Althea and I had been married for close to fifteen years when I saw Jane again, in Rochester. Rochester, of all places, in the middle of winter, at one of the entrances to the downtown mall, where they have the totem pole and the clock with little puppet shows. Christmas was over, and the season’s snowfalls had been compressed to a blotchy corrugated ice, hard as iron. Jane was accompanied by a blond child I took for Jeffrey; but of course Jeffrey would be in his twenties, I realized. The boy was tugging at her, against the tilt of her crooked smile, and I could hardly talk, since the old mist between us had arisen, plain as she had become. She had put on weight. Her middle-aged face was round and red beneath a wool knit cap, and she was wearing one of those black quilted winter coats that suburban matrons had taken to wearing as work uniforms. Dog hairs and what looked like a few bits of straw were clinging to it.

“Jane, my God,” I said, reeling backward from the firm, even complacent hug she bestowed, through our wraps. “What are you doing here?”

“I live here,” she announced. “In Irondequoit, actually. We bought an old farm.”

We? I put off exploring that. “How—how long?”

“Oh, ten years. This is Tommy.”

“Where’s Jeffrey?”

“In Taos, trying to be a painter, the poor darling. God, it’s been bliss for me to get away from artists. What selfish boyish shits they all are. Ken works for Kodak—he’s a chemist. We met the way you and I did—he was trying to sell the gallery some process.”

“Not a process, I just wanted to look at flanges. But can you stand it, Jane, out of New York? The city, I mean.”

She put a great black-mittened hand on mine, and even through the wool-lined leather I felt the rightness of her touch, the velvety rightness come back to me, a texture of youth, when the world still bristles with options. I felt in her presence the fear of death a man feels with a woman who once opened herself to him and is available no more.

“I hated New York, I was dying to get out of it. You knew that, Stan. It’s what made you shy.”

“I—”

But the strange child was tugging her toward some keenly imagined pleasure within the mall, and her hand was yanked awkwardly away. Flipping that hand in mid-air, she urged, “Don’t say a thing, sweetie. Be happy for me is all you have to do.”

MY FATHER ON THE VERGE OF DISGRACE