Leaving Lucy Pear by Anna Solomon

where she would sit in her car until, at the last possible minute, with the southbound whistle bearing down, she would yell at the driver to open her door, thinking to herself,
These people.
    Tomorrow, perhaps, in the
Gloucester Daily Times,
there would be an entry in the social register:
Mrs. Beatrice Cohn entertained Mrs. Lillian Haven, of Boston, at the home of Ira Hirsch on Eastern Point.
Which would be the truth, if the truth were made of facts. Ira knew the difference, having been a newspaperman himself. More accurately, the lackey writing the social register might write,
Mrs. Lillian Haven, née Kunkel, socialite Jewess from Boston posing as a WASP, took the 12 o’clock train up to Gloucester yesterday to psychologically abuse her daughter, Mrs. Beatrice Cohn, née Haven, at the home of dying widower Ira Hirsch, née Heschel.
    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 caseagainst 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