When the food came, the woman in the blue hat again raised her eyebrows for the benefit of her companion, this time to signify the rather rough delivery of the plates by the waiter.

As they ate, the woman in the blue hat was reminded of something she had recently heard and the conversation turned to the business of neighbors. The woman with the red hat listened with an air of having heard it all before and yet not wanting to miss a word. It just shows to go you, she would say, whenever a turn of events ratified her worst suspicions. Like when the colored boy who cared for the Adelsons’ cars finally took their Cadillac for a night on the town. Or when young Miss Hollister followed that fast-talking schoolteacher all the way to Chicago, only to return Miss Hollister and child. And Leonora Cunningham? After buying the Obermeyers’ place in Clayton, and telling everyone who would listen about this curtain and that curtain and this lamp and that lamp, the bank examiners paid a visit to her husband’s office and emerged with seven years of ledgers in a cardboard box!

Well. It just shows to go you.

He crossed his knife and fork on his plate and turned to the window, feeling a certain pang. It was the sort of pang that would strike him every now and then in the moments before some memory of Betty would surface. But no memory of his wife surfaced now. It was Caroline that he found himself thinking on.

When his son had first courted Caroline, he and Betty had been right proud. It wasn’t because she was a college girl and the daughter of a New York attorney. Or, it wasn’t only because of those things. It was because she had been so blue-eyed and bright. Sitting on their porch, she’d been ablush with talk of travel and music and books and all manner of open-endedness. But just six years later, she couldn’t hide a hint of impatience. Like when Tom spoke of how much he enjoyed his position at his firm; or when he showed satisfaction in some little aspect of their house. And when she described a visit to an old friend in Greenwich, she twice told Tom that he wouldn’t believe the trees in her backyard—as if the trees in Greenwich had been planted by a grander divinity than had the trees in Tenafly.