Free How to Fall by Edith Pearlman

temples. You could feel the despair. The child’s knuckles touched his forehead. It was a universal gesture. Thus have old men grieved for their ruined houses of worship, their conquered cities. Thus grieved the little schwartse, for his life.
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    Judy thought: we are not so bad. But Marlene thought: we are wrong, wrong. Paul Winokaur endured a moment of panic when he couldn’t find his wife’s tousle of hair, but then he saw it, all filaments, against the whitening walls (Marty Greenglass née Fox was turning on the lights). At that moment, Marty could have renounced the world. Frances Masmanian did resolve to do just that. And though with time their passion weakened and their resolutions faded, they never forgot their feelings on seeing the little boy, nor were their contributions to a variety of relief associations ever less than generous.
    The pledges to the Organization that night were large, and the conversations during sandwiches and wine subdued. One woman—the woman who had scratched the movie screen in order to liberate the image within—was unable to talk or eat at all, even when she saw Mrs. Fenton tucking into a turkey-and-Russian. Bill Masmanian agreed with the man who, indicating Mrs. Fenton with his thumb, remarked that lofty ends may rely on low instruments. It was, after all, an old truth.

    A newer truth did occur to Bill. It had to do with all these kindly and generous friends of his, who did not conspicuously consume, who did wonder about the nature of the good life, who gave time and money, feelingly. Hell gapes for the merely empathic: that was what Bill was beginning to think. But since there was no typewriter handy to release its opinions on the matter, Bill lost hold of the idea before the evening was out.

Trifle
    Pinky was making the trifle this week. Trifle was the only dessert offered on Thursday nights. It was expected, smiled at, disregarded. The meal itself drew customers to The Local—the soup, the salad, the main dish, the cheese, the wines. And then, at the end of the repast, patrons idly consumed a bit of trifle with their coffee—“real coffee,” Marvin called it.
    About the trifle, Marvin said to Pinky during her first week at The Local, five months ago—well, he stocked the best rum, the freshest eggs, the thickest cream, and homemade jam. He allowed cakes to dry out. But the trifle remained not quite loved. “Like an orphan,” Marvin said.
    Pinky looked up from scrubbing a pot. Could he be alluding to her? But no, he was pressing his thumbs onto the cake, assessing its degree of staleness.

    Anyway, Pinky wasn’t really an orphan. She was a half-orphan at most, and she couldn’t be sure even of that. Her father’s name was unknown, but that didn’t make him dead. He was a number on a folder and some recorded attributes. Caucasian, five feet eleven, without inherited defects. Free of disease, at least on the morning he had donated his sperm. But who knew, maybe he had picked up some slow organism the very next day. Maybe he was dying in agony right this minute; and she, his daughter, was not at his bedside, did not even guess that he was gasping for air. He had been twenty at the time of the donation, a graduate student in Physics. Perhaps he was still a graduate student—he’d be thirty-eight now, they often haunted their departments for decades, doing lab chores and growing wispy beards. She’d seen them at coffee shops near her old home in Providence, Rhode Island.
    But maybe Jerkoff had earned his degree after all. Maybe he was working in a lab close to her present home in Godolphin, Massachusetts. Godolphin called itself a Town but was really a leafy wedge of Boston. One noontime he’d walk into The Local in search of an omelet. Or he’d hear of Thursday Nights when the daytime bar and café morphed into a Restaurant. He’d make a reservation; and he’d come in, a little late; and