“Mrs. Randolph? You heard that one yet?”

“No,” I whispered. “I hadn’t heard.”

Of course I knew the fellow he meant. It was the talk of Nassau for weeks, even in the midst of all that fuss over Pearl Harbor and Nancy Oakes’s ball, and while the talk had died down during the course of the spring, his name still came up from time to time.

Consider the afternoon I learned how he was attacked. I remember how the walls of the room made a kind of tunnel around me, how I went hot and then cold in the course of a few seconds, and I thought I might actually faint. Somebody asked me if I was all right—the voice sounded like it was coming from another room, from another country—and I remembering saying I was fine, just a little shocked, what a terrible thing. I remember asking questions—how had it happened, where was he hurt, who found him, were they sure it was Thorpe—but nobody seemed to know anything more. So I turned back to the hymnal in my hands, the program of service. The chords of the organ, calling the faithful to the miracle of Christmas. That steadied the shaking of my hands and brought me back to the present world, to the substance of the objects around me. Except each time I opened my mouth to sing, I had no breath. I had no voice at all.

When the service ended, I suggested to Mrs. Gudewill that we put together a few books and treats—a Red Cross parcel, if you will—and deliver them to the hospital. I thought it wouldn’t be so singular if I went with a friend. By the time we reached the hospital with our basket it was past teatime, and the nurse on duty told us that Mr. Thorpe had regained consciousness a little past noon and was out of immediate danger. But we were too late to deliver him any comfort baskets. At that very moment, he was on a boat bound for Miami and the hospital there: a voyage chartered for him by the Duchess of Windsor herself.

All of which, you might think, was wonderfully good news: the kind of news that ought to make a girl feel better on the spot. Indeed it did. For that first hour or two, I felt as if I’d been loosened from a vise, from one of those devices of medieval torture that turn each limb and organ on its own separate screw, and come to understand at last the true meaning of the word relief. I parted ways with Mrs. Gudewill and made my way to my bungalow to pour myself a festive gin and tonic. But as I sipped at the drink, I discovered that my relief had dissolved into something else. Into emptiness, into a loss of mass, an absence of atoms and molecules I had not known I possessed. There had been something, and now there was nothing. Gone.