Tears spilled over to course down her dirty cheeks, and frustration made her search for a rock, a stick, a bottle, anything, but nothing came to hand; and ringed by the hooting Jets, she turned from them to dart into the traffic. She wove between wheels and fenders, oblivious of startled horn blasts, until she reached the other sidewalk.

“Not bad,” Action complimented Riff. “Tony never got rid of her as quick as you did.”

The season was spring, the month May, but the soft night was early summer. From where she sat on the tenement roof, Maria Nunez looked off toward Central Park and saw the bright windows and irregular patches of light. It had been a short climb from the fire escape up the ladder to the roof, and she had avoided unnecessary conversation with her father, mother, two uncles, two aunts, and several family friends, all crowded into the little kitchen with its one window.

Overhead the sky was prodigal with stars and thin, tenuous clouds had been torn apart by the passage of the moon. She had come to the roof at dusk to admire the tops of buildings less than a mile away, but separated by a greater distance than she had come a week before.

Night had come slowly to the city, to obliterate the form, thrust, and strength of the monoliths, to tone down the burnished metal and stone of intricate design, to erase the towers and bring patterns of color into tier after tier of windows. People lived differently in such rich, marvelous buildings, and with her chin supported by the palm of her hand, Maria wondered in what luxury they bathed and dressed. How different were the streets below; not at all like Puerto Rico where the houses were little more than hovels without floors, without glass in the windows, and certainly without plumbing. Most of the streets were unpaved, without sidewalks, and poverty was everywhere.

When she had been met only the week before at the airport, she had had to blink and make certain that the man and woman running toward her with outstretched arms were her parents, for they appeared so much younger, more self-assured, even better dressed than she had last seen them two years before. At the time they had migrated to New York, it had been decided that she and her sisters would remain behind with relatives. Only Bernardo, her brother, would accompany them to New York until they could get themselves established.

Her father had frowned and not replied when she asked why Bernardo hadn’t come to the airport. But she soon knew the reason. He was eighteen and handsome; but his eyes were too bitter, his mouth too tight, his voice too high, and every word he spoke dripped hatred of Americans.

They had more here in New York, more of everything, even of hatred; and to be rid of the latter Maria would have given up everything else and returned to Puerto Rico because she believed it was wrong to hate. She didn’t want to hate when it was so much more wonderful, joyous, to love.