“I had to be afraid of marriage, where Colin was concerned,” Roberts was saying. “Not just because he had failed in one attempt. With Norma, he had to have a far better chance to succeed. The life he had lived before he had met her had been the best for him. A lonely life, but it had allowed him to grow. Marriage makes its own great demands—people are afraid to discuss them. What happened to Colin was precipitated by the pressure of marriage—the same with your wife. You know it. And both of them wanted so badly to do well—you know that, too. In spite of what he saw in his parents, or what he did himself, Colin believed in marriage. No work, no personal accomplishments compare, he thought. A little while ago you said about him that there was such a complexity to his financial affairs that it was easy to overlook the fact that he wanted to be rich. When he and I were talking about marriage, he said that we lived in such a welter of change and confusion that it was easy to miss the point that marriage is the most important fact of our life on earth—”

“A doctor who looked at Scanlon last night said that there were three things, birth, death, and life itself.”

“And marriage is what we do with life, Joe. Or try. We regard it as our crowning achievement. Colin reminded me of that. It isn’t the first time a man’s sorrow has turned a light on something good.”

“I think that the doctor was asking questions about our taste for misery,” Leland said. “He frightened my father. My father had a high school education and the doctor talked about Scanlon going mad—that it was happening before our eyes and there was nothing we could do about it.”

He had said something, too, about the man being out of reach, as if dead, like MacIver. Leland had not been out to the cemetery. He was going to do that. He was going out and see MacIver’s stone. Norma did not seem like one for visiting graves. All the funerals a man went to, all the biers and corpses with rosaries or crosses or Bibles—everyone knew that much about it. It was enough of a burden for a man to bear.

“Listen to me a little longer, Joe. For Colin, for your wife, for all the people so badly prepared for taking their places as adults, marriage is like a machine made in hell. It tears them apart. You saw what happened to Karen. You helped her help herself.”

“It was an accident,” he said. “Pure acccident.”