Koko

them without waiting for Tina’s instructions, he must have given him the old price. Tina said, “I’ll be right there,” and pushed the button to unlock the door and admit his caller.

4

“So you think I ought to go back to him tonight?” Maggie trailed after the General as if clinging close to his broad military back for warmth and strength—she was not levitating now.

“I didn’t say that.” The General darted into one of the aisles of his impromptu church to align a chair. Everything around them, the red vinyl of the seats, the yellow walls with the garish oils of a pigtailed Jesus confronting demons in a misty Chinese landscape, the cheap blond wood of the altar, gleamed and sparkled and shone in the harsh bright light the General and his congregation preferred to any other sort of lighting. And he and Maggie spoke in the Cantonese, similarly hard and brilliant, in which he conducted his services.

Standing by herself before the shuttered Harlem window, Maggie looked nearly bereft. “Then I apologize. I didn’t understand.”

The General straightened up and nodded approvingly. He went back to the aisle, stepped around her, and proceeded up the side of the church to the altar rail and the altar.

Maggie followed him as far as the rail. The General made minute adjustments to the white cloth on the altar, and at length looked at her again.

“You have always been an intelligent girl. You just have never understood yourself. But the things you do! The way you live!”

“I do not live badly,” Maggie said. This looked like another replay of an old, old argument, and she suddenly wanted to leave, to go downtown and stay with Jules and Perry in one of their rickety East Village tenements, to escape into their mindless club-hopping and their mindless acceptance of her.

“I mean—living in such ignorance of yourself,” the General said mildly.

“What shall I do, then?” she asked, unable to keep the irony out of her voice.

“You are a caretaker,” the General said. “You are a person who goes where she is needed. Your friend was in great need of your help. You brought him back to health so successfully that he no longer required your assistance, your caretaking, and all his usual problems returned to him. I know men like him. It will be years before he gets to the end of what combat did to him.”

“Do you think Americans are too sentimental to be good soldiers?” Maggie asked, really curious to know if he did think this.

“I am not a philosopher,” the General said. He went into a storeroom behind the altar and returned carrying a stack of hymnals. Knowing what was expected of her, Maggie came forward and took the hymnals from him. “But you would perhaps be a better soldier than your friend. I have known some caretakers who were excellent officers. Your father had a great deal of the caretaker in him.”

“Did he go where he was needed?”

“He often went where I needed him,” the General said.

They were walking side by side down parallel aisles, placing hymnals face up on the chairs.

“And now I suppose you want me to go somewhere,” she said at last.

“You are doing nothing now, Maggie. You help me out here in my church. You live with your old soldier. I am sure you do a great many things for his restaurant.”

“I try,” Maggie said.

“And if you lived with a painter, you would find the best brushes in the city, you would prepare the canvases as they were never prepared before, and you would end up getting him into famous galleries and museums.”

“That’s right,” she said, struck by this vision.

“So either you marry some man here and live his life by proxy, being his partner if he will let you, or you have your own life by yourself.”

“In Taiwan,” she said, for eventually they would come to this point.

“It is as good as anywhere else, and better for you. I will forget about your brother. Jimmy would be the same anywhere, so he might as well stay here. But you could go to college in Taipei now, and then train for a career.”

“What career?”

“Medicine,” he said, and looked at her fully and frankly. “I can pay for your tuition.”

She nearly laughed out loud in astonishment, and then tried to make a joke of it. “Well, at least you didn’t say nursing!”

“I thought about that, too.” He went on setting down the hymnals. “It would take less time, and cost much less money. But wouldn’t you rather be a doctor?”

She thought of Pumo and said, “Maybe I ought to be a psychiatrist!”

“Maybe you ought,” he said, and she saw that he knew exactly what she was thinking.

“Always the caretaker,” he said. “Do you remember your mother reading Babar to you? The book about the elephant?”

“The books,” she said, for her memory of the French children’s books, which both parents had read to Maggie during her early childhood, was very clear.

“I was remembering a sentence from one of them—something King Babar says. ‘Truly it is not easy to bring up a family.’ ”

“Oh, you did all right,” Maggie said.

“I wish I had done better.”

“Well, I was only the tiniest of families.” Maggie smiled over the rank of intervening chairs and patted his thick old hand. “I haven’t thought of those books in years. Where are they?”

“I have them.”

“I’d like them someday.” Now they were both smiling. “I always liked the Old Lady.”

“See? Another caretaker.”

Maggie laughed out loud, and if Pumo had seen her at that moment, he would have said that she had begun to levitate again.

“I would never insist you follow any design of mine,” the General said. “If you decide to marry your old soldier, I would be happy for you. I would just want you to know that you were his caretaker as well as his wife.”

This was too much for Maggie, and she turned them back onto safer ground. “I could sing him the song of the elephants. Do you remember that?”

He cocked his close-shaven authoritative head. Maggie was very grateful that he had at least met Tina Pumo, and promised herself that she would bring whatever man or men became important to her up before the General’s inspection.

“All I remember is that it was supposed to be very old.” He smiled and said, “From the days of the mammoths,” as if he were old enough to have seen them himself.

Maggie sang the song from Babar the King: “ ‘Patali di rapato/Cromda cromda ripalo/Pata pata/Ko ko ko.’

“That’s the first verse. I can’t remember the other two, but they end the same way—‘Pata pata/Ko ko ko.’ ”

As soon as she had sung the words again she knew that she was going to go back down to Grand Street.

5

About the same time that Tina Pumo pressed the button to unlock his street door and Maggie Lah went up the steps to the 125th Street subway stop, wondering if Tina would still be in his infantile mood, Judy Poole called up Pat Caldwell to have a serious conversation. Judy imagined that Pat Caldwell was very likely the most satisfactory person in the world with whom to have a serious conversation. She did not judge other people in the way that most people of Judy’s acquaintance, and Judy herself, judged others. Judy attributed this to the liberating effect of having been born into a great fortune and grown up to be a kind of displaced princess who went around pretending to be poor. Pat Caldwell had been born far richer than even Bob Bunce, and Judy imagined that if she had been born with such an enormous silver spoon in her mouth, she, too, might have learned to be so artless