And bright red blood it is, sweet to behold. Just like her own.
1etters in official-looking envelopes, sometimes stamped REGISTERED MAIL: RETURN RECEIPT REQUESTED, come for "Cornelius Courtney, Jr."
Follow him from one address to another, one season to another.
Bills.
.. or the second notices of bills... or Internal Revenue, Washington, D.C. Duke cringes, seeing that name. That name!
But snatches up the envelope, rips it open with a jaunty thumbnail, walks out of the room humming. Quickly, before Persia appears.
Atop the bureau in Persia and Duke's bedroom is a photograph of Private First Class Duke Courtney, aged twenty, framed in silver, brown-toned, taken by Duke's brother, Leslie. In it, Duke has an angel's face.
.
. a truly beautiful face. A mere boy. The fact of this photograph of Iris Courtney's father before he was Iris Courtneysf'ther might terrify Iris if she allows herself to consider it.
Like bones, bones, blood, pulsing muscle-hearts, walking erect in envelopes of skin like sausage.
In a gay mood, her boogie-woogie mood as she sometimes calls it, Persia covers the glass, the boy's face, with damp luscious kisses.
"My old honey," she says. "Yummy-honey. Better-looking any damn day than Errol Flynn."
Duke runs an embarrassed hand through his thinning wavy hair.
"Jesus! Wasn't he!"
Names. Like the wavy bluish glass, its perfect transparency marred by secret knots and curls, in the vestibule fanlight of the old house on Java Street: altering your vision unawares.
"Can you imagine me as 'Cornelius Courtney, Jr." for my entire life?"
As if the insult to his integrity were fresh and not thirty-odd years old, Duke can work himself up to actual anger. His eyes drain to the color of ice and his nostrils look like black holes punched in his face.
Iris laughs but quickly sobers, seeing that her father is in one of his serious moods.
He tells her he changed his name as soon as he'd come of age; which is to say, left home. Joined the army, joined the war.
"Thank God for the war!" says Duke. Though he was wounded in action has not one but two Purple Hearts to prove it he looks back, he says, upon his youth with real nostalgia. For one thing, the world was younger then.
"Did you change your name in court, with a judge and all?"
Iris asks.
"I changed it in here," Duke says. He makes a gentlemanly fist and strikes it against his heart.
Iris was told as a small child that she has no grandfather on her father's side of the family... no grandmother either. Duke Courtney and "his people" don't see eye to eye on life, thus why beat a dead horse?
It's the kind of question, appalling to envision, even a child knows isn't meant to be answered.
Persia tells Iris she is named for something special: the iris of the eye.
"I thought I was named for a flower," Iris says, disappointed.
'An iris is a flower, of course," Persia says, smiling, "but it's this other too. Our secret. 'The iris of the eye."
"The eye?"
"'The iris of the eye." The eye. The eyeball, silly!"
Persia snaps her fingers in Iris's eyes. The gesture is so rude and unexpected, Iris will remember it all her life.
After this disclosure, Iris doesn't know whether she likes her name.
Her favorite name at the time is Rose-of-Sharon, that of a pretty brown-skinned girl at school.
Persia's name really is "Persia." Her mother named her; it's her authentic Christian name, in black and white right on her birth certificate.
Over the years so many people... especially, Iris gathers, male admirers... have asked Persia about her exotic name, she has perfected a little story to explain. Each time Iris hears the story she feels an absurd thrill of apprehension, as if fearing the story will go wrong; each time Iris hears the story it is precisely the same.
"My parents had some perfectly normal, ordinary name picked out for me," Persia says, her vanity unconscious as a child's, "like Margaret, or Betty, or Barbara.... Then in the hospital my mother was glancing through a magazine and she saw pictures of this beautiful country-in Africa, I guess-but not, you know black Africa. The people there are white. Or, at any rate, light-skinned.
There were mountains in these pictures, and a sea like an emerald, and some strange kind of temple-a 'mosque'-and my mother said she knew she had to call me 'Persia." No one could talk her out of it, though they tried. 'Persia' she wanted, and 'Persia it is.
Gazing at her watery-seeming reflection in Persia's dressing table mirror, when Persia isn't home, Iris wets her lips with the pink tip of her tongue.
'Persia' she wanted, and 'Persia' it is."
Someday, she will have her own story to tell.
After the move to Holland Street, to the mustard-colored brickand-stucco building from whose tarpaper roof Iris Courtney can see the Cassadaga River drifting in a long slow curve from east to west, motionless at this distance as a strip of wallpaper, the earth begins to shift on its axis.
Always at such times you wait for balance to be restored, for things to "right" themselves. Until the act of waiting itself becomes the "rightness."
Duke has a new job as a "manufacturer's representative," and this new job requires traveling by car... and odd hours. There are midnight telephone calls; there is Persia's voice raised sleepily, then angrily.
For sometimes Duke Courtney is, Iris gathers, not out of town at all but involved in marathon poker or euchre games right here in Hammond; sometimes, flushed with winning, he cannot resist calling home. Or, stricken with losing, drunk-sick, repentant, he is calling for "my bride" to come fetch him in a taxi.
In their Java Street house, in the attractively wallpapered living room with several windows, the sofa the Courtneys chose on one of their extravagant shopping trips-featuring four outsized pillows and two giant seat cushions, made of impractical crushed velvet in lavender and green splotches-looked dramatic as an item of furniture in a Hollywood musical; in this new cramped, lowceilinged place, jammed against the end wall and taking up nearly every inch, it looks monstrous and sad.
Mornings, Iris steels herself to seeing it made up hastily as a bed.
