He noticed the way she was touching the child’s face without even thinking about it and he thought she will never do that again she will never wipe away this girl’s tears or touch the edge of her smile or push her long hair behind her ear with a finger the way mothers do and he thought of the girl and would the girl know that she was missing this even if there was someone else to do those things and then he pushed the thought away and it was the last time he could bear to think it.
You must be tired, he said.
I must be but I don’t feel it.
Take your time. You tell me when you’re ready.
Her hand was touching the tiny perfect hand.
A little longer, she said.
She began to cry.
I don’t want to do this, she said. But I have to, you understand?
He nodded.
You can always see her, he said.
She turned her face to the side and shook her head. I don’t think so, she said.
The baby slept and together they watched her sleeping. Vivian stared downward with that weary loving look but he could hear the screaming inside her head.
She’ll always be yours, he said.
She took a deep breath.
No, she said quietly. But I’ll always be hers.
He felt that this was the saddest he could ever be. She was shaking now, holding the baby close and shaking in a kind of rocking motion and the child was sleeping.
He leaned forward and took them both in his arms. For a moment, they were a family. Her wet cheek was pressed against his neck and her arms around the child pushed into his chest and he welcomed the physical pain. He took Vivian’s face in his hands and he kissed her for the last time while she cried and shook. I can’t do this, she said, looking up at him. And then she handed him the child.
There were fireworks inside Milo, gentle ones like handkerchiefs drooping in surrender and also gigantic and thunderous wheels of light.
•
Do you have everything? Vivian’s mother was standing at the door with Joe while he buttoned his jacket. She handed him a bag filled with blankets and bottles and clothes. She was careful not to look in his eyes. She was holding the door for him now while he reached down and picked up the basket. The yellow light from the house spilled onto the steps and lit his way and then stopped as if giving up against the darkness. He walked into the darkness.
2006
So the baby is Iris, Anna’s mother.
It seems that way.
And Anna, you think she is …
My mother. I think so.
Did you know that this is what happened?
No, I never knew.
Did you know Pearl?
No. She died when I was small. And Anna never talked about her.
Do you want to keep going? he said.
They were lying side by side. She turned to look at him and he seemed more than tired. His eyes wrinkled at the edges and his lips were pale and dry. The yellow flecks still lit up his blue eyes but the blue was gray now and the flecks seemed like stars hovering at twilight. It was as though his strong physical presence was giving way to something else, making room for something else.
Are you all right? she said.
I’m fine if you are, he said.
I’m not fine, she said. But I want to keep going.
He closed his eyes. He felt her roll back over him, her hair sweeping across his chest and then his face. It was like being in some kind of holy car wash. He thought his body was a vehicle and that she was driving him home, driving him crazy, driving him to the end of the road. He remembered an essay he’d had to read in school and one of the lines in it: Everything good is on the highway. He was a car and she was driving him and they were on the highway and they were lost and they were trying to find everything that was good.
Joe
Joe walked by the river. He never stopped walking by the river. He didn’t think that he was looking for anyone, just thinking, and the river helped him think. All the men he knew had to get out of the house sometimes, away from the bills, the lonesome cupboards, the silent cleaning, the baby’s cries. He was a father now. He’d take the car and drive downtown even if he didn’t have much to do in the office and he’d park and he’d walk past the places he used to go when he was in law school or haunts he’d played in when he was still playing music and he’d always end up heading west toward the river. The river was green today and it reminded him of his daughter’s eyes: green and deep and sometimes severe. She was ten now but she could flash her eyes at him like she was a woman, glancing sideways at him flirtatiously one moment, slanted and accusing the next. What was she accusing him of? What did she know? She seemed to know everything, but of course she wouldn’t find any of that out until some years later when she came across the original birth certificate hidden among his papers. They had had a false one too, a doctor friend had obliged, but Joe had always kept the original in a file in a drawer in his office just in case, he told himself, just in case … he didn’t really know why. No, her accusations at this age were more general and, in some ways, more understandable. He was a man filled with guilt and she could smell it and nobody wanted a father weak with guilt. She would have him strong. She would have him able to withstand those green eyes.
