Their rural mobility brought its social rewards. Julia’s Studebaker or Doris’s station wagon would show up on a weekend at David’s farm, that farm with which his mother had expected to place an irrevocable remove between her family and the town. They would carry him away, in a nest of passengers that included not just the stolid Schenktown pals but such prizes as Mamie and Betty Lou and Ann, and the boys they deemed acceptable. By way of Julia’s magnetism and the power of the American automobile, he had made his way back in, into those mysterious, pointless, indispensable get-togethers that had begun to exclude him in the fifth grade. The group went bowling, played canasta in clouds of cigarette smoke, watched infant television, drove to a pond where there was a dock and diving board—flimsy excuses, all of them, for being together and staying together, on the edge of those possibilities they felt, dimly, approaching to shape and limit their lives. It was a little late for him; he was plotting a life for himself after Olinger, following his mother’s lead after all. But he was happy to be in a gang again, and took with him into the world the pride of membership, of acceptance.

Until tonight he had not distinctly seen how much that acceptance had been a prize Julia had passed on to him, not valuing it greatly herself. Of her life once she made her escape from school he knew little and needed to know nothing—a Schenktown husband, a row of children, a dose of the illnesses and disappointments that give life its final fatal flavor. She had tasted it all even as a teen-ager. Well, was kann mer duh? All we have in the end is our posture. The erect way she carried herself in those vanished, clattering halls had made her breasts, in an old-fashioned edgy bra and fuzzy sweater, jut out sharply, above a stomach as tautly flat as if she had taken a deep breath to sing.