“Well, I won’t say no,” she said, not altogether graciously, one night well after midnight when Jeanne suggested that I walk Winifred home, through a snowstorm that had developed during a dinner party of ours and its inert, boozy aftermath. Couples or their remnants had drifted off until just Winifred was left; she had a stern, impassive way of absorbing a great deal of liquor and betraying its presence in her system only by a slight lowering of her lids over her bright black eyes, and an increase of pedantry in her fluting voice. This was before the Greers’ divorce. Frank was absent from the party on some mysterious excuse of a business trip. It was the first stage of their separation, I realized later. Jeanne, knowing more than she let on, had extended herself that night like a kid sister to the unescorted woman. She kept urging Freddy, as the party thinned, to give us one more tale of the creative-writing seminar she was taking, as a special student, at our local college, Bradbury. Bradbury had formerly been a bleak little Presbyterian seminary tucked up here, with its pillared chapel, in the foothills of the White Mountains, but it had long loosened its ecclesiastical ties and in the Sixties had gone coed, with riotous results.

“This one girl,” Winifred said, accepting what she swore was her last Kahlúa and brandy, “read a story that must have been very closely based on a painful breakup she had just gone through, and got nothing but the most sarcastic comments from the instructor, who seems to be a real sadist, or else it was his way of putting the make on her.” Her expression conveyed disgust and weariness with all such transactions. I supposed that she was displacing her anger at Frank onto the instructor, a New York poet who no doubt wished he was back in Greenwich Village, where the sexual revolution was polymorphous. He was a dreary sour condescending fellow, in my occasional brushes with him, and disconcertingly short as well.

These rehashed class sessions were all fascinating stuff, if you judged from Jeanne’s animation and gleeful encouragement of the other woman to tell more. A rule of life in Pierce Junction demanded that you be especially nice to your lover’s spouse—by no means an insincere observance, for the secret sharing did breed a tortuous, guilt-warmed gratitude to the everyday keeper of such a treasure. But even Winifred through her veils of Kahlúa began to feel uncomfortable, and stood up in our cold room (the thermostat had retired hours ago), and put her shawl up around her head, as if fluffing up her feathers. She accepted with a frown Jeanne’s insistent suggestion that I escort her home. “Of course I’m in no condition to drive, this has been so lovely,” she said to Jeanne, with a handshake that Jeanne turned into a fierce, pink-faced, rather frantic (I thought) embrace of transposed affection.