but the two groups had always been quite separate in her mind. “At school, you mean?”
“In the park sometimes. Whenever, wherever. I’m pretty good, too.”
“I’ll bet you are!”
“I beat Donovan good.”
“Cassie, do you know Donny never brings any of his friends round to see his poor Maw and Paw,” said Polly, putting her hands on slender hips and delving into her small trove of accents. “So I’m real glad he thought to bring you round to see us.”
“I was gonna show-and-tell my chess . . . but when you think about it, there ain’t that much to show.”
“Of course, our show is up and ready to go, any time,” said Polly, slowly. The train was coming back down the line, and Donovan, tied to the track, did his best to divert it.
“But that’s not—you can’t teach a person to do that in just a few days. Puppets are a real craft,” he said, quoting Polly back to Polly, which seemed to calm her; she stopped biting the spoon and put it back in the pot.
“Well, that’s very true. It is a craft. Not everyone can pick it up just like that.”
“There’s a war on,” said Irving loudly, and flicked a finger at the front page. “Somebody should show-and-tell about that.”
Cassie examined the photograph: “They your people over there?”
“Hmm?” said Polly, with her back to them all. “Oh, no, not mine. Irving’s. Technically. I mean, he doesn’t have any relatives over there or anything.”
“Technically?”
The door caught on the usual tile and failed to slam; Polly did not flinch. Polly, Cassie and Donovan listened to Irving leave the cottage, and—such was the silence of the mews in those days—strike a match against an outside wall. Polly returned placidly to her sauce.
“Of course, in the end,” she said, with a contented look on her face, “we’re all one people.”
* * *
• • •
“This is a scale model,” said Cassie, holding up, in front of the class, a circular, inverted ziggurat made of cardboard, and Donovan read the scale off a piece of paper, and then Cassie said the name of the architect, and Donovan somehow got through the phrase “gun-placed concrete,” and it all passed off without a hitch. But in the hallway, afterward, when they should have been simply congratulating each other, Cassie announced her intention to soon visit the Polly Kendal Puppet Theater.
“But—it’s two bucks.”
“I’m not in the poorhouse—we got two bucks!”
“It’s just for little kids,” tried Donovan, gripped by the horrible confirmation of a private fear—that all roads led back to his mother. “You’re too old. And it’s on a S-S-Sunday. You’ll go to church, won’t you?”
“I’m coming.”
“It’s not two bucks, that was a lie,” said Donovan, turning red. Having put his hand up inside Pinocchio every Saturday for the whole of the previous year, he had been unable to rid himself of a feeling of deep identification. “If you really want to know it’s only fifty c— fifty c—”
Most adults would keep looking into his face when he was in trouble, smiling kindly, until the word, whatever it happened to be, was completed. Cassie, like all children, only said, “What? What? What?” and groaned with impatience. She walked ahead. When he caught her up, she turned on him: “Man oh man, can’t you stop that?”
“Yes,” said Donovan, feebly, but perhaps that was just another lie. A man called Cory Wallace had assured the Kendals that their son could be easily “cured” of his trouble, but he did not seem to be a proper doctor—he had no certificates on his wall and his office was next to a Chinese restaurant down on Canal. Still Polly had “faith in his sincerity.”
“Donovan Kendal,” said Cassie, sighing and putting her hands on her hips like somebody’s mother, “you tire me out. Wanna see my titty?”
They were within spitting distance of their classroom; it did not seem a viable prospect. But in the turn of the stairwell, Cassie pressed herself against a wall and pulled her pinafore to one side. Donovan stared dumbly at a breast no different than his own except that the nipple was slightly larger and the skin a deep and lovely brown. He put his palm flat against its flatness. They stood there like that until a footstep was heard on the stair. “If I was a hooker,” whispered Cassie, pulling the fabric back over and looking serious, “that would be ten bucks easy.” After which they walked to the exit and parted without another word.
Matters developed. One morning before