Reunions revealed that keenly felt structure of implacable discriminations to have been a poor predictor of adult performance. It was the comically tongue-tied yokel, invisible in class, who moved to Maryland and founded an empire of plant nurseries and parked a silver Jaguar in the lot of the reunion restaurant. It was the forlorn, scorned daughter of a divorced mother—a monstrous thing in those days—who had become a glamorous merchandising executive out in Chicago. The class cut-ups had become schoolteachers and policemen, solemn and ponderous with the responsibility of maintaining local order. The prize for newest father—his bouncy fourth wife, in a low-cut satin minidress, indistinguishable from his third, five years ago—went to a boy who had never, as far as anyone could recall, attended a dance or gone out on a date. The class wallflowers, an almost invisible backdrop of colorless femininity against which the star females had done their cheers and flaunted their charms, had acquired graceful manners and a pert suburban poise, while the queens of the class had succumbed to a lopsided overdevelopment of the qualities—bustiness, peppiness, recklessness, a cunning chiselled hardness—that had made them spectacular.

Julia had been spectacular but seemed unaware of it or, if aware, dismissive of it. Her characteristic expression, that worried smile which asked, “What can you do?,” alternated, in David’s observation, with a faintly grim, masculine intentness, as when she was driving her convertible fast, her chestnut hair flattened back from her forehead and rippling furiously, or when she was smoking a cigarette at lunch. Her lower jaw would move out under the cigarette and her eyes would narrow like a man’s. The way she always travelled with an attendant, little Doris, enhanced the powerfully exotic impression she made on the class élite. The good-looking, dynamic girls courted her, and enrolled her in their circle almost against her will. She shrugged off as ridiculous the boys who professed, along the wriggling grapevines of gossip, their love for her. She had no sex life, that David could see; perhaps it was back in Schenktown. The boys, Wilbur and Morris, who came along on their lunchtime drives had a countrified softness and tact of manner, as if life were innocent of undercurrents—as if these devil-may-care lunchtime excursions were not an exhilarating exercise in bonding, in nerve, in escape from the order imposed back in Olinger High and the surrounding tight community of semi-detached brick houses. There was something negative, something refusing about Julia that David liked, without being tempted to improve upon the pleasant sexlessness between them. If she had ever kissed him before this forty-fifth reunion, he had forgotten it.