Ira smiled. He had thought newspapers were going to shit when he retired, but now—except for the Freiheit and a few others—they read like veritable graveyards. There was the inane and endless coverage of the Snyder-Gray murder, the driveling deification of Lindbergh, the four-inch headlines devoted to the opening of the Roxy while the Mississippi flood, half a million homeless, was already dead in the back pages. This Kehoe fellow out in Michigan blew up a school, killed forty-two people, almost all children, and a couple days later the New York Times forgot about it. And what about Sacco and Vanzetti, still awaiting execution? Felix Frankfurter’s piece in the Atlantic in March had destroyed the case against them, then last month a bomb had been sent to Governor Fuller’s house. But the papers, after a day or two of condemnation and platitude, had returned to detailing Lindbergh’s youthful smile. If that wasn’t complete bull . . .
It was also possible, Ira considered, that he just wasn’t interested anymore in what most people considered “news.” Or perhaps he had transcended it, via age or grief or immobility. He thought Vera would have something to say about the difference—or maybe similarity—between not being interested in something and having transcended it. She would remind him to laugh at himself. But it was hard to laugh at himself, by himself. So Ira smiled, and continued. To clarify, the entry might go on: Ira’s brother, the shoe man Henry Haven, née Heschel, also called himself Hirsch once upon a time, until he met Lillian Kunkel, who insisted on Haven. And that was the beginning of the split between the Heschel brothers. Henry Haven made himself a fortune, and Ira Hirsch married into one, which allowed him to continue thinking of himself as a Marxist and a Jew even though he lived in a very large house, sent away to England for his pear trees because the name “Braffet” gave him a thrill, and entertained men and women whose blood ran mostly blue. True, they were often artists, like his wife, Vera, née Victoria Bent Oakes, but artists in the safest sense of the word, for they could take great risks while risking very little. But this was roaming from the point. The point was Ira’s younger brother, Henry, whom Ira had not seen in years. Was that possible? It was. Ira Hirsch’s brother, Henry Haven, the shoe man, did not accompany his wife to Gloucester yesterday, not because he cannot find time to make the trip, but because he cannot forgive his brother his kindness to Beatrice Cohn, who comes to the Hirsch home during bouts of “instability” because this is where she wants to come. Henry Haven is too ashamed to forgive Ira Hirsch, and Ira Hirsch is too angry to forgive Henry Haven.
That would be a fair place to end. It would be honest, at least—it was where things stood and would probably go on standing until he and Henry were both dead. Ira could hear Bea downstairs, rearranging things, no doubt choosing a nice dress, putting herself back in order. He would have liked to fall asleep again—his chest hurt—but his chest hurt, so he couldn’t fall asleep. He could call for Bea, and she would rub his feet, and he would drift off again maybe, but if he drifted off with Bea rubbing his feet in the stew he was in now, he was likely to dream the dream in which Vera’s angora shawl floated by on the outgoing tide, the dead baby wrapped within. This was what Ira had never told Henry and Lillian, for Bea’s sake, for his own, for theirs, too: the child was gone the day after the pear people came, along with Vera’s shawl, which Ira had bought for her in a little Paris shop. Bea had used the pear thieves, Ira figured, as distraction; she’d gone down the hill in the other direction and drowned the thing off the rocks. Ira had seen something, that afternoon, drifting out toward Thacher Island. That had not been a dream, the listless something forty feet or so offshore, too distant for Ira to see clearly. It might have been a dead gull, or a man’s shirt buoyed by driftwood. Still, the fact remained: the baby was gone.
He questioned his niece, but she appeared paralyzed; she wouldn’t even open her mouth. Ira had slapped her—the only time. Then he’d seen that the front of her dress was wet. Her milk was leaking. I’m sorry, he’d said, wishing Vera weren’t too sick that day to help the girl, wishing, as Bea began to weep, that he had the courage to hold her. Instead he’d called for the nurse and left the room.
A month after that, Vera died. And her dying became associated in his mind with the baby’s, so that in his dream he would sometimes see, wrapped in Vera’s shawl, where the swollen lump of the baby’s face should be, Vera’s face, her lemon-colored hair wound around her neck, her expression peaceful, almost saintly, as it had been when he’d found her.
Ira touched the pain in his chest. Vera wasn’t part of the story anymore, he knew. He had told her she could leave, her last night, to make it easier for her. He had never regretted that. Yet he missed her. He doubted he would live long enough to stop missing her. Whereas Henry, he predicted, would live forever and barely be cognizant of what he had, or lost, along the way. Ira watched a fishing boat trudge into the harbor, its gunwales low, laden. He heard the call of the new buoy. It didn’t bother him as it did Bea. He found it comforting, actually: that the buoy was out there, calling with the water and the wind, keeping Ira apprised of what was going on in the world. He let his eyes close.
Today Beatrice Cohn lives with her uncle, Ira Hirsch, on Eastern Point and he is uncertain that she will ever leave. He doesn’t want her to leave, for his own sake, but he wants her to want to, for hers. He would never say this to her. Also he would never tell her that even after all these years, he cannot tell if she is actually unstable, or just very sad.
Eight