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him—Mara checked out a selection of books on the history of ancient Iraq.
    Mrs. Ephers demanded to know what made her want to read about that? in a tone which told Mara that the Ancient Near East was a sensitive nerve on Graham Street. But Grandfather said nothing when Mrs. Ephers mentioned it at dinner. He only said it was high time Mara showed an aptitude for something, and maybe archeology ran in her blood. Disappointed not to rouse a more active response to Assyriology, Mara returned the books to the library and went back to irritating Grandfather by rewriting operas.
    When she was eleven and Harriet was busy with law school, Grandfather started taking Mara to the symphony and the opera. Mara, not used to attention, proclaimed an enthusiasm for opera—so difficult for a child to understand and respond to, therefore so much more meritorious in her to like. In her teens, she found a kind of release in the extravagant emotions onstage. Luisa Monterief, singing the “Willow Song” from
Otello
, carried Mara to the brink of suicide.
    In her teens, too, she started calling herself a feminist, to annoy the doctor, who said that like all ideologies feminism was an excuse for mental sloth. Mara began fighting with him on all subjects relating to women, including opera. Why did the women always die, while their stupid lovers beat their chests in remorse? She wrote revisions of
Rigoletto
and
Madama Butterfly
, since she couldn’t revise her family’s history. Grandfather was disgusted: if you’re going tostart playing games with music as well as the rest of your life, we’ll have to discontinue these outings. And so their brief rapport dissolved.
    Mara muddled on through Chicago Latin. Although she didn’t achieve Harriet’s stellar grades, she performed brilliantly on the SAT and was easily accepted at college. But a wish to choose her own school, perhaps a big state university, couldn’t stand up to the family tradition of Smith. After all, Harriet had gone there, had loved it. Mara knew by now she wouldn’t develop straight hair or smooth white skin if she went to Smith, but she could still imagine a glittering circle of friends and lovers like her sister’s.
    But once there, away from the buckram of Grandfather Stonds to give her shape, she drifted, making few friends, finding no milieu, turning to alcohol as the easiest way to prove to one and all that, really, she was Beatrix Stonds’s daughter even if she had no father to identify with. Until after her third semester, the college—not liking to offend the grandchild of a rich donor, but really left with no choice—kicked her out.
    Back in Chicago she got out of bed to go to work, but spent long hours listening to music and writing in her journal. At night she meandered through the netherworld of the city, to the jazz clubs, the dyke bars, the places where other rootless people swirled.
    Blood will tell, Grandfather said grimly to Mrs. Ephers, I was right to name her Mara; for the Lord has dealt very bitterly with me.

4
The Woman at the Wall
    E VERY NIGHT WHEN Mara climbed down the iron stairs that led from Michigan Avenue to the truck and bus routes below, the woman was in the same place. She sat cross-legged on a blanket, back against the wall, face hidden in the shadows. Some nights candle stubs, scavenged from the Dumpsters of nearby hotels, flickered in empty whiskey bottles in front of her. Between the candles lay a grimy photo of the Virgin Mary torn from a magazine. The woman leaned over it as if in prayer. Candlelight glinted gold from the icon in the photo, streaking the woman’s gray-white face and hair with yellow. Light flickered over the damp crack in the bricks behind her head where a pipe was leaking and dripping.
    Mara, drifting through the Underworld on her way to the jazz bars on the other side of Michigan, stopped to stare at her. Mrs. Ephers’s warnings echoed in her head: You’re following in your mother’s footsteps. Be careful you