had relied on Uncle Ira for her information, and Uncle Ira was prone to telling tales. Nevertheless, Bea had chosen to believe him. It happened every year, he said. When the moon was bright enough to see by but not to be easily seen, the air still enough not to carry sound or scent. The pears on the verge of starting to drop. He never heard or saw a thing, but the next morning he would look out his window and down the hill and there, where the day before the pears had packed the branches like sparrows, there would be only leaves and the gray, fleshy stubs from which the pears had grown. Uncle Ira smiled, describing this. They might be giraffes, he mused. Giants! Ira harbored a kind of love for the trespassers who stole his pears. They made him feel benevolent.
But really, he said, Catholics. A poor Irish family who had found a market for pears. And Bea believed him, maybe because she had to. She didn’t know any Catholics. Catholics weren’t Jews, but they were like Jews in that they weren’t Protestants. So there was that. And back home Bea had seen the Irish children walking in packs through the common and envied them, even the poor ones, the company. There looked to be a certain freedom in being one of many: the right to go unnoticed, unattended. Neglect, Bea’s mother would call it, she who had rarely let Bea out of her sight.
Until she had, quite suddenly.
And look at the consequences.
Bea steadied herself against one of the near trees, a tall, straight pine so bare of low branches it entered her consciousness as more human than plant. An idea came to her of sliding down its rough side, lying down on the cushion its needles made beneath her feet, and falling back to sleep with the baby in her arms.
The infant snorted. Bea wouldn’t have guessed that babies snorted but this one snorted all the time, followed by a tremulous sigh. The sigh came. Bea shifted the infant to her shoulder. High above them, a branch creaked and shifted, making way for moonlight. Already its angle had changed. If Bea waited for the people to arrive, she would lose her resolve, or she would keep it and be seen and the people would tell Uncle Ira and he would tell her parents and her mother would make her give the baby to the awful woman who had come last month from the Orphanage for Jewish Children, reeking of camphor and assuring Aunt Vera and Uncle Ira that she did not believe in spoiling, kissing, or otherwise unnecessarily touching babies.
She began to walk. Her neck was wet with the baby’s breath and to counter the sensation, and whatever emotion it might lead to, she did what she had trained herself to do over the months of carrying the baby, as rigorously as she had ever trained herself to play a Beethoven sonata or pen a thank-you card in the microscopic, finger-cramping script that satisfied her mother: she thought of other things. The pear trees, which she could see more clearly with every step. They were Braffets, she knew, not because she understood anything about fruit or trees but because Uncle Ira talked about his pears all the time, as though they were the children he wished he’d had, braver and brighter than his own. Have you seen the Braffets, battling the frost? Look at those Braffets, blossoming like little gods. Who knew I would be so lucky to have such Braffets. Thirty-one years ago, he had imported the trees from Sussex, England, paying their fare not in cargo but in third class, where each one, wrapped in burlap, its roots watered daily by a hired boy, occupied its own bunk. The Braffets are in the orchard, fermenting the revolution. Bea tightened her hold on the bundle of baby and shawl. She had reached the stone wall that marked the orchard’s western boundary. She squinted into the dark, straining to hear the first sounds of feet and wheelbarrows, but heard nothing apart from the lazy slap of water on the rocky beach down below. The pears waited on their branches. Vera’s exotic fish swam silently in their little pond. The infant made no sound but Bea covered its mouth with her hand anyway, half knowing its lips would move to suck her palm, half pretending to be surprised at the warm, wet mouth as it burrowed and