Leaving Lucy Pear by Anna Solomon Page A

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
    A nd Albert Cohn, he wasn’t with another man. He was alone, in his underwear, at Bea’s writing table. He was a large man, and the table was very small, with fussy legs that knobbed into his calves and a sliding leaf—stuck for years in its fully extended position—that was slowly but steadily purpling his elbow. Albert could have chosen somewhere else to write his letter; the house on Acorn Street was full of horizontal surfaces. But the table helped solidify his resolve. It was like a perpetual pinch, urging him on.
    He was writing to Bea, to tell her that he wanted to live alone. This was his first problem: his basic purpose was undermined by the fact that he already
was
living alone. He’d been living alone for months and could continue living alone, doing whatever in hell he wanted, until Uncle Ira died, or—if Bea decided to stay on in Gloucester, which she might, for all sorts of reasons, some known to her, some not—maybe forever.
    So what was it he wanted to tell