selfish and prejudiced, but no one can see them. Jamal, does that about sum it up?”
Jamal looked at his finger, looked at the floor.
“I guess that's better than shooting them,” Mary said.
“Much, much better,” Cassandra answered. “It keeps people's mothers happy, it doesn't entirely deny the aggressive impulse, it's really a highly satisfactory solution all around.”
After lunch, Mary went with Cassandra and Jamal to Central Park. She didn't want to, not really, but if she'd invented an excuse she'd have been the kind of woman who pleads a hairdresser's appointment to escape her own grandson. When she offered to drive, Cassandra insisted that they take the subway. “Traffic's terrible by now,” she said, “and there's no place to park up there.” Mary agreed, it was easiest to agree, although as they walked the several blocks to the subway she couldn't help wondering if Cassandra was reluctant to be in her car—to sit in the cool prosperous hush she owned. Mary's car was serene, ordered, sound; the sub-way station when they entered it was full of harsh light and furtive, defeated characters. A low crackle emanating from a loudspeaker might have been the unconscious mutterings of the city itself, its restless, elderly dreams. Cassandra seemed at home there, standing on the platform, holding Jamal's hand and chattering to Mary about the new shorter hemlines that were predicted for fall. The air was full of rot and urine and food fried in sour oil. Mary thought, suddenly, of her own childhood, the oppressed future that had wanted her, and it seemed she couldn't breathe at all here, she'd have to run gasping back up to the surface. Instead, she smiled at Cassandra, and nodded, and breathed. She'd grown adept by then at managing suffocation without appearing to be anything but calm. She could get through it. And if it overwhelmed her, there were always the pills. Then she saw the lights of the approaching train, and Mary knew she could manage.
The park, when they reached it, was beautiful in a sketchy, nascent way. The early April sun had started to deepen, to take on the first of its warmth, and the dry brown grass had been dusted here and there with a tentative gloss of green. “How pretty,” Mary said. The light that fell from the limpid sky seemed almost visibly to be thawing the earth, and it was possible to imagine, on a day like this, that a huge rolling kindness, soft and unremarkable, more closely resembling human sentimentality than the more scourging benevolence of God, did in fact prevail in the world.
“It's pretty if you like nature,” Cassandra said. “To be frank, we come here because Jamal likes it. I get nervous in parks, all these branches could snatch the wig right off your head.”
Jamal had run along the concrete path, checking back over his shoulder to be sure Cassandra and Mary were following. Mary could see that he was in fact a child, delighted in a child's way by freedom and open space, fearful in a child's way that he would become so free he'd never find his way back again. As she watched him running on his short skinny legs she vowed silendy, I will do better with him. I'll remember this.
“Do you bring him here often?” she asked.
“Once or twice a week, now that the weather's changing. We cut back when it was snowy out, he didn't like it, but really, there are limits. I'm not very good in the cold.”
“I love winter,” Mary said. “I love a cold, crisp day.”
“Then, honey, next winter you can bundle him into his snow-suit and take him up here to make snow angels.”
“That'd be nice.”
“Then do it. Dear.”
It was the first remark Cassandra had made that wasn't wholly sweet-tempered and admiring, and it took Mary by surprise. She looked at Cassandra's face in profile and saw—of course, she had
always known—that she had a temper. She saw, too, here in the soft spring light, that Cassandra was firm-featured and regally, serenely damaged and probably older than Mary had imagined, well past fifty. A faint but clear illumination, like the illumination of the white tablecloths in the restaurant on Charles Street, seemed to rise up off Cassandra's face and answer the yellower, more diffuse light of the afternoon air.
“Maybe I will,” Mary said. Where would someone like this have gotten such bearing, such a fierce sense of purpose?
“Fine,” Cassandra said.
A chill settled between them, and Mary understood for the first time that