She pulled his head down and he rested softly, the way he had with Roe-Ellen when he was a little boy. Dorothy bent to kiss his closed eyes and he felt it flowing from her as she held him, sympathy, desire, the willingness to make things right in his world.

But when he acted on this belief he managed only to earn a bitten lip while she clawed the back of his hand and he learned that she still retained a belief in one of the Muslims’ basic tenets.

He was unable to believe it. In the neighborhoods, both black and white, that had fashioned him, there were few twenty-four-year-old virgins. It filled him with awe but he smiled at her despite the lip-pain.

“A piece of flesh. Thin, often very fragile. Having nothing to do with intimacy. What does it mean? We’re already intimate.”

“You know this house, this yard? What is it but lumber, glass, a few trees, half a dozen shrubs. Do you know what it is to my father?”

“Middle-class respectability?”

“Exactly.”

He hooted. “Lord, what an analogy. You want so badly to conform you end up being non-conformists. There isn’t another property on this street as well-tended as your father’s. And I’d give odds that pelvic examinations wouldn’t disclose an army of twenty-four-year-old virgins, either. You think you have to be stricter with yourselves than all those white folks to buy your way into their kind of world?”

“We’re not trying to conform. We think a lot of white people are losing something they once had, something very valuable. We’re trying to gain it,” she said, reaching into his pocket for a cigarette. He lit a match. In the flare of the soft, quick light the African face made his hand tremble and the match went out, but the cigarette tip glowed as she drew smoke. “Listen,” she said, “you thought Midge was my child, didn’t you? Well, you were on the right track. She’s my sister’s. My unmarried sister Janet’s.”

“Your mother told me. I didn’t know there wasn’t a husband.”

“No husband. You know how Lena Home looked when she was young? Add a kind of . . . happy wildness. That’s my baby sister.”

“Why haven’t I met her?”

“She comes home once in a while. She plays with Midge then as if she were a little girl herself, but not like a mother. She says she doesn’t feel like a mother. She’s living in Boston with a bunch of white hippies.”

“I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. “Janet says with them her color doesn’t matter. She never seems to learn. Midge’s father was a baseball player up from Minneapolis to try out with the Red Sox for a few weeks. He played third base. And my sister.”

“She’s not the first girl to make that kind of mistake,” he said gently.