nothing I can do about it.”
Mary was seized by emotion, and she did not speak. She sat with Jamal and Harry. She knew herself as a woman of sixty-three, wearing slacks and a cotton sweater and a strand of pearls given to her by someone impossible whom she had loved. So little remained. Jamal’s music thumped, and she could feel his agitation along the slats of the bench. She watched gulls careen through the cloudy air. She saw Will coming back, carrying soda in paper cups. There was a sky full of shifting light and there were these people, this boy who was as closed to her, as impenetrable, as either of her daughters had been. There were drinks in red cups.
So much remained.
“Here comes Will,” Harry said.
“Mm-hm.”
Mary thought, I can love this. I can try. I can try to love it. There’s nothing else for me to do.
“Okay,” Will said. “Coke, Diet Coke, Diet Coke.”
“Thanks, honey,” Mary said.
“Thanks, Dad,” said Harry.
Jamal accepted his drink without speaking, without leaving the music.
“You’re welcome, Jamal,” Will said.
Boats churned through the water. Pillows of air blown in off the harbor turned the leaves of the trees.
Harry said, “We’ve decided to abandon all notions of going out to the Statue of Liberty or Ellis Island. We’ve decided to go shopping in the East Village, and then get a pizza.”
“You spoil him,” Will said.
“I know.”
Will reached over and ran his fingers through Jamal’s hair. Jamal pulled his head away, pretending an attack of rhythm.
“So,” Will said. “Shall we go up to the East Village?”
“Okay,” Jamal said.
“Spoiled, spoiled,” Will murmured.
Jamal stood up and shifted from leg to leg, in sunglasses and a pair of pants so enormous Will wondered how he kept them up. Jamal asked, “What are those big blocks over there?”
“A memorial,” Harry told him. “I don’t know what war.”
“Want to go take a look?” Will asked.
“I don’t know,” Jamal said.
“Let’s look,” Will said. “That’ll be our nod to education and general self-improvement for today, all right?”
“I think it’s World War II,” Mary said.
“What?”
“Those stones. I think they’re a memorial to the men who died in World War II.”
“And the women?” Jamal asked.
“Well, yes. I suppose there must have been some women, too.”
They walked up the esplanade toward the stone tablets. Trees shivered with their new leaves, silver green in the cloudy light. They climbed a bank of stairs to a broad plaza flanked by two rows of tall, concrete-colored marble slabs incised with thousands of names. At the landward end an immense bronze eagle spread its heavy wings. They walked quietly among the stones. Jamal ran his hand over a roster of names, feeling the squeak his hand made. He swayed to the music.
In another year, Constantine will lie in a hospital bed watching the white summer sky through the window as he begins to die from the stroke he’s suffered. He will be aware of his feet under a white blanket, and of a gray feather blowing by beyond the glass. Magda will sit beside him. She won’t say anything when he whispers, “Momma.” She won’t contradict him and she won’t answer. She will let him take her hand, and will listen as he repeats the word. She will sit in silence, waiting.
Soon after Constantine dies, Susan will leave her husband. She will find a job in the sales department of a printing company, and will eventually marry one of the men who own the company, a man much older than herself. Her new husband, a widower with grown sons, will take his sons out the night before the wedding and tell them, in a voice he is scarcely able to control, that he had believed his life would hold no new pleasures, nothing beyond the daily particulars of ink and paper, until he met this woman.
The sons will wish him well, and secretly despise him for betraying their dead mother. He will love Susan with a quiet tenacity that does not end, and Susan will give birth, at the age of forty-nine, to a girl. She will insist on naming the baby Zoe.
Will and Harry and Jamal will live in New York together until Jamal leaves for Berkeley at eighteen. While Jamal is still young, Mary will sell her house and buy an apartment in the city. She will wait for him in her apartment when he gets out of school and will try, not often successfully, to keep him there until Will and Harry are home from their jobs. After