Sitting in the Flamingo and going through the fruit salad—her obstetrician had asked her not to drink—he realized that it had taken him too long to see her desire to do it this way for what it was. It was the level on which she knew she could make a contribution. So there was another reason for him not to interfere: on her own terms, she was relaxed and doing well. He saw no point in determining if she had made her decision consciously or intuitively. She had had a relapse in his office when he had been checking the police file—reacting, she had said. The thing was that she had put it behind her and was trying to work on any terms. Perhaps she had even forgotten. It didn’t matter; she wasn’t leaving it to him to find his way as he could. She would tell him everything she thought would help him to see her husband, starting with the woman he had made his second wife.

Karen had not yet arrived. The Flamingo was a long sunken room to the side of a large foyer that also gave access to a half-dozen catering rooms upstairs. Like the rooms overhead, the public restaurant was finished in a softly lit stippled coral. There were no pictures on the walls, but a pair of gigantic whitewashed birch branches mounted above a bordering of artificial ivy. These were the new decorations and nobody liked them. Leland had taken a table by the wall where he could be seen from the entrance, but he had decided at the last moment to sit with his back to the entrance so he could give less divided attention to what Mrs. MacIver was saying. He had hedged: Mrs. MacIver could see the entrance and she had a description of Karen.

“I went to Franklin Pierce High School,” she said in her soft voice. “It was bad, and we had trouble, but nothing like what they have now with the race problem. There were fights, but nobody was ever killed. When two fellows had an argument, they settled it themselves. Maybe that’s romanticizing it, but I never saw anything like the picture they ran in the Herald-Press last week of that colored boy with the blood pouring out of his head. Did you see that?”

“There was a film on television,” he said.

“I saw that, too. I was in a tough crowd, and some of the fellows were out of school and working. A couple had prewar cars and when my parents thought I was at Gloria’s house or Anne’s or the confraternity, we were out bombing around town. We’d go to June Island or Northport, and once in a while we’d go down to Joytown and the boys would look for fairies to beat up.”

“I’ve always wondered who you troublemaking kids were.”