“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.”

He could not help thinking of the flight to Manitou—the way he looked at it these days, he had deserted her. But he rarely looked at it, except in fear, which was true of her, too. They had come this far because they had been afraid to let go of the bits and pieces they had found of the thing they had thought they had destroyed. They were both to blame. Maybe like Betty Kaminsky he had not known enough, and maybe he had expected too much: he had gone home those nights before the war with his head filled with visions of Karen Widener. Had he ever thought of her as someone other than the girl who had had so many good things to do?