now? And really, a mother ought to know about these things.”
“Where is she? What hospital?”
“St. Vincent's. I'm here now.”
“I'll be right there. And, Cassandra?”
“Mm-hm?”
“Will you stay with her until I get there?”
“I wouldn't abandon my daughter, now, would I?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Figure of speech. Now, honey, get in that car of yours and drive.”
“I can be there in an hour.”
“Don't break your neck, love. She's fine, honestly, I'd tell you if she wasn't. A girl makes a mistake every now and then. And, Mary?”
“Yes?”
“The baby's fine. When you get here, you and I have got to do some serious talking to this girl about behaving like she has in her condition. We'll be an avalanche of nagging—”
“The baby?”
“Listen, just get here. Girl, you've got some catching up to do.”
Zoe was asleep, lying thin and gray in a hospital bed. Mary stood watching for signs of her daughter. The girl in the bed had a blankness, an anyone quality. She was thin, not pretty, her hair lank and unclean on the pillow. Mary found herself staring at Zoe's hands. The face was waxen, slumbering, lost in its silent demonstration of how skin can lie upon a skull. Mary looked at Zoe's hands and saw her there, in the curl and twitch of the fingers. There was her daughter's inchoate being, the creaturely push and pull Mary remembered. There was the fretful one-year-old, asleep and dreaming in Mary's lap, cutting off the circulation in Mary's legs because she dared not shift her position for fear of waking Zoe and setting into motion another hour's worth of sourceless, inconsolable weeping.
She was still watching Zoe's hands when a voice behind her said, “Mary?”
It was a man in a dress.
He stood in the hospital light, a tall man with garish red lips and enormous, spidery black fans of false eyelashes. He wore a black beehive wig and a red square-dancing dress, bristling with net and chiffon and synthetic red lace.
“Yes?” Mary said.
“It's Cassandra.”
Mary passed through an interval of dislocation, a loss of order like what she'd felt in Constantine's office the day she'd realized he was having an affair with fat, homely Magda. This was Cassandra. The words appeared in her head. Her daughter had taken an overdose and this was the woman Mary had liked so much on the telephone.
“Sorry about all this,” Cassandra said. “I didn't have time to change, it's not what I ordinarily wear to emergency rooms.”
Mary nodded. She said, “Cassandra.”
“Oh, I know, I know. Life is full of surprises, isn't it? Have you talked to the doctor?”
“Yes.”
“So you see? She's going to be fine.”
“What happened?”
“She wasn't doing Marilyn, if that's what you mean. I'm sure of it. Like I told you over the phone, it was a simple mistake. But she's got to stop this. You know how the young are, they think nothing can possibly happen to them.”
A part of Mary floated to the ceiling and hovered there, watching herself stand beside her sleeping daughter and talk to a tall man in a red dress. A part of Mary asked questions and wanted answers.
“Did you say something about a baby?” she said.
“I thought you knew. She told me she'd told you. I kept saying to her, 'What do you think you're going to do, hide the kid for the first eighteen years?' I said, 'You're not Lucy Ricardo, don't try to come up with some kind of zany scheme.'”
“How long has she been pregnant?”
“Four months.”
“And the father?”
“I never had the pleasure.”
“Well,” Mary said.
She stood there, just like that. She didn't cry. She didn't move.
Cassandra put a hand on Mary's shoulder. His hand was soft and light and Mary found, to her surprise, that she was not repelled by his touch.
“I know, honey,” he said. “It's a big dose, isn't it?”
III
INSIDE
THE MUSIC
1983/ Magda wasn't a beauty, not in the magazine way that some guys went for. Those stick women with no hips or tits, a big cloud of hair like the end of a Q-Tip. Mary was that kind of beauty. She had those magazine fingernails, those thighs that didn't touch. Constantine had been there, with that. He knew exactly what kind of hunger lay on the other side of it. He knew about the primness of bedside tables. He knew about the sourceless, infinite anger that had no cure because it had no cause, nothing you could get to beyond the plain facts of a hard-working man and a woman whose beauty led her to expect more than the