not dead," Santino said. He reached down to the floor of the cab, picked up a wooden basket with an iron wire handle, and set it on the window ledge.
Inside were six small, hard, yellow pears, no larger than hen’s eggs, their skins scarred with brown rust from the salt wind.
"They're sour," he said. "You have to boil them with three cups of sugar and two cloves before you can put a tooth in them."
Emily walked down the three brownstone steps. Her slippers were thin, soaking up the freezing slush from the curb, but she didn't look down at her feet.
She took the basket by the wire handle.
The fruit was cold—hard like river gravel that had been left in the frost.
"The lawyer in Providence," Santino said, looking down the street toward the river where the salt mist was beginning to swallow the lower bridges, "wants three thousand dollars for the search on the Tiverton deeds."
"He’s charging you twelve hundred too much," Emily said. "The search only goes back to sixty-two. The rest is in the state library in the basement."
Santino Ferrara looked at her for three seconds.
His eyes had the color of the ice on the pond—not cold now, but clear, the way water looks when the mud has finally settled to the bottom and the weeds have died back for the winter.
"Sixteen words a minute," he said.
"Eighty," she corrected, her chin coming up against the sleet. "And the Latin is still extra."
He turned the handle of the Dodge, threw the transmission into low gear with a heavy, mechanical clonk that shook the chassis, and let the clutch out two inches.
"Tomorrow at six," he said through the glass. "And bring your own pencils. Silvio says the ones from the five-and-dime break when you write the tonnage on the carbon."
May you like
The car moved away from the curb, its rear tires throwing two long arcs of gray slush across the cobbles of Benefit Street.
Emily stood by the iron gate, holding the six sour pears against her apron, until the red taillights of the Dodge had crossed the bridge and disappeared into the fog that was rolling up the bay from Newport, covering the docks, the salt, and the long, still water that had finally let them both go.
