A crumbling, screaming shame, said Papa, in a letter to his stepdaughter Maude that Polly saw much later. Thomas Alden Ward, pride of his snooty family, who had cast aside a deferment and enlisted out of spite—toward his parents, his crazy wife, a needy little boy, himself—was in the process of disappearing, at that moment lying down to die near Hue.

The Tet Offensive played every night. Papa bought a larger television, ostensibly so that they could watch the Grenoble Olympics, really to distract everyone from Rita’s constant babble. He realized quickly that the television was a mixed bag. The war and all the funerals and riots from the previous spring and summer, already Technicolor in magazines, were now larger, moving, echoing. Merle and Jane tried turning the news off, but Edmund kept turning it on and sat cross-legged in front of it, watching Walter Cronkite instead of cartoons. He studied every photo of the war in the Times, in LIFE magazine, every muddy white face in Southeast Asia that came his way. He dreamt of his father sleeping on a sandy path in a jungle, flowers and ferns blocking the hot sun, a line of ants walking around his head. It was possible Tommy was sleeping somewhere, even now. Polly would hear doors open when Edmund cried out in the night. Jane or Dee—never Rita—would go to him, and Polly would hear their whispers through her wall.

When they first moved into the house on Long Island, Polly felt a moment of hope, a blast of her old belief—maybe they’d find Evie and Frank. Now she told Edmund about her theory. It was stupid to think that way, she said.

I don’t know, said Edmund. Maybe we should still keep an eye out for all of them.

After the officers visited, Rita was quiet for a day, and then she said she didn’t know why people were acting this way—Tommy wasn’t dead, he’d just gone off somewhere. Hiding out, like a smart person, she said to Tommy’s mother on the phone. A week later, she announced at dinner that she was going to have a baby, and that she needed to lie down. It was exciting, but that night, when Jane tucked Edmund and Polly in, she told them it was hard to be certain about such things. Through the floor vent, Polly heard Jane say, Do the math, she saw Tom last in September, and her waist isn’t much bigger than Polly’s. Everyone said something like this but Rita, who stopped coming out of her room. She asked everyone who brought her food what she should name the baby.