An elderly man in a sweater and blazer came out onto the patio. He surveyed the crowd and, seeing Clara at the table, came over behind her and set his big veiny hands on her shoulders. To Henry’s shock, she said, “Richard, dear!” and reached up to squeeze his forearms.

The man couldn’t have been younger than sixty. He had a long, solemn face and unruly white eyebrows. He would have made a good schoolmaster. “I see the party is under way.”

“Sit, darling, sit,” Clara said. “How wonderful you’ve decided to join the living. Max, dear, would you mind?”

The boxer bowed and got up from the table with his plate, and Richard took his place and waited while Clara piled a heap of gumbo for him. Henry squeezed Effie’s knee under the table, to get her attention and point out what was happening, but she was too absorbed in her conversation to notice. If Clara was going to make introductions, she never got a chance, because another group of people came out onto the patio, and when she saw them she cried, “Helen Crabtree, you horrible bitch!” and bolted up from the table to give the woman in question a hug. Poor Richard was left to himself, but he didn’t seem to mind; his attention was directed at his plate, and steadily he made his way through the gumbo and a side of greens, pausing only once to pour himself an austere amount of wine.

Through the big windowpanes, now that the inside was brighter than the outside, Henry could see more people gathering in the den, big groups of them, laughing, sipping from martini glasses, smoking cigarettes. He saw the beatnik in the slip take her shoes off and hand them to a man who placed them into a potted plant. He saw a naked toddler run screaming from the archway. He saw an Oriental woman with a complicated bun and silvery eye shadow. He saw a man with circular sunglasses and a shaved head under a beret. Who were these people? Where had they come from? They had materialized out of the enveloping dark. Most of them seemed to be young, Scott’s or Clara’s ages, but there was a group of older men too, in tuxedos—family friends, maybe, or Richard’s friends, or people from Scott’s law firm, or professors at Princeton. Who could say? The record player had been turned up and something hopping, with horns and a drumbeat, was coming through the open French doors. For the past week he’d felt isolated from the world, and now the world was upon him, or some strange version of it.