The school allotted a class period, fifty-five minutes, for lunch. After finding and eating the hamburgers, they would still have time to drive around. In that Pennsylvania of the late Forties, before the transformations of the post-war boom had really taken hold, pure countryside lay five minutes from Olinger in every direction except along the trolley tracks toward Alton. Hilly, twisting township roads connected lonely farmhouses and an occasional grocery store with two rusty red gas pumps outside, advertised by a Pegasus. David remembered standing in the rear seat of Julia’s Studebaker, battered by wind, and then lying back across the folded convertible top onto the sun-warmed metal of the trunk and watching the dazzling alternation of sky and tree branches scud overhead.

Little cemeteries of tilted sandstones, mysterious thick groves of planted evergreens, rickety farm stands that would have appeared deserted but for their fresh yellow squashes and orange pumpkins and the bonneted old woman keeping an eye on things from the porch; collapsing stone springhouses, the overgrown ruins of old iron forges, creeks making brown foam with their chuckling small waterfalls; fields of corn, of rye, of tobacco, of cattle, of peach and apple trees in blossom or bent low with fruit—all this poured around the noontime travellers, who were oblivious to most everything but one another and the sensation of speed. When David was the automotive host, in the old black Chevrolet, he had a trick, safer than it looked but infallibly producing shouts and screams from his passengers, of putting the car in neutral at the crest of a hill and getting out on the running board and steering through the window. The chance of meeting another car was not great. The roads, laid out in dirt for horse-drawn farm wagons, had been paved before the war. Soon enough they would be broadened, and the curves straightened at the cost of a little dormered farmhouse or stone-sided dirt-ramp barn, but for now they formed an empty maze that called these licensed adolescents out, out from the high school with its crammed halls and classrooms, its perfumed and slick-haired mobs in angora sweaters and corduroy shirts and saddle shoes and penny loafers, its whispering seethe of romance and breakup and calculated misbehavior, and its merciless gradations of worth by Olinger standards—the shining ins and the shadowy outs, the attractive and admirable versus the many more who were neither.