Susan had a big blue and white striped umbrella and she carried it so that it protected her and Pearl from the rain. Pearl didn't quite get it, and kept drifting out from under its protection and getting splattered and turning to look at me. I had on my leather trench coat and the replica
Boston Braves hat that Susan had ordered for me through the catalogue from
Manny's Baseball Land. It was black with a red visor and a red button.
There was a whiteB on it and when I wore it I looked very much like Nanny Fernandez.
'What will you do?' Susan said.
'I'll try to extract Patty Giacomin from the puzzle and leave the rest of it intact.'
'And you won't warn Rich?'
'No need to warn him. He knows he's in trouble.'
'But you won't try to save him?'
'No.'
'Isn't that a little flinty?' Susan said.
'Yes.'
'Officially, here in Cambridge,' Susan said, 'we're supposed to value all life.'
'That's the official view here in Cambridge of people who will never have to act on it,' I said.
'That is true of most of the official views here in Cambridge,' Susan said.
'My business is with Patty-Paul really. Rich Beaumont had to know what he was getting himself into-and besides I seem to feel a little sorry for
Joe.'
Pearl had wedged herself between my legs and Susan's, managing to stay mostly under her part of Susan's umbrella, and while she didn't seem happy, she was resigned. We turned the corner off Linnaean Street and walked along
Mass Avenue toward Harvard Square.
'You are the oddest combination,' Susan said.
'Physical beauty matched with deep humility?'
'Aside from that,' Susan said. 'Except maybe for Hawk, you look at the world with fewer illusionsthan anyone I have ever known. And yet you ire as sentimental as you would be if the world were pretty-pretty.'
'Which it isn't,' I said.
'You cook a good chicken too,' Susan said.
'Takes a tough man,' I said, 'to make a tender chicken.'
'How come you cook so well?'
'It's a gift,' I said.
'One not, apparently, bestowed on me.'
'You do nice cornflakes,' I said.
'Did you always cook?' she said.
Pearl darted out from under the umbrella long enough to snuffle the possible spoor of a fried chicken wing, near a trash barrel, then remembered the rain and ducked back in against my leg.
'Since I was small,' I said.
As we passed Changsho Restaurant, Pearl's head went down and her ears pricked and her body elongated. She had found the lair of the chicken wings she'd been tracking earlier.
'Remember,' I said, 'there were no women. Just my father, my uncles, and me. So all the chores were done by men. There was no woman's work. There were no rules about what was woman's work. In our house all work was man's work. So I made beds and dusted and did laundry, and so did my father, and my uncles. And they took turns cooking.'
We were past Changsho, Pearl looked back over her shoulder at it, but she kept pace with us and the protective umbrella. There was enough neon in this part of Mass Avenue so that the wet rain made it look pretty, reflecting the colors and fusing them on the wet pavement.
'I started when I was old enough to come home from school alone. I'd be hungry, so I'd make myself something to eat. First it was leftovers-stew, baked beans, meat loaf, whatever. And I'd heat them up. Then I graduated to cooking myself a hamburg, or making a club sandwich, and one day I wanted pie and there wasn't any so I made one.'
'And the rest is history,' Susan said.
A big MBTA bus pulled up at the stop beside us, the water streaming off its yellow flanks, the big wipers sweeping confidently back and forth across the broad windshield.
'Well, not entirely,' I said. 'The pie was edible, but a little odd. I didn't like to roll out the crust, so I just pressed overlapping scraps of dough into the bottom of the pie plate until I got a bottom crust.'
'And the top crust?'
