Anna’s parents weren’t fond of him, and they weren’t shy about showing it. Their dislike had nothing to do with him and everything to do with his accent. He had been in the country for years by then, but he never succeeded in casting off his accent—he had come a few years too late for that, he knew. Anna’s parents were themselves immigrants from Russia, but they had both arrived just a few years shy of the age when one can no longer lose a foreign accent (which, Bill later read, was around the age of eleven) and therefore spoke a brash, ungrammatical dialect they considered to be an English fit for royalty. On the evening they first met the young and still slightly pimpled high school student who came to take their daughter out, they were horrified as soon as he opened his mouth. Anna’s little brothers agreed—identical-twin brats who ran through the front yard with pillowcases tied behind their heads pretending to be Superman. (One later became a Clark Kent, a grind at a New Jersey newspaper; the other continued believing he could fly, and was shot down over Korea.) They made fun of his accent from the moment they met him, quickly converting their Superman capes into Dracula robes and bearing their rotten little teeth like fangs, running up the stairs as they shouted with insane glee, “Ah-nah, somevun vants to suck your blood!”

Her parents were more subtle. They simply refused to give him the time of day. When he would come calling for her, her mother would tell him that she was so sorry, Anna wasn’t available this afternoon, she was at her piano lesson (she especially loves ragtime, rather old-fashioned but still so charming—though you wouldn’t know about that sort of music, would you?), or tutoring the neighbor’s child in English composition (I’m sure someone like you must have noticed how beautiful Anna’s English is—or perhaps you wouldn’t quite appreciate it, would you?), or volunteering at City Hall, since today was Election Day (but I don’t suppose you knew today was Election Day, did you?), or, best of all, out on a date with the captain of the football team (but I don’t suppose you would know what football is, would you?). When he tracked Anna down in school the following day, he learned that she wasn’t half the model of civic virtue her mother made her out to be. In reality, he discovered, she was something of a recluse, and had been sitting in her bedroom listening to records each time he had rung their doorbell. After the third or fourth time he called, he noticed a letter to the editor in the local paper signed by Anna’s father, concurring in a qualified manner with a guest editorial entitled “Confronting the Refugee Bloodsuckers.”