Max built up the fire and Clara made whiskey sodas. She asked for Effie’s help ransacking the kitchen. Mrs. Pavich was gone, she said, but there was plenty to eat, and they returned a few minutes later with a platter of sliced sausages, cheeses, bread and olives, and dips of various kinds: olive oil mixed with pepper and Parmesan, something like honey but with flecks of red pepper in it, a green paste Henry couldn’t identify. Clara put the platter on the coffee table and they settled around it, Henry and Effie on the couch, Clara in the armchair beside it, Max in a straight-back chair next to hers, his feet up on the coffee table. They were castaways, Henry imagined—they had that look about them: windblown and sun-kissed, in their bathing suits and loose linens. Effie and Henry shared an afghan; Clara spread a sweater over her legs.

Only Alma had changed out of her bathing suit. She’d put on a brown dress with little white polka dots, and she lay apart from them, on the rug near the fire, reading a book, her bare feet bobbing in the air.

The warmth was rejuvenating. The big open room, where they’d danced on Friday, felt close now, and as the evening darkened outside, the fire and the two lamps on either end of the couch made a circle that separated them from the rest of the world, and most of the living room—the foyer, the staircase, the little bar, the archway that led back to the kitchen—lay in shadow.

As on the boat, Max and Clara led the conversation. They seemed used to being in charge of a social setting, though Clara was prone to defer to Max, and when he cut her off, as he did fairly often, rather than get annoyed she’d look at him with a kind of delighted shock and then slowly her mouth would close and she’d seem to be lost in whatever he was saying, until she caught an edge and jumped back in. She was dramatic but gullible—or pretended to be, Henry suspected, for Max’s sake.

Max was also dramatic, but everything he said was laced with irony. He was good at imitations. He told stories about his old friends at Exeter, the prep school he’d attended in New Hampshire; about bar fights he’d gotten into in the Village; about girls who wore knee-length skirts without underwear. The stories were long and skillfully told—rehearsed, Henry thought—and Clara and Effie and even Henry laughed until their stomachs hurt.