So that was why he had felt relaxed and tall and grateful, known for what he was, seeing Julia Reidenhauser again. But why had he felt that sharp impulse to introduce her to his wife? He watched his wife move about in the motel room on the edge of Alton, slowly undressing, draping her bra on a towel rack, fussing at the provincial inadequacies of the accommodations—instant coffee in the bathroom but no shower cap or bath oil—yet sweetly calm and somewhat absent beneath this skin of irritation. A woman was a circle whose center was slightly elsewhere. David wondered if he would live to see the fiftieth reunion. Mamie had spoken into the microphone about it, her voice with its childish lisp curling around a vision of something extraordinary—a cruise on the Chesapeake, a weekend in Bermuda even, which aren’t as expensive as you would think, off-season. She wanted them all to write her with their ideas. “And please include your present correct address, for the class list. Things don’t get forwarded any more; the parents that used to do it are … are gone.” Help, she was saying, we are sinking into the sea of the generations. There was no more Olinger High School: the name had been swallowed up by a regionalization in the Fifties, and the high-school building itself, with its waxed oak hallways and wealth of hidden asbestos, had been razed in the Seventies. At their twenty-fifth reunion, the door prizes had been yellow bricks salvaged from the rubble.

“Maybe this will be the last one I’ll drag you to,” David announced to his wife.

She gave him a harassed, dishevelled, lovable look. “Miss your fiftieth? Why? I don’t mind them. They’re nice people, really. They just have never gone anywhere.”

“I think they think they’re already there. How did you like Julia?” Julia had left, with Doris, before the dancing began, and the post-dinner drinking. First, Butch Fogel had shown an old movie his father had taken on eight-millimeter film, of a Memorial Day parade in 1937, and then of a clambake on the vacant lot next to the Lutheran church. David had been rapt, spotting as they flickered by an old Sunday-school teacher brandishing a cigar, and the bald doctor who had aided his birth and used to come visit with his little unfolding black bag, and (for a piercing split-second) David’s youthful father mugging for the camera, and then the fat town policeman who at Christmas always dressed up as Santa Claus to hand out red-wrapped boxes of Zipf’s chocolates. David looked for himself in the swiftly panned throngs, but he would have been only five, and would he have recognized himself anyway?

“Which was she?”

“The tallish one with the hook nose and the crown of white hair.”

“She seemed a bit above it all.”