“Sheila has a new show in February,” Monica said. “I really don’t think she’d have time to visit us.”

“Then after February, of course,” Jill said, smiling at Monica as if Monica had said something particularly obtuse. “There’s all the time in the world and I know Harry and Ruth would be delighted. . . .”

Monica felt the prick, the lightest pinprick, of coercion. But she only murmured a vague reply, neutral and near-inaudible.

James said with a droll smile that the artists he and Jill had known—and they’d known quite a few, beginning back in college—this was in Columbus, Ohio—Ohio State, where they’d met—the artists they had known were really colorful and eccentric personalities—unpredictable—rather childlike, in fact. Difficult to get along with but sometimes very likable. Lovable. “It never surprised me,” James said expansively, “the things we’d hear from time to time about the Flaxmans, and it never made me feel there was anything, you know, immoral about them. They simply abide by a different set of standards than the rest of us, and in God’s creation each individual only has to account for himself—no matter what the Pharisees preach.”

James Starkie was a burly good-natured man in his early forties who looked and behaved like a man in his late twenties. At Ohio State he had been a football star—so Monica had been told, many times—and it was considered quite a coup for Glenkill, that their much-admired chaplain was an athlete and a companion of young athletes, his name well-known to alumni. All the boys adored him, it was said—or nearly all: perhaps his relentless good nature and his white-toothed smile failed to charm the more “problematic” of the boys.