Asta fell in love with a college man (there was an archaic phrase, thought Polly, and Maude delivered it with sarcasm) at a weekend party in Providence, and for a few months the world was a lovely place. A good-looking, rich, intelligent boy. He proposed and Asta brought him home that summer, but that fall, after she found out she was pregnant, he stopped answering his phone. When she took the train to Providence to see him, he cried and blamed his parents for backing out of the engagement, then got drunk and called her a slut in front of his fraternity brothers. A proctor led her out of the dormitory. Asta went back to Bryn Mawr and stayed in her room for a week, until a friend talked to the school authorities. She bolted from Philadelphia for New York and Papa found her two weeks later in a hotel.

By then it was too late to do anything about the pregnancy and he brought Asta home, all of them moving around town with a distinct lack of shame that people came to admire. Dee gave a baby shower, and everyone came. People loved Asta and people hated to see her wronged. Jane was born, and things were more or less fine until the man reappeared.

The ninth version of the story: The boy Asta was with when she died in the river had been Jane’s father. Though he abandoned Asta when he learned she was pregnant, he returned two years later to see her—no one knew why, or why she’d agreed—while Dee and Papa were visiting Maude in California. He knocked on the door of the house, this house, ignored the baby that Asta handed to Odile and Inge as she left, and took her off for a drive in a green Ford. The next morning, she was found drowned in the car in the river, and the boy was gone.

And that was that? Of course not. Maude and Papa and Dee drove north from California for a day and a night and saw Asta’s body. She had a black eye and a healing split lip from a beating that must have happened earlier in the day, and they found that though she’d suffered a blow to the head, she’d died of drowning. The water wasn’t that deep—the boy fled and left her to die. And so it wasn’t just that he’d caused the accident. Seeing her lovely face after the agony of drowning—Maude said it pushed Papa around a corner, forever. He hired a private detective, but the boy enlisted, shipping out days before the detective reached his parents’ house. Pearl Harbor was timely for him.

The bats were herding mosquitos again, listening. Harry leaned back in the lawn chair with his eyes closed.

“Jesus,” he said. “You’d never get over wanting to kill him.”