They stopped responding to her. Ira kept waiting for her to admit she was wrong—if not lying, then mistaken. She had been dreaming. Everyone gets confused sometimes, he said, Vera used to get confused, even I sometimes think not entirely thought-through, thoughtful—what do you call them?—thoughts. He tried to make her laugh. But she looked at him without any sign of confusion or torment and said, calmly, I know what I saw. Her certainty was the worst part, proof of how fully she had unraveled. It sat heavy on Ira, and there was his guilt, too, at how Bea’s suffering had brought his brother back to him. The shipwreck seemed to have roused Henry from his tunnel of commerce, and then Bea’s hallucination had roused him further, so that he had come to visit each weekend and on some days, like this one, in the evening after work. Ira couldn’t have predicted the pleasure Henry’s company would bring him. For years, he had thought of his brother as a statue, made of wax, but he was real, with warm, hairy forearms and, across his balding brow, a shock of black hair which by this time in the day, in the middle of August, had started to frizz and fly. Henry hadn’t been hard about Bea all those years, Ira decided, but overcome. Or, if he’d been a little hard, Lillian had bossed him into it. But that wasn’t entirely fair, either. Ira was less inflamed by thoughts of Lillian now that Henry had returned. Even Lillian herself didn’t seem so hateful. She’d joined Henry on his weekend visits, along with Albert, who was good to all of them, taking Bea out on long walks, pushing Ira down to Mother Rock, making tea for Lillian and Henry, going out on his own once Bea and Lillian had gone to bed, walking for hours—they didn’t see him until morning—so that Ira and Henry could play chess.
Bea sat, rubbing her face with her hands, preparing to go fetch the letter. “Nah nah nah-nah!” the mailman might have shouted. The picketers had dispersed but venomous missives continued to arrive, accusing Bea of crimes ranging from attempted manslaughter and bribery to excessive wealth. Many referenced Sacco and Vanzetti in some way, suggesting that Bea was directly responsible for the persecution of the working class. Their letters mobbed Bea’s desk, spilled onto the floor, while nearly every day another piece about Bea’s fiasco ran in the Gloucester Daily Times, next to headlines about Sacco and Vanzetti. Today’s article exposed the number of extra ambulances the city had to maintain year-round for the two months when the population boomed with summer people like Beatrice Cohn. If she had been a Protestant, Ira thought, her fellow vacationers might have stood up for her. But she wasn’t. They didn’t.
“Sweetheart,” Henry said. “Don’t bother with the letter. Let me burn it. Come. Sit with us awhile longer.”
“I wasn’t sitting with you.”
“Lie with us. Lie back down. We’ll read to you.”
Bea stood. Ira shook the Globe in her direction. “Look! They’re cheering in Buenos Aires and Paris! It’s progress, at least.”
Bea took the paper and read for a minute. “I wonder what made him change his mind.”
“The bombs,” Ira said with joy. “The demonstrations! London, Chicago, Brussels, everywhere. Workers standing up as one!”
“You think a few bombs scared Fuller?” Henry huffed. “They sent one to his house in May, didn’t change his mind. You think he cares about the mighty granite cutters threatening to strike?” Henry shook his head. “He’s got two hundred million in riot insurance, tear gas by the truckload, machine guns stacked like wood. It’s not up to him anyway. It’s the judges who decide.”
“That’s what Fuller would have us think,” said Ira.
Bea handed the paper back. “They should get a fair trial. I do believe that, even if the throngs think I’m a beast. But it won’t make any difference in the end. They criticize America. Their English is bad. I wouldn’t execute them. But they’ll be executed.”
She left the room.
“I wouldn’t bother her with the news while she’s still in it,” Albert said from his spot at the window. He was thinking of Lyman Knapp, the man who owned the huge, strange house on the harbor and who was a great success in interior design in Boston. On the afternoon Albert had dared climb onto his raft, Lyman had swum out to say hello. He was gaunt, with an easy grin and a hairless chest. They were lovers now.
Ira and Henry looked at each other, then Henry shut the paper and slid it under his left buttock. Ira smiled. Even as his ever-roving mind drew lines from Sacco and Vanzetti to Bea (for wasn’t it all about money, in the end? didn’t class oppression work both ways?), his brother’s boyish charm titillated him. So what if Henry was, politically speaking, a simpleton and a jackass? He knew how to get things done, which was more than Ira could say about himself. Ira slid the Globe under his own haunch and circled his hands on his wrists, then straightened his right leg and circled his foot, then straightened his left leg and circled that foot, and the maneuvers, undone for decades, brought him back to the loud, tiled lunchroom at the William Cabot School for Boys, where each morning, before lunch, the headmaster would direct them to rise from their chairs, stretch their arms and legs, and perform twenty jumping jacks. Ira remembered how anxiously he had watched the gaggle of younger boys. Where were Henry’s hands? Had he fallen? Did he not understand the rules? Later, Ira learned that Henry had been sitting calmly on the floor, out of the headmaster’s view: already he had devised the most efficient route to success. His brother was extraordinary, Ira thought now. Even in that bouncing sea of silken, Gentile hair, Henry had understood how to win.
Bea walked in swinging a torn envelope. “What am I supposed to do now?”
“Sweetheart, why don’t you sit down?”
“It’s from Luis Pereira’s wife.” Bea shook the envelope upside down, releasing a flurry of torn paper. “My check. They don’t want my ‘dirty money.’ The Murphys haven’t deposited theirs, and now the Pereiras rip theirs up. What am I supposed to do?”
“Bea—”
“Why don’t they believe me?”
No one answered.
“Oh,” Bea said. “Of course. You don’t believe me either. You’re awful. All of you. I did see her. I saw her. She was here. The pears . . .”
“Sweetheart.”
“She was! Besides, I’m not talking about that.”
Albert turned. “What is it you want them to believe, Bea?”
“That I’m sorry.”
“You’ve written your apologies. You’ve sent your checks.”
“Exactly!”