But what did he have to feel guilty about? He had made mistakes, everyone makes mistakes, and he did not pretend to be perfect but he had done the best he could given the circumstances. And what were the circumstances? They were the conditions of time and place, America in 1936, where and when he thought his life had ended and begun. A time when the music that he loved played behind everything he felt and did, a music that was considered quintessentially American. But what did that mean? Wasn’t it a lie? Because of course, as he had learned, the music only existed, only swung because it was being led by the cymbals and those discs of beaten metal were not American at all but came from someplace far away and long ago. And he remembered the weekend in Massachusetts and the story of Avedis and how the cymbals had come from an Armenian alchemist in seventeenth-century Turkey, about as far away from Roseland as one could imagine. So the idea that the music had nothing to do with anyplace else, that it was as separate from the world as the country it romanced, this idea was a myth, as all separateness was a fantasy, a dream.
It was the same dream he had fallen into when he met Vivian at the dock, the same fantasy that they could live apart, from the world, from consequences, from Pearl. Like two ships floating in the lenses of a woman’s sunglasses. He had been so young. He had been so stupid. He did not regret falling in love with Vivian and he did not regret what they had made of their love. It was a kind of miracle that he was now able to be a father and that their love had resulted in this tender gift for Pearl. But the gift came with so much sadness that he was not always sure that it was worth it. For him, it was worth it. For Pearl, it was worth it. But what about the girl? Joe was not an intellectual and he was not a philosopher but he had become a thinker and the love he had for his daughter led him to thoughts that he would much rather have not had. He no longer experienced the pain he felt that night at Vivian’s bedside, he would never let himself feel that again, but his punishment was to be someone who would think and think and think. His mind was a river, and its contents were as green and deep and severe as his daughter’s eyes.
He turned up his collar to the wind. He kept walking. His thoughts rushed on, taking him places that he did not want to go. He thought about the future and what his actions would bring in the world. He wanted his daughter’s happiness 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 days. They had not found Joe until he had already been dead for three hours, and during those two days in her room Iris replayed in her mind everything she had done while he was already gone. She had done her homework. She had listened to the radio. She had eaten dinner with her mother. She tried to tell herself that now everything she did would be like that: she would be doing it while he was no longer alive. If she could go back to not knowing that he was not alive everything might be okay. This was when her fifteen-year-old brain began to blame her mother for having ever picked up the phone. It was several years later that she would find in her father’s file cabinets her original birth certificate.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Honor and Milo
They were driving very fast now. Signs sped past in an imaginary window: Bon Vivant Diner, Used Books, Open Twenty-four Hours. Then they drove straight through the city out onto the road. They were giving themselves over to the highway. Honor had an image of herself and Milo at that moment and they looked to her like a soldier and an angel making love in the backseat of a speeding car. The angel’s wings brushed the inside roof of the car and one feathery white tip, gray with soot and exhaust, stuck out the window. The soldier’s boots pressed one against the door and the other against the seat and made a rip in the worn vinyl. In this image of herself and Milo, Honor could not tell which one of them was the angel and which one of them was the soldier.
Pearl
Pearl struggled through the blowing sand and occasionally reached for Anna’s arm to steady herself. She was absorbed by the task of walking through the desert and could not yet take in her surroundings. Later, when she thought about the last time she had seen her granddaughter and great-grandchild she wished that she had spent more time looking at the girls’ faces and less time looking at the sand. The experience of being with Anna in that place again had been overwhelming and unreal and she sometimes wondered if she had actually been there.
