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those who were involved and who comprehended the world. All around the earth, armies battled and cities were bombed, and she sang to the salesmen and the manufacturers of everything necessary to the prosecution of the war; she sang to the generals and the admirals and all the uniforms of the services of the country in a hotel on a hill in a great port city.
    She stood before the long, oval mirror, with imperious flicks of herfingers pressing the rubber ball in its golden net to spray cologne over her bare arms, watching her son, acting as an empress for him. Then she sprayed the air, high up toward the ceiling, pretending to wield an antiaircraft gun, and he laughed, still with his head back, his arched throat jumping. When she played with him during the day, he was often at odds with her, but in the evening, in this hour in which she felt no boredom because she was to leave him in a matter of minutes, she enjoyed the playing. During the day he was absorbed in his own self and she was his accomplice in that absorption, but now he became an accomplice in her self-absorption. When she pantomimed for him, acted silly for him, she felt that the audience later in the night was already gathered around her, enthralled by her entertaining her son.
    â€œOlga!” she called, “did you make the bed?” And to him, “Never mind, we’ll dump you in anyway.” She held out her arms to him. “Come on, then. You want to fly into bed? You feel like a bird? If the war’s still going on when you’re eighteen, you can learn to fly. You can fly a plane.”
    He leaped into her arms, causing her to stagger in her high heels. With his arms clasping her neck, a leg on each side of her waist, and his face looking back over her shoulder, he was carried into his room.
    â€œUp, up you go,” she said, boosting him onto the dresser top. From there he jumped, arms outspread, onto his bed.
    She threw back the covers, pushed and joked him under, and kissed him on the mouth when he was settled in. When he called to her while she was in her bedroom again, slipping her coat from the hanger, she called in turn to Olga to go and see what he wanted. With her coat slung over one shoulder, she passed his open door; Olga was sitting on the small chair, attempting a low, singsong voice that induced sleep. Vivian went down to the kitchen and stood drinking black coffee while she waited for the taxi horn, glancing at her dark red fingernails, turning her head to see the back of her knee just under the black dress, to see the high satin heel of her shoe.

7
    T he day that Roosevelt died she took her son for a walk to share the shock of the death with the people in the streets. She and her son went hand in hand along by the shops, and in every shop people were talking about the death, and the ones inside and the ones waiting to cross at corners all had a look of shock that—because it was not for anyone close, for father or brother or husband, for anyone they had spent a lifetime with, but for a great man—was touched or tainted with a sense of privilege: that they were granted a time beyond the life of the great man was like a sign of favor. The sorrow that she felt over the President’s death became an encompassing sorrow for the millions of others dying, the anonymous others dying, and her husband dying, and for everything that went on that was tragic and that was not known to her. But as little as she knew, she thought, her son’s knowledge was only a fraction of her own. He was not even aware of nations and their governments, of the year and the era, and much less of the irretrievability of the dead; but if he did not have the comprehension now, he would have it in a few years. In a few years he would have more than she had at this moment, a great manhimself, perhaps, about whose death—when he was seventy or eighty, and she was already dead a long time—everybody would be informed by newspaper and by