“Nothing wrong with that. It’s being sociable and showing good manners.”

“It’s being nosy. He wants to know their parents’ names and where they live. He’s like a cop or something.”

The next time he went down, I went with him and watched. One of Regina’s girlfriends had brought along a new boy. He was watching the Ping-Pong game, waiting his turn. Frank approached him, shook hands amiably, then proceeded to do just what Regina had described—asking the boy about his parents, where they lived, even where they came from.

Upstairs, I told him I thought he was being too overbearing.

“There’s nothing wrong in finding out about her friends,” he said. “There’s a lot of drugs around and you never know who might be peddling them.”

“You’re not going to find out that way. You’re making them uncomfortable.”

“Are you faulting me for being interested? All I’ve heard from you about your school is ‘parental apathy,’ how the parents don’t show up for PTA meetings and open-school conferences.”

“There’s such a thing as a happy medium.”

Frank’s surveillance continued until Regina announced to me that she and her friends would not be meeting in our house anymore. Instead, they would gather someplace where they would be left alone. At this point, she shut Frank out of her circle of attention almost entirely. She barely spoke to him at all, restricting her conversation to grudging answers to his questions. If she needed to be driven somewhere, she asked me to do it. When she practiced her French for oral quizzes, she would come to me even though Frank had had two more years of the language than I had and his ear for it was better than mine. I was put on the tightrope between them. It was easy to see how Regina felt suffocated by him, and a selfish part of me saw some justice in her about-face because all those years that he had won her attention and her affection cheaply, with indulgence, he had not worked at winning her respect. Of course, it was too late for that. Still, it pained me to see how deeply she was hurting him. But I sensed in him something more than hurt. I sensed panic. Not wild, hysterical panic, but the kind of panic that is kept in check. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I would hear him get up to go to the bathroom, listen to him pause at Regina’s door, open it, close it, and come back to bed. Something, something was moving in on us.

The pressures of school, the uphill battle with Rand, the friction between Frank and Regina, and perhaps the fact that Gloria now had four children made me decide to become pregnant. We had visited Pat and Gloria almost every year since that Chicago summer and I had watched her family grow. The idea of our having a second child was not new to me, but whenever I discussed it with Frank, he had always presented a firm argument for how much I would miss teaching. But that argument no longer held any ground now that the school seemed to be crumbling. Naïvely, I thought a baby would be the best thing for us all.