“She left you alone?”
“Please, don't start looking at me like I'm some kind of Dickens character. We were better off without her. I did a much better job with those children than she ever did.”
“Well,” Mary said. She was working for something further to say when the waiter came to take their orders. Mary ordered the chicken salad and, after a hesitation, a glass of white wine. Cassandra ordered the chicken salad and a cup of tea.
After the waiter had gone, Cassandra leaned forward and said in a low voice, “In case you were wondering, it's Bertram.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I was born Bertram Butz in Table Grove, Illinois. You think I blame my mother for taking off? Not for a minute, hon. I understand completely.”
“Do you talk to her now?” Mary asked.
“Oh, no. She died.”
“I'm sorry.”
“Oh, I suppose I am, too. Not as sorry as I probably should be.”
“What about your brothers and sister?”
“They don't know where I am.”
“You're joking.”
“No, it's better this way, believe me. They have very conventional lives. They all got married and had children and they live in Illinois. They don't want a visit from Auntie Mame.”
“That's terrible.”
“No, it's not,” Cassandra said. “All it means is we don't have to suffer through Christmases together. Now, what about you? You're a New Yorker, aren't you?”
“Well. I was born in New Jersey.”
“Italian, right? You've got those eyes and those cheekbones.”
“I was Mary Cuccio. My parents never quite forgave me for marrying a Greek.”
“Lord, the things people get worked up over. You married young, didn't you?”
“Seventeen. I wanted to get away.”
“Honey, I hear that,” Cassandra said. “Marriage wasn't exactly an option for me, so I went to college. I got a scholarship to the University of Wisconsin and I said to the kids, here's how the washing machine works, here's how to put Momma to bed when she needs putting to bed. Now sayonara.' “
“I probably should have gone to college,” Mary said. “I didn't really think of it, it didn't seem like something I could do.”
“Well, I lasted a year into graduate school, but I didn't finish. I was a literature major but I couldn't seem to . . . let's just say something was missing. I couldn't seem to work up a head of steam about ending up as a skinny effeminate man teaching nineteenth-and twentieth-century literature on some remote little Midwestern campus where I'd probably have had a series of crushes on a series of students who'd flirt with me to make sure of their grades. In another era I'd probably have done it anyway, a flaming queen's choices are about as limited as a woman's, but, well, the times being what they were, I stood up one day in the middle of reading The Wings of the Dove, marked my place, took my three hundred dollars out of the bank, and moved to New York.”
“Are you glad you did?”
“Yes, absolutely. I never really wanted to teach Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, I wanted to be Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary. And really, when nature has elected to provide you with the soul of a tragic diva and the body of a scrawny man who started going bald at twenty-two, well. . .”
Mary said, “I was sixteen when I met my husband. My ex-husband. But, sixteen. Think of that.”
“You were a Lolita. I'll bet you could work those hometown boys.”
“Not really. I was pretty enough, I guess, but sixteen felt awfully young then. Not like today. Constantine was my first boyfriend, can you believe that?”
“You married your childhood sweetheart. It happens.”
“I met him at a dance. A church dance in my neighborhood. He was assistant foreman of the crew my brother Joey worked on. He was my older brother's boss, and he seemed so important. He seemed like somebody. He was twenty-one. He showed up at this dismal little dance in a church basement wearing a red sport coat.”
“Snappy.”
“I'd just seen a picture of a boy in a magazine wearing a red sport coat like that. I think I fell in love with the jacket first, to tell you the truth. First the jacket, then the boy.”
“It's one way of doing it.”
“And I wanted to fall in love. I could hardly wait. You see, my parents, well, I was so terribly afraid of ending up like them. I wanted something—better. I thought I'd do just about anything.”
“I guess that makes two of us, doesn't it?” Cassandra said.
