“Hey, Glad Hand, where will you be?” Snowboy yelled.

Murray forced himself to laugh. “All right. We’re going to start the record and the boys will move in one direction and the girls in another…”

“Dir-ty!” someone shouted.

“Two circles, kids.” He swelled his voice so it could be heard above the lubricous, sly laughter. “Then when the music stops, each boy dances with the girl opposite him. Okay? Okay. Two circles, kids.”

Cheeks and forehead beaded with perspiration, glasses misted, he could still see that they did not move, that the Jets and Sharks continued to glare at each other.

The highly rouged, elaborately hair-styled girls in tight dresses, their breasts made prominent by nature or design, also signaled their challenges. The silence became heavier, more pregnant, and with an explosive sigh of relief that made him ashamed, Murray saw that the first policeman had returned with another, whom he recognized as Officer Krupke.

He waved, called out to Krupke, and as the Jets and Sharks saw the policeman staring hostilely at them, they moved to form circles around their own girls. Bernardo stood opposite Anita; Riff paired himself off with Graziella, who snapped her fingers impatiently for the music to start, because she loved to dance and they were wasting time.

But this was not what Murray wanted, and again he explained. He looked at Krupke who barked that the instructions seemed simple enough for anyone to follow, so how about it?

There was no way to defy orders, so the proper circles were formed, the record was started, and Murray clapped his hands as the boys and girls began to move in opposite directions. “That’s it, kids. Keep the ball rolling. Round she goes and where she stops, nobody knows! All right, here we go!”

Murray shouted and signaled one of the other social workers to stop the record. He blinked, opened his eyes wide and was disappointed. Although the circles had stopped, so that some of the Jets were opposite girls who had been escorted to the dance by Sharks, they only glared at each other, until Riff, with a manifest expression of disgust, turned away from the Shark girl in front of him and beckoned for Graziella to come to his side.

It was a gratuitous insult and outraged the Sharks the more because a Jet had thought of it first. Trembling with rage at this public humiliation, Bernardo snapped his fingers for Anita, the gangs broke apart, the girls following them.

Murray signaled for another record to be played immediately, and sighed with relief when the music of a hot, wild mambo filled the room. This was the kind of music to calm them, which was strange, until he began to think in anthropological terms. Music did occasionally intoxicate savages, and that’s what was needed now. Something to get them drunk on music, so they couldn’t think of hating. Later, when the dance ended, the Jets and Sharks would leave and then it would no longer be his responsibility.