It wasn’t long before Gorham decided that this B & C lawyer was rather attractive, and he tried to find out more about her. He managed to discover that she’d been to a meeting of the Historical Landmarks Commission at lunchtime, and that she was passionate about protecting the city’s classic architecture, like Grand Central, from the relentless advance of the glass-box skyscrapers. His father would have approved of that—a point in her favor. But though Maggie was perfectly friendly, Gorham noticed that she had the lawyer’s trick of evading questions she didn’t want to answer.

Gorham wanted to know more about what Juan had been doing recently, so Juan told them how he’d been working with nearby Mount Sinai Hospital to provide health care in El Barrio, and how he was trying to improve the terrible housing there. He’d been working with some of the radical Puerto Rican activists in El Barrio as well, getting them to back these projects too.

Gorham was impressed. “That’s good work, Juan,” he said. “The link with Mount Sinai is brilliant.” Maggie also listened intently, but the young lawyer seemed puzzled.

“How do you work with the radicals?” she asked. “From what I hear, some of these people are pretty dangerous.”

Juan sighed. He knew what was troubling her. Back at the end of the sixties some of the younger Puerto Ricans had formed a group, called themselves the Young Lords, and demanded better conditions in El Barrio. For a while they’d made common cause with the Black Panthers of Chicago, for which they’d been reviled in the press. It was hardly surprising that a nice, white, middle-class lawyer like Maggie would find such people frightening.

“You have to understand, Maggie,” he said, “that I was lucky. I got an education, and I was out of the gangs. Otherwise I might easily have been in prison by now, like my cousin Juan. Illegal activities are natural in some communities.” Maggie frowned—the lawyer in her didn’t like that—but he pressed on. “Look, the problems of Harlem and the South Bronx are the same as those of other American cities. New York, Chicago, wherever: it’s the same thing. You have poor populations who’ve suffered years of massive neglect, who have few if any chances of getting out of the mean streets where they live, and who believe, often rightly, that no one cares about them. When Puerto Ricans in El Barrio called themselves the Young Lords and organized free breakfasts and health clinics, that wasn’t such a bad idea. They were demanding help for their people. So, in their way, were the Black Panthers in Chicago. When Puerto Ricans talked about self-determination, that wasn’t so unreasonable either. Nobody else seemed to care about them.