by Anna Solomon
“If you say so.” Lillian smiled her half smile. “How is Uncle Ira?”
“The same. Oakes and Rose and Julian are coming next week.”
“How are they?”
“I don’t know.”
“Dumb,” Lillian said. “Oakes and Rose anyway. You could use those two in one of your campaigns. They’re a fine example of what drink will do.”
“Rose is a doctor,” Bea said, grateful to Lillian for leaving Julian out of it. “And Oakes was dumb as a child. Ask Uncle Ira.”
“I wouldn’t want to bother him,” Lillian said. Her eyes roamed toward the ceiling, then back down. She had only once gone upstairs to see Vera when she was sick. Lillian had shrunk even from her own parents when they got old, Bea remembered, touching them only with her fingertips, visibly working to narrow her nose against their odors. “He’s the same, yes, sleeping, most likely? I ought to go soon, anyway, if I want to make the next train. I’ll come back next week, maybe your father will come with me, or not, you know the store is doing quite well, those silly boots he made for the war, Bert Lacey wore them in his latest picture and now the young men love them, they wear them to all the functions and then they show up in the Herald and the Globe and then the poorer boys want them, too, so the store is busy.”
Lillian stood. She looked beautiful, thought Bea, though she knew, when her mother got home, that she would change her dress five more times and watch her nose in the mirror for an hour before agreeing to go down for supper.
“Do you need a car?” Bea asked, standing.
“No. I told the driver to wait.”
In the drive sat a taxicab. Of course, Bea thought. She wondered why she bothered throwing her dresses on the floor whenever Lillian came only to have to pick them all up an hour later. Her mother never asked to see Bea’s room. She didn’t even know there was one devoted to her in this house—not one of her cousins’ rooms, her own.
Lillian started for the door. “That bookend,” she said, pointing at a glass lion on a high shelf. “Where is its other one? Where is its friend?” She shrugged and said offhandedly, “You look fine, Bea-Bea.”
“Thank you.”
Lillian paused. She closed her eyes. A ripple of some emotion passed across her forehead. Then her eyes snapped open and she said, “Your cousins, you know, they weren’t so stupid. You were just very smart.”
• • •
Ira was not asleep. He watched Lillian’s hired car disappear down the drive. It would head off the point, past Niles Beach—here he imagined his sister-in-law thinking, How picaresque! in a way she considered generous, not realizing either of her mistakes—and back to the train station, 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 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 th
e 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
And 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 her? He didn’t even know what he meant: living alone. Everyone was always living alone, if you wanted to get depressing about it. If he didn’t live here alone, he would live somewhere else alone. If he lived with another man, as he allowed himself to imagine in the narrow crawl spaces that intersected rational thought, he would: (a) still be alone, because everyone was; (b) perhaps cease to exist, because he didn’t know any men who lived in this way; and (c) be miserable, because the man he wanted to live with had just last week told Albert he didn’t want to see him ever again.
Dear Bea, I’m so sorry
Dear Bea, I’m not sure exactly what I’m writing to say
Dear Bea, I’m not even sure that this will upset you, what I have to say, which makes it all the more confusing—to know how to say it, or even to know why I should bother saying it
Albert was hungry. This was another problem; he hadn’t left the house all week and was very, very hungry. He rubbed his calf. He traced the ridges the table leg had left in his skin. He was asking for a divorce, he supposed. But the word was so dramatic, and final; it seemed to belong to another marriage than theirs. He could imagine Bea reading it and bursting into laughter.
He released his calf, winced, took up another piece of stationery, made for Bea’s confirmation ceremony fourteen years ago. Lillian had chosen the shade of pink, and the embossed initials: BTH. Beatrice Theodosia Haven, Theodosia for Feigel, who had been Lillian’s or Henry’s grandmother, Albert couldn’t remember which. He also couldn’t remember how they’d gotten Theodosia out of Feigel (they had drawn the T from the Hebrew equivalent of Feigel, Tsipporah) but the distance between the words represented for him part of the problem. Bea was so attached, on the one hand, and so utterly unattached, on the other.
Even when they met, at Congregation Adath Israel’s Purim Ball, where Albert played one of Vashti’s handmaidens with such gusto and so much chest hair that he found himself attacked afterward by a herd of young women, Bea was not among them. It wasn’t until the party was winding down and Albert, having extracted himself, was walking toward the men’s room, that he felt a hand on his elbow and found himself being steered toward an out-of-the-way window by Beatrice Haven, who wasn’t known to bat her eyelashes at a man, let alone touch him. She started to introduce herself, but Albert smiled and said, “I know who you are. No Booze Beatrice. I’m Albert Cohn, who likes to drink.”
Bea did not blink. “But do you like women, Mr. Cohn?”
He unhooked himself from her arm. “Excuse me?”
“Do you prefer us?”
“That depends on the context.”
“In the context of marriage, Mr. Cohn.”
“I don’t prefer to be married.”
“And what if the woman, hypothetically, didn’t want to be married either?”
Albert, looking around the room, lowered his voice. “And why wouldn’t this hypothetical woman want to be married?”
“Let’s say she was strange. Or lonely.”
