Maggie did corporate work. Often, when she had big deals going through, he’d gone down to her offices at maybe nine or ten at night, taken her out for a quick dinner, then let her get back to work until two or three in the morning. Both their courtship and the first years of their marriage had been like that. Romance snatched at odd moments, leisure organized in little compartments of time. In a way it was exciting. Wartime affairs and marriages, Gorham realized, must have been like this. But peace was a long time coming.

They had been having an affair for a year before he proposed to her. By that time he was completely crazy about her. If she wasn’t a corporate wife, he didn’t care. And she, for her part, not only loved him, but would sometimes say in wonderment: “I just can’t believe that you put up with the terrible hours I have to keep.” His fascination and her gratitude, Gorham reckoned, made a good cement in the building of their marriage.

“If you want to have it all, Maggie,” he’d cheerfully remind her, “just remember that having it all includes me.”

The marriage was at her parents’ Catholic church in Norwalk, Connecticut. Her parents thought Gorham was perfect. They didn’t even mind that he wasn’t Catholic. As for Maggie, she didn’t tell the priest, but she’d already assured Gorham that their children could attend any church he liked, or none.

Juan was best man—he’d married Janet by then—and Maggie’s brother Martin was one of the ushers. Martin was a pleasant, rather intellectual fellow, and he and Gorham got along fine. At the end of the wedding, Maggie’s father had quietly suggested to Martin that if he had no plans for ever marrying, perhaps he’d like to tell him about it some time.

The pattern of their lives changed only a little as they entered the 1980s. If Gorham needed Maggie to attend a business dinner with him in the city, she’d make great efforts to do so. Once, when Branch & Cabell hosted a weekend at a resort for all the partners, associates and their spouses, Gorham was amused, during the lawyers’ business sessions, to be taken around and entertained with all the spouses. “I like being a spouse,” he told Maggie with a grin. “I had twenty wives all to myself.”

The only other necessary defining of their positions in the early eighties had been the newly popular social acronyms.

“I have always been a WASP,” Gorham rightly declared. “And I guess I may be called a preppy. But Maggie is definitely a yuppie.”

Even this changed in 1986, however, when Maggie was made a partner. “And a partner of Branch & Cabell,” she insisted, “can no longer be called a yuppie.”

“Not even a pretty young red-headed partner?”