34. The old woman's story.

They walked to the same falafel place on Second Avenue for lunch, and went back to Tompkins Square Park to eat. Pigeons pecked around their feet for stray morsels, of which there were none.

Finally she asked. "How did you know what was in that woman's purse?"

He watched her as he chewed. She continued.

"I mean, I guess you could have figured out that it was paper in there. By the shape of the bag. Or maybe because it looked full of stuff but she didn't have any problem lifting it. Maybe you heard the paper rustling in there."

"Is it important how I knew?"

She looked down. As before, she was done eating long before he was. "I guess not. Then there was all that other stuff about her that you knew too, about her kids, for example. But that could have been a lucky guess, too, a woman all by herself in the park, you could have assumed that about her."

"What do you think it meant, that she had done that, wadding up pieces of paper and putting them in her bag?"

"I don't know. Old people do all sorts of crazy things. If you were right about her and she's all alone, she probably has to come up with some ways of killing time. Boredom and loneliness do weird things to people. And people are conscious of appearances."

Sid finished chewing and swallowed. "Why do you think she sits in the park all day?"

Nan looked up. "I don't know. Do you?"

He paused. "When she was much younger, she used to meet a man there in the park. She and her husband had a small dog--it's been dead for a long time now--and she'd walk it. She and the man used to meet there, and then go to his apartment. This went on for almost six years, only in the summertime."

"You don't think she's still hoping to meet him?"

"No. He's been dead almost as long as her husband, although she doesn't know that. She assumes he moved, or stopped being interested. If he were alive and she saw him, she'd turn the other way. She comes to the park because her guilt is like a person to her, some company where otherwise she would have none."

"Do you think she's a bad woman?"

"There are no good people or bad people. I feel compassion for her because she suffers, but in that she's no different from anyone. And her prisons are of her own making."

Nan opened her notebook and jotted some notes.