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By Root 517 0

more than anything but he saw that she was not destined primarily for happiness. She was too complicated for happiness. And he wondered what kind of mother she would be, and if he ever lived to see his grandchildren what kind of happiness they might know. He felt a pain in his chest. He slowed down. He stopped at a stretch of railing and leaned over and caught his breath. The wind pushed his collar and hair leftward and he had the sensation of leaning over the railing on the deck of an ocean liner many years ago. In the memory he was holding a newspaper and he had folded it into quarters to stop it from flapping in the wind. A notice in the lower right-hand corner of the page caught his eye. It was an advertisement announcing that Count Basie would be making his New York debut on Christmas Eve at the Roseland Ballroom. He remembered reading that and looking out over the sea with anticipation and hope. The ocean that day was navy blue and sparkling with handfuls of diamonds thrown from the sun. The jewels seemed to jump up into the clear air and then alight back on the surface of the water like delicate mystical insects. He thought that this is what life would be: fresh and free and filled with light. But then he thought about returning to law school and he loosened his grip on the paper and the wind stirred up and then the pages flew from his hands. They contorted themselves in various positions of torment as they clutched the railing before breaking free and flying, jerking and buckling and sailing above the water, and then fluttering down to the sea.

That was then, he thought, before Vivian, before Iris, before the war. Everything felt so different now, from the way women wore their clothes with those big shoulders and dramatic hats to the music that people played, swing having long since been left behind by serious musicians. Time swung, he thought, even if the music didn’t anymore. He marveled at the way the wind blowing a certain direction could make him feel more than a decade younger and bring him the sensation that he was gazing out at a bright future. The future hadn’t turned out too bad, he reasoned. He loved his devoted wife, his beautiful, complicated daughter, his gorgeous suffering cracked and ever-changing city. No, the future wasn’t too terrible, he thought. It just didn’t really feel like the future anymore.

Iris

The light in the kitchen was dim and silvery blue. Iris was cleaning up the dishes with Pearl when the call came about Joe. He had stayed late at the office. Is your mother home? a voice asked.

She worried that it was something about school. She was fifteen and didn’t much like anything but art class although schoolwork came easily to her and she got good grades. Still, her deportment was a problem. She had refused to file her nails for hygiene class. She had said she would prefer to cut them and this defiance had earned her first detention and then a D. She hoped it wasn’t that beastly woman calling about some other failure to behave. She liked to wear jeans with the cuffs rolled up. She studied, but she liked the boys who listened to the radio. The teachers noticed things like that. But then she saw Pearl wipe her hands a second time on her apron even though they were dry and tilt her head down and put her hand on the back of the wooden chair and, swaying, move her body into the seat. She pressed the phone to her head as if she were trying to receive a message from a distant planet. Pearl repeated what was being said to her and as she softly mouthed the words Iris’s thoughts shattered inside her head. Suddenly the world was trying to reorganize itself and she realized that she would be left with the wrong parent. She loved Pearl but it was for her father that she lived. She felt the truth of this the moment her mother hung up the phone, that there had been a terrible misunderstanding. Your father’s had a heart attack, Pearl said, trying to be gentle but sounding to Iris redundant and cold. When her mother left for the morgue Iris refused to go and she did not come out of her room for two