Maria shook her head. “Like Bernardo.”

“I guess so,” Tony said. “The Jets meant a lot to him.”

“Bernardo loved the Sharks.”

“I guess they were alike.”

Maria nodded as she sat on the bed and traced the damp outline of Tony’s head on the pillow. She pitied Tony and Riff, who had been so like Bernardo. She had never seen Riff’s eyes, but knew they had been like Bernardo’s, ever restless and vicious, searching out hatreds as if to prove over and over again that he was a man, and always failing.

What future could there have been for Riff or Bernardo? None that she could see. In the warped years of their youth, they had seen, witnessed, found joy and participated in enough violences to age a dozen men. They loved nothing and destroyed everything, although they protested that it was one thing only that they hated—each other. So she pitied Riff as she pitied her brother, and would have willingly, at that moment, given her life for either of them.

But to what purpose? That they might kill other men? Eventually they had to die: in a bar or outside a poolroom, at some dance or in the back seat of an automobile, along a lonely stretch of highway or on some tenement roof. But not in bed. For boys like Riff and Bernardo preyed upon each other and were in turn preyed upon by every man and woman who could cater to and find profit in their violence. If they had lived to grow a little older, they would never grow wiser.

“That is why they both had to die,” she said. “And that is why you must not. Because you were like them, once. But you wanted to be different—I know. And Riff and my poor brother did not.”

“I don’t understand,” he said. “I killed Bernardo. Doesn’t it mean anything that he was your brother? And that I did it to him?”

“You did not want to go there tonight,” she said, speaking for sorrowing women everywhere. “I sent you. I made you promise to go.”

“You did,” he said quickly, to keep her from sharing any part of his guilt. “But you didn’t want me to kill your brother. Don’t you love him? Can’t you cry for him?”

“Must you ask when I can cry for all the world? ’Nardo was my brother, and you are the man I love.” She shook him. “I want to love everything in the world. Not only the things I know but the things and people I do not know and will never see or meet. Do you understand?”

“Look at us.” He stared around the dark room, heavy with heat and shadows. “We’ve gone from living and loving to dying. It happened too fast.”

A finger suddenly placed by Maria across his lips silenced him, and they heard the hard tap of high heels and Anita’s frantic voice as she called out in the kitchen. “Maria?”