“We’re trying to get out of town, we’ve got realtors coming out of our ears,” Ann said with comical vehemence. “I’m damned if I’m going to take the children out of school before it ends in May. They’re heartbroken we’re moving in any case.” As the car heater warmed, drowning in its gases the sour-milkshake scent, and the rumpled blocks of the old town rolled by, she conceded, “I’m sorry. That was not a good-sport thing to do. But just seeing her physically, after talking about her for weeks and weeks, it came over me how you’d seen her … how you knew every … and she looked so great, actually, in that grotesque outfit.” Ann went on, “Pale and tense, but it’s taken a few pounds off her. Wish I could say the same.”

He reached over and squeezed her plump thigh through the thickness of her winter coat. “Different styles,” he said, obliquely bragging. They were united, it seemed to him, in admiration of Maggie—two suppliants bowed beneath a natural force. Though rapprochement on such a basis was bound to decay, for a time it made for a conspiratorial closeness.

In the meantime, Maggie was crossed off party lists. She pursued her daily duties in majestic isolation, visited by only a few gossip-hungry women and oddball men sensing an opportunity. Frank was divided between acquiescence in her exclusion—her power over him, the grandeur she had for him, left no room for pity—and an impossible wish to reunite, to say the words to her that would lift them above it all and put them back in bed together. More experienced than he, she knew there were no such words. A few months after the Christmas-carol sing, the town fathers sponsored an Easter-egg hunt on the sloping common, this side of the cemetery. In the milling about, while parents chased after frantic, scooting children on the muddy brown grass, he managed to sidle up to Maggie, in her familiar spring tweeds. She gave him an unamused stare and said to him, as if the words had been stored up, “Your wife has ruined my social life. And my children’s. Sam is furious.”

Such a petty and specific grievance seemed astonishingly unworthy of them and their love. Startled, Frank said, “Ann doesn’t scheme. She just lets things happen.” As if, after all this silence between them, they had met to debate his wife’s character. Maggie turned away. Sick with the rejection, he admired the breadth of her shoulders and the wealth of her hair, done up in a burnished, glistening French twist.