“I wondered if it was blood, actually,” Rebecca said. Ruth put the coins down. “There’s nothing remarkable about them, except she had them saved,” Rebecca added. “They’re all from before the fire, 1910, 1909, I think the oldest one is 1907, the Indian-head penny. And one of them looks like a Russian kopeck, that little silver one—it’s not a dime.”

Ruth was now opening the glasses and holding them up at arm’s length to see the magnification property. “Are these your grandmother’s spectacles?”

“I don’t really see how they could be,” Rebecca said. “She never wore glasses with that kind of lens. That’s a really strong prescription, and even at the end of her life she didn’t need that much correction. Anyway, she didn’t keep her old eyeglasses in the bank in a safe-deposit box, she kept them in drawers all over the apartment. She used to do this thing with her glasses that drove me crazy, as a matter of fact. Whenever she got a new prescription, she would fill it, put the frames with the new prescription away, and only then would she start using the previous pair of glasses she had put away with the last prescription the year before.”

“Really?” George said. “So she was always one prescription behind?”

“Yes. She was always saving them. It never made any sense. But anyway, these here are really old frames, and I am certain I have never seen them before or I would remember them from when I was little, if they were Esther’s.”

“Did you ask her why she did it?” Ruth asked.

“I did. More than once. I’m telling you, it drove me nuts.”

“What was her answer?”

“She said something I never understood about how it was so she could see the world a little blurry on purpose, that a lot of people go through their lives without being able to see clearly, and who did she think she was to see everything perfectly?”

“Pretty crazy. That makes no sense at all,” George said. “Why get prescription lenses then? Why not just sit home and be blind?”

“I can’t explain it,” Rebecca said.

“How fascinating,” Ruth murmured, taking notes all the while. She finished writing and picked up the eyeglasses thoughtfully, holding them in front of her face to peer through the thick, cloudy lenses, which from Rebecca’s vantage point magnified her nose, her pores, and her faint mustache. “A deliberate subjugation, in her latter years, of her potential female power to perceive the truths in this man’s world,” she added.

“She never thought about it that way, I guarantee you,” Rebecca said impatiently.

“Maybe she had seen enough,” George said.

“Anyway, I’m telling you, I never saw her wear these frames or anything like them,” Rebecca said. “She always wore those sort of pointy Joan Crawford glasses when I was little, and then more recently she got these gigantic square black eighties frames that she loved, so she just kept those going all this time. These look like genuine antiques, don’t you think? They’ve got to be really old.”