If it is Persia who has slept there, Persia is likely to be up; if Duke, Duke will still be sleeping... sleeping and sleeping. A "hero's hangover," he calls such fugues. He sleeps in boxer shorts and thin grayish T-shirt, snoring in erratic gasps and surges, like drowning; disheveled silver-glinting hair on a makeshift pillow is ris will see of his head. He lies hunched beneath a blanket, in weather, as if he were cold, face turned toward the wall.
Persia and Iris prepare for the day, for going out, careful not to disturb him. Duke can be mean in the morning before the memory of his guilt washes over him, bringing color to his cheeks.
Iris whispers, "Momma, what's wrong?" Persia lights a cigarette and says, "Who wants to know?" Regarding her daughter with brown bemused eyes as if she has never seen her before.
Who wants to know?
The sort of puzzle, a heart riddle, a twelve-year-old can almost grasp.
When Iris trails home from school-she has friends, she goes to friends' houses, hangs out sometimes on the street-Duke will be gone. Persia won't be home, and Duke will be gone. But the glamour sofa will still have the look of an emergency bed, big pillows heaped on the floor, blanket lying where it fell.
And that smell, that unmistakable smell, of a body in sleep: alcoholic headachy rancid sleep.
Now Persia is a waitress, now she gets decent tips; returning late from her job, seeing that Duke is still out, she sometimes turns around and hurries back out herself, high heels clattering an alarm on the stairs.
Iris calls after her, "Mom? Mommy?" and Persia's voice lifts out of the dark, "I won't be long, lion!" Persia knows where to find her husband... some nights. There is the Cassadaga House, there is Rick Butterfield's, there is the Four Leaf Clover Club, there is Vincenzo's.... Some nights, though, she doesn't come home until two or three in the morning, escorted to her very door, without him.
In bed but rarely asleep at such times, Iris waits to hear a stumbling on the stairs, voices. Who are the men who bring her mother home?
she wonders. And does her father know?
She's very frightened but believes her interest to be merely clinical.
* * * Gently pulls her Girl Scout uniform off its wire hanger, eases it out of the stuffed beaverboard wardrobe at the foot of her bed, pads barefoot into the other bedroom where there is a floor-length mirror as well as the heart-shaped mirror over Persia's dressing table.
Stands holding the dress against the front of her body, gazing at her reflection, admiring the color of the fabric, its texture and substantiability, the several fine-stitched badges she has earned, Iris embroidered in shiny greenish-gold thread above her left breast.
She'd wanted more than life itself to belong to the Girl Scouts, to the troupe at school; to be a part of that circle of girls, the most popular girls; to wear this dress, this beautiful dress, as casually as the others She'd pleaded with Persia: Please; oh, please, please, I will never ask for anything else again.
Now she stares, her eyes damp with emotion. Holding the dress, the long perfect sleeves, against her body, her arm folded over it like a lover.
Persia stares at Duke Courtney, who is unshaven, tieless, a soiled look to his best white shirt, a cheapness to the gold flash of cuff links.
He's home at the wrong hour of the day.
A gusty whitely glowing November day. She'll remember.
He has just informed her that they are in debt. He has borrowed money not only from the loan company that financed their 1953 four-door Mercury sedan but from a second loan company.
has borrowed money from his brother Leslie... and from friends of whom, in several instances, Persia has never before heard. Duke has been forced to confess since, today, embarrassingly, before noon, he is obliged to drive their car, the very car he requires for his job as a salesman, to the loan company headquarters uptown. Such words as "repossession," "default," "in lieu of," resound like drunken song lyrics in her head.
My God. Duke has even borrowed money from Madelyn.
"But the poor woman works in that terrible beauty salon.
she doesn't have any money!"
"Maddy wanted to go in with me on a bet at the Downs," Duke says evasively, running a hand through his hair. "It wasn't exactly a loan.
Only seventy-five dollars."
He smiles one of his reflex smiles. His nostrils are wider and darker than Persia recalls. In his fair, thin-skinned, handsome face, the narrow-bridged nose is becoming swollen and venous.
"Strictly speaking, we both lost. The bet." He smiles again.
"But I repaid the loan."
"You repaid it? You did?"
"I said I did."
"How much do you owe? I mean... in all." Persia is frightened but tries to keep her voice level. Though their daughter is at school she has a perilous sense that there is a third party in the flat with them, listening.
"Why does it matter, Persia, how much? A sum."
They are standing in the kitchen, a formal space between them. Persia in her pink quilted bathrobe, a surprise gift, and a luxury gift too, from Duke, on a Valentine's Day long past. Going grimy at the cuffs, frayed at the hem. Persia is barefoot and almost naked beneath the robe. Begins to feel the linoleum-tiled floor tilt under her feet.
.
. like the teakwood deck of that gleaming white yacht Erin Maid.
Since confiscated, among other items, by the Hammond City Council.
Duke is trying to joke. "We owe, darling. Not just me. You've spent most of it yourself, in fact-groceries, clothes. Things Iris 'simply has to have."" "But how much?"
"Not all that much."
"Duke, honey, please"-Persia's voice begins to falter-"how much?"
Duke sighs; rummages through a drawer for a pencil and a note pad; scribbles down the figure to show Persia as if the numeral is too shameful, or too intimate, to be disclosed orally. Persia whispers, "Oh, God." She yanks out a chair, sits blindly at the kitchen table, her hair, having endured elaborate pin curls through the night, now suddenly limp, straggling in her face. She hasn't put on any makeup yet this morning, so her skin is ivory pale, glazed.
Without lipstick her lips look unnatural.
'And all this went for cards? At the racetrack?"
