The front door was open, and through the screen door they could see to the back windows, but they couldn’t see anyone inside. Effie pulled a rope hanging by the door and a bell clanged inside. They waited. After a minute she pulled the rope again, and finally a voice came from deep within the house—“Coming!”—and soon a handsome woman with blond, elegantly coiffed hair and a white halter-top dress pushed the screen door open. “Hello!” she cried, looking at Henry, whose eyes dropped involuntarily to her breasts. “You must be…” And she seemed to search for the right name, ready to be utterly delighted, whoever it was.

“We’re just staying down the street,” Effie said. “We were on our way to supper and saw the cars down here and figured we’d introduce ourselves. We don’t want to bother you.”

While Effie spoke, the delight in the woman’s face faded, and she leaned forward to get a closer look. “No,” she said. “No, it can’t be—it just can’t be. Is that my little belle?”

Effie glanced at Henry, as if he would know the answer.

“My God!” the woman cried. “It is you. You’re the little Southern girl from down the street! My God—I could faint!” The woman wrapped her arms around Effie and squeezed her, and Effie tipped her head up as if for air. She seemed alarmed. Finally the woman let her go and said, “Don’t you remember me? You’re going to break my heart if you don’t remember me.”

And now something seemed to dawn on Effie. “Clara?” she said. “Clara Strauss?”

“Yes!” the woman cried, clapping her hands together.

And though Effie was smiling broadly, Henry knew her well enough to know better: she was sorry they had come.

Two

“Come in, come in—Jesus!” the woman demanded, as if to scold them for not arriving sooner, and led them across a wide foyer into a bright living area that looked out through a bank of windows onto a lush patio and swimming pool. The shadowy look of the house from the outside was a disguise for the brightness inside. It seemed to Henry like an enchantment.

“We can only stay a minute,” Effie said. “We were just on our way to dinner.”

“I can’t believe it’s you,” Clara said, stopping to appraise her. “How long has it been? Five, six years? A lifetime? Who is this?” She placed her hand at the small of Henry’s back. When Effie told her he was her husband, the woman gasped—she had never heard of anything so marvelous—and gripped his hand firmly, painfully. “My God, how do you do? I’m Clara—Clara!”

“I’m Henry!”

“Yes!”