Mamie took an unexpected offended tone. “I didn’t. I’m through with begging, David. I used to beg Julia, and about a dozen others that I knew would have a swell time, if they deigned, but now I figure, send out the invitations and let those that want to come come. We’re all adults, God knows.” They were all over sixty; they had graduated forty-five years ago, the June the Korean War started. Seven of the hundred twelve, by the secretary’s accounting, were already dead. Yet all around him, through a mist of gray hair and wrinkles and body fat, David saw children’s faces, rising essentially unchanged up through the grades. Mamie added, “Betty Lou says Doris begged her to—she didn’t want to come all that way from Schenktown alone. And I guess Julia’s over her time of troubles, with her health and husband and all.”

Time of troubles? Mamie had never left Olinger—in fact, she lived two blocks from her mother, who was still alive—and assumed that David, who had gone away to college, and then into the Army, and then to New York City, and for thirty years had commuted to the city from Connecticut, knew more than he did of local news. He did remember Ann McFarland telling him, back at the fifteenth reunion, that Julia had said she would come only if she could lose ten pounds, and she hadn’t managed to, and so had proudly stayed away. She lived in Schenktown, six miles from Olinger, and hadn’t entered the school system until the ninth grade. She was not a slave to the old Olinger magic the way Mamie and Betty Lou and Ann were.

David’s mother had always marvelled at the good opinion Olinger people had of themselves. It was not as if it were the richest suburb of Alton, or the prettiest, or the “Dutchiest.” In Pennsylvania Dutch country, Dutchiness could be measured, not just by counting the number of decorated barns and whitewashed old inns in a town, but by a certain sullen air of resistance to all the things—malls, self-serve gas stations, discount outlets, housing projects for the elderly and less fortunate—that diluted the way things used to look. Busloads of tourists came out from Baltimore and Philadelphia to see how things used to look. Olinger had a pre-Revolutionary limestone house at its center, and a nineteenth-century track for harness races had preceded the curving streets of a rather posh section, Oakdale, developed in the Thirties and extended up the sides of Shale Hill after the war; but the town was not especially Dutchy, even with the multiplication, it seemed to David upon each return, of mass-produced regional kitsch—decal hex signs, dolls in Amish costume.