That was the first of the ladies' lunches, as Cassandra insisted on calling them. After that, Mary met him every four or five weeks, always in the same restaurant. She began to feel a certain defiance in meeting Cassandra, a small thrill of illicit pleasure. Mary told herself she was meeting Cassandra to keep track of Zoe, and that wasn't untrue, but after six months or so, after five of the ladies' lunches, she had to admit that she also liked seeing Cassandra for the sake of seeing Cassandra. Within their range of shared topics she could say anything that entered her mind, and she knew Cassandra didn't feel superior to her. If anything, she felt superior to Cassandra, though she didn't like to think of it in those terms. So much in her life was difficult, and these lunches were surprisingly easy. They didn't count; they didn't matter. Cassandra could be relied upon to keep the conversation going, just as Mary's family had once relied on her to do. She was never boring (Mary had begun, somewhat queasily, to think of Cassandra as “she”), and she reminded Mary at regular intervals of Mary's beauty and of the contention, however doubtful, that at fifty-five she was just now entering the realm of true feminine mystery. After one of the lunches it occurred to Mary that Cassandra reminded her, in certain ways, of her childhood friends, the Italian girls from her old neighborhood to whom she hadn't spoken in over thirty-five years. Cassandra had a similar raucous extravagance; she seemed to take a similar pleasure in her own gaudy if limited prospects. Here she was, a friend who paid court and did not threaten, and Mary found that she liked having this secret friendship. She carried it with her in the shops of Garden City and at her club meetings, where the other women were unfailingly kind and courteous and not in any way truly interested in the divorced Italian wife of a Greek man who built shoddy subdivisions.
At the sixth of the lunches, Cassandra turned up with Jamal. Mary arrived and found the two of them, Jamal sitting in her own usual chair, propped up on a telephone book. He leaned forward across the table and spoke to Cassandra, softly but with great urgency, his small dark hands gripping the edge of the table so hard the cloth rippled and the saltshaker leaned, waiting to fall. As Mary stood at the door she lost whatever sense of familiarity she'd developed with Cassandra. In their shared attitude of intense, secretive conversation Cassandra and Jamal looked surreal and hyperbolic, freaks from a ragged traveling circus, full of perversities and little crimes and an insane, giggling wisdom. Mary was fighting an impulse to simply turn and leave when Cassandra spotted her. Jamal saw her an instant later, and sat back in his chair so quickly he might have been a parody of apprehended guilt.
“Surprise,” Cassandra said, as Mary walked smiling to the table. “They had to close the whole kindergarten today, something lethal seems to have gotten into the pipes. It was too late to call you, so I just brought Jamal along.”
“That's great,” Mary said, though she was surprised to find herself irritated by the notion of having Jamal all through lunch. He was her grandson, what was wrong with her?
“Hi, honey,” she said to him. She bent to kiss him and he allowed himself to be kissed without indicating that he desired it in any way. He could be such a remote child, so silent and vague, although a second ago he'd seemed to have no reluctance about talking to Cassandra. Mary tried to care for him, to feel connected, and sometimes she managed it, but more often the feeling simply slipped away from her and she looked at Jamal as if he were anyone's child, balky and undemonstrative, a little dull. It might have helped, Mary thought, if he r
esembled her more. If he hadn't had such purplish lips, and all that woolly hair.
“We've been shooting at passersby,” Cassandra said. “So far we've bagged an even dozen.”
Mary took a chair from another table and sat down. This is a child, she admonished herself. He only wants the things all children want.
“So they closed the school, did they?” she said cheerfully to Jamal.
“They say it'll be open again tomorrow,” Cassandra said. “Every now and then disaster strikes, and you get a day off.”
“Well,” Mary said. “Isn't it nice to have a day off?”
“We thought we'd go up to Central Park after lunch,” Cassandra said. “Want to come?”
“We'll see,” Mary said. “Jamal, what.do you think you'd like for lunch?”
Jamal looked at Mary with such uncertainty, such naked absence of recognition, that she wondered, as she did periodically, if he was in fact of normal intelligence. Maybe they should take him in for tests.
“I'm having a cheeseburger,” Cassandra said, “because I'm beyond caring.”
“Cheeseburger,” jamal whispered.
“Two, then,” Cassandra said. “Mary, a salad for you?”