The wind had died down and the sand had settled. They reached the top of the dune, where there were two beach chairs waiting for them. Pearl gingerly lowered herself into one of the tiny chairs. She felt a chill although the air was blisteringly hot; she remembered this hot dry weather. The desert stretched out before them but instead of a blank expanse it was strewn with people working and equipment and what looked to her like debris but which in fact was an array of artifacts. A different kind of debris, she thought to herself. She sat atop this mound of sand and was put in mind of generals looking down on a battlefield. Or a director overseeing a film set, she thought, and smiled. She remembered Mr. DeMille and the way he had screeched into his megaphone and stood there silhouetted against the sun like some kind of exotic desert cactus that made noise. If she closed her eyes she could see the Gate of Ramses II and her small self walking under its enormous archway.
She opened her eyes. There stood the very same archway, in the distance, chipped and broken and slanted but standing up in the desert. And all around were vestiges of The Ten Commandments: goblets, chariots, artificial stones. When Anna had told her that her boyfriend was an archaeologist Pearl had imagined the uncovering of ancient tombs and undiscovered hieroglyphs. It seemed like a vaguely noble line of work. But this.
She had been polite about it, and genuinely amazed by the coincidence. Anna hadn’t known that her grandmother had worked in film, let alone on the set of this film, and so when she told Pearl that Rob was on a dig in California unearthing an old film set and then said what film it was she had been stunned to hear her grandmother burst out laughing. Pearl was not someone who regularly burst out laughing. It was a short burst. And then Anna had spontaneously suggested that they go out west together to visit the dig. She had never traveled with Pearl and it seemed an unlikely thing to do, but Anna was at that point in her life up for anything, and besides, she had a young child to look after and perhaps Pearl could help. This was unlikely, since Pearl was now in her eighties, but Anna was still, always, expecting everything to turn out in her favor. So she was not really surprised when Pearl agreed to go. Iris thought it was a terrible idea, but this only strengthened both Pearl’s and Anna’s resolve.
The sun was starting to set and the sky was shimmering with heat. The little girl, Honor, played in the sand. Her hat had fallen off and Pearl thought of mentioning this to Anna but she was careful not to seem a busybody. It was enough that Anna had remembered a hat, she thought; the girl was still in college. The fact of the child had been absorbed, but nevertheless she worried about Anna’s prospects. A single mother. This boyfriend digging for silly props in what was essentially the outskirts of Los Angeles. It was absurd the lengths to which people went to take the movies seriously. She had long ago stopped caring about the
movies. She still went, but there was no such thing as glamour to her anymore. Her head was throbbing from the heat, and her vision seemed to be blurring at the edges, but she didn’t say anything about it.
Anna asked her questions about her job on the film. What had she done as a wardrobe girl? Was this really where she had met her husband, the grandfather whom Anna had never known? The little girl kept sifting the sand and talking quietly to herself. The sun sank a millimeter lower and the whole sky changed, softening, and the heat lifted a little. Anna stopped asking questions. The workers continued their busy activity in the distance. Pearl settled back into the beach chair. Her head throbbed and the scene before her began to pulse and waver in the heat. She felt faint but she didn’t want to trouble Anna. She experienced a dull jolt in the side of her skull like she was bumping her head in a dream and then she knew that she had drifted to someplace unreal. She would stay there, she thought. Just for a moment. Nobody else had to know.
A figure came walking toward them across the sand. It appeared to be a man. Pearl was aware that he had been summoned from her imagination but she did not want to send him back. He was tall and olive-skinned and he was wearing a suit. It was hot for a suit, most of the people working down in the field were wearing T-shirts and jeans, but somehow he did not look strange to Pearl. He approached. As he came closer Pearl tilted her head with curiosity and then stared intently at him.
Do you remember me? he said.
I think I do, Pearl said.
Solomon Eckstein, he said, and held out his hand.
She leaned forward in her little chair and he lifted his other hand and said Don’t get up and he knelt down in front of her on one knee and shook her hand. It seemed for a moment like he was going to kiss her hand but he just kept holding it. He held it the whole time they talked.
This is incredible, isn’t it, he said.
She thought he was talking about the dig and she said: Who would have imagined that they would have considered this something worth digging up!
American Music Page 15