“If she were lonely, wouldn’t she want to marry?”
“That would depend on the nature of her loneliness.”
“I see.” Albert nodded, trying to look sober, but he’d drunk a lot of whiskey and the conversation was so far from anything he’d ever participated in. A kind of giddiness swept through him.
“Forget loneliness,” Bea said. “Let’s say she’d simply had enough of men.”
“She’s a man hater.”
“If we must call her that.”
“She hates men. Except for a man like me.”
Bea didn’t answer.
“But her mother wants her to marry,” he said. “Her mother has wanted her to marry since she could walk.”
“Her mother must be like his mother,” she said.
Albert took off his wig. He’d forgotten he had it on. “Is this a proposal?”
“I’ve never known a woman to propose.”
“And I’ve never heard of a woman who wanted to marry a fairy. Not knowingly, anyway.”
“Well, then.” Bea flushed. “Consider me down on one knee.”
He scratched behind one ear, then the other. The wig had made him itchy, and the scratching was straightforward and satisfying. He kept at it, needing more as he went. “I barely know you.”
“You know of me.”
“I know you spend a great deal of time trying to rid the world of my second-favorite vice.”
“That’s only politics.”
“If that’s only politics, you’re quite an actress.”
He watched her watching him, her eyes taking in his tutu and his woman’s shoes.
Nothing more had been said that night. Albert took her hand as if he’d done it a hundred times before, and turned them to face the room.
Dear Bea,
Out the window, just visible through the budding tree that flanked the opposite townhouse, was Lillian and Henry’s house one block over on Chestnut Street, their windows turning purple as they caught the sun. Albert guessed Henry would hate him, and Lillian would act as if she hated him, too, while secretly she would soften toward him, relieved. Albert didn’t think he should care what his in-laws thought, and yet he did, which was yet another problem, not what they thought but his caring, or it was emblematic of his largest problem, which was, he supposed, if he was going to be honest—he took out a fresh piece of paper—what he really wanted to tell Bea.
There was a secret court
Albert’s senior year at Harvard, there had been a secret court. It was convened after the suicide of a student named Cyril Wilcox, who had been involved—according to his brother—in homosexual activities. (Cyril’s brother informed Harvard’s acting dean of this only after he’d gone and beat up Cyril’s lover.) Thus the court, consisting of the dean, a professor of hygiene, and several others, began interviewing reputedly homosexual students about their practices of masturbation, habits of cross-dressing, uses of slang, parties attended and with whom, etc. After thirty such interviews, the court reported its findings to P
resident Abbott Lawrence Lowell and, based on the evidence, expelled eight students, one of whom, Eugene Cummings, killed himself in Stillman Infirmary a few days later.
I was not called in
It could be said—it would be said—that no one knew what had gone on. But the court knew. President Lowell (the same man Governor Fuller had just appointed to sit on the Sacco and Vanzetti commission) knew. And the boys knew: the ones who were refused positive references by Harvard and therefore rejected by other colleges; the ones who had perjured themselves before the court and denied all kissing, mutual masturbation, fondling, and dancing; and the ones like Albert, who had stayed so far away, kept his head so low, and pretended so earnestly to himself that he was nothing like Wilcox or Cummings that he never got called in.
I watched
A wretchedness had flattened Albert when he heard about Cummings, a spine-wracking fever had forced him to bed for a day. But then he’d stood up, moved on, watched his back, gotten his job at the bank, accepted and framed and hung his indecipherable diploma, married Bea a year later, and so on and so forth. Then last year he’d run into one of the boys who’d been expelled, Tederick Whitlock III, onetime champion sailor and heir, tending bar at the Green Lamp (an underground coupling of the establishments formerly known as the Lighted Lamp and Green Shutters). Albert didn’t recognize Teddy at first, changed as he was, fluid and toothy where he’d been stiff and grim, his shirt open to his bony, aristocratic chest. Older. But Teddy recognized Albert. He took Albert’s money, rose on his toes to lean across the bar, and said, You fuck.
They’d taken up together. Teddy beat on Albert, screwed him, bit him, called him names, and Albert, so much bigger than Teddy, took it as his punishment. For months this went on and Albert thought it would continue going on, a mutual convenience. But then Teddy had questions. He wanted to talk. He wanted Albert to say why he’d lied and when Albert said he hadn’t lied, Teddy said of course he had, and when Albert said he’d had to, Teddy refused to hit him—he said calmly, We all had to. Albert said Teddy’s breeding afforded him leniency in the world, that he didn’t know what it was to be a Jew, and Teddy reminded him that he’d been disowned. He hadn’t seen his siblings in years. Albert said, At least you’re free, and Teddy laughed a quiet, mean laugh and Albert realized he’d fallen in love with Teddy, which had never happened to him before in such an appalling, unfixable way. But Teddy was done. Teddy said he’d met a boy, and I really mean a boy, and then he said it wasn’t the boy at all, actually, it was Albert he didn’t want any more to do with because Albert was despicable and Albert shouldn’t go to the Green Lamp anymore either, because that was Teddy’s livelihood. Albert worked at First National and Teddy worked at the Green Lamp, because I’m so fucking free, and Albert should at least respect that.