“I suppose,” she said.
Jamal turned to the window, pointed his finger at an elderly man passing by, and said, “Zzzip.”
“Got him,” Cassandra said. “Nice fat one.” To Mary she added, “We take no prisoners.”
“I see,” Mary said.
Jamal shifted in his seat, aimed his finger at a couple sitting at the next table, and said, “Zzzip.”
“Turn around, honey,” Cassandra said. “And put that thing away, it's rude to shoot your luncheon companions.”
Mary was surprised to see that Jamal obeyed. Suddenly his strangeness and all strangeness evaporated, and he and Cassandra could have been any ordinary parent and child, trying to get through the usual negotiations of leniency and demand, of adoration and propriety.
“Do you like playing cowboy?” Mary asked Jamal, who looked at her, once again, with an expression of utter incomprehension, as if not only her words but she herself were unprecedented, and quite possibly dangerous.
“Perfectly civil question, Jamal,” Cassandra said. “Perhaps it would be an interesting conversational gambit to tell your grand-mother about the Planet Sark.”
“I beg your pardon?” Mary said.
Jamal looked down at the tabletop as if it, too, was unutterably foreign.
“The Planet Sark is where Jamal comes from,” Cassandra said. “It's the medium-bright star just slightly to the left of Orion's belt. He isn't shooting bullets at these people, because on his planet murder isn't just forbidden, it's impossible. Sarkians can't kill any more than you or I could decide to stop breathing. It's involuntary. However, when confronted by a particularly irritating individual it is possible to zap them with a special gun that renders them invisible, and I don't mind telling you, the world is filling up fast with invisible citizens these days. They go on about their business, they go on being rude and mean and 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 Cassandra's feelings about her were not confined to admiration and a desire to please. The two of them walked in silence for a while. The branches threw pale indistinct shadows on the walk.
“I'd like you to spend more time with him,” Cassandra said at length, and Mary could not read the tone in her voice. It was not angry, nor was it kind. It was, if anything, strong but blank, as if she were reciting a set of important, indisputable facts.
“I should,” Mary said. “I will.”
How could someone like this presume to lecture her? Still, she listened.
“I mean it,” Cassandra said. “He should know you better, he may need you someday.
”
“Mm-hm.”
“This child leads a less than orthodox life, and believe me, I don't have any illusions about the orthodox. Still. There are limits. I don't want to think of him just bouncing around if anything happens. I don't want him to have to go and live with anyone who seems like a stranger to him.”
Mary felt something. She couldn't name it but it was there, an inner tug, like the lost memory of a dreadful sorrow. There was a chill, an insistent inner tug. Two black women sped past on roller skates, laughing, their wheels setting the pavement abuzz. Cassandra was pale and thin and full of obscure purpose, and Mary touched her arm with her fingertips.
“What is it?” she asked.
Cassandra put her own hand over Mary's. “Nothing. It's exactly what I've just said.”
“Well,” Mary said, and she could think of nothing else to offer. A flock of pigeons flew by, so close Mary believed one of their wings would brush her face, though she didn't flinch. She thought she would welcome the flick of the bird's wing. That wild gentleness, that effortlessly beating life. She almost felt the feathers graze her. Up ahead Jamal bent over to pick up something, a coin or a glittering stone, which he held in his hand and came running to show to Cassandra.
1988/ The most terrible beauty came out at night. In daylight the world was full of facts; you could live in a swarm of errands. At night, late, there was only desire or its absence, after the other stories had been pulled in off the streets. It was Boston—most citizens were dreaming by midnight. During the deeper hours men owned the streets, at least in certain neighborhoods, and for those hours, on streets usually devoted to the most ordinary transactions—a pound of coffee, a haircut, fire and theft insurance—a defiant, muscular beauty was the only virtue.
Will filled his clothes now, he moved without apology. On a cold night in April he kissed his friends good night outside a movie theater and walked toward home. A winter smell, rainwater on bare branches, still hung over Boston, though Easter had come and gone.