V

Time has touched her. I found myself wondering: did she know that in this infant she brought forth, to whom she gave the name for happy (ironic?) was a soul which would become torn and unhappy? Does any mother anticipate the future; acknowledge when the time comes that a son is now a man and must leave her to make whatever peace he can alone on a treacherous earth. No, it's the same Maltese timelessness. They don't feel the fingers of years jittering age, fallibility, blindness into face, heart and eyes. A son is a son, fixed always in the red and wrinkled image as they first see it. There are always elephants to be made drunk.

He always wore a hat, inside or outside, in bed or dead drunk. And George Raft suits, with immense pointed lapels. Pointed, starched, non-button-down collars. Padded, pointed shoulders: he was all points. But his face, the girl noticed, was not: rather soft, like a dissolute angel's: curly hair, red and purple rings slung looped in twos and threes beneath the eyes. Tonight she would kiss beneath his eyes, one by one, these sad circles.