“Please, Bea,” I said. “Be happy for me.”

She looked up and, with tears streaming, said, “Mr. Welch, this will be your undoing.” Then she gathered up her things and fled the room.¹

TWO

KATE

WHEN SUMMER CAME, EVERYONE FLED—WELL, NOT EVERYONE, JUST THE ADAIRS, the Adamses, the Alexander-Lowells, the Baxters, the Boydens, the Brills, the Cahills, the Carpenters, the Cass-Wentworths, and the Davis-Hargroves, to list a few, to their country homes, their oceanfront beach houses, their rented rustic cabins on glacial lakes, with destinations as varied as the Vineyard, the Cape, Sag Harbor, the Hamptons, Bucks County, the Adirondacks, the Berkshires, the islands Shelter, Fire, and Block. Mothers and weekend fathers and children loaded up their SUVs, strapped bicycles to the rack, drove away the minute school let out in early June, not returning until after Labor Day, not until they were tanned, with sun-drenched hair, pink-peeling noses, and bodies lean and limber from aerobics, tennis, and sailing. Others went farther—Ireland, Italy, Greece—others farther still, and where were Tim and I during all this extravagance? At home with the kids in our un-air-conditioned apartment, where, except for one unfortunate weekend, we had a terrific summer—the best ever.

For Tim, however, it began with a bump. In previous years, within days of turning in final grades, he’d speak of his great ache to be back in the classroom. That summer I thought he’d ache more than ever. Fortunately for us but sadly for him, any desire to teach disappeared the moment he opened the end-of-school edition of the Montague Missive . He’d mentioned in passing that a feature interview/article would be appearing. One night while we were sharing a bath, he admitted his eagerness to read it, for even though the interview had been conducted by his least-favorite student ever, he had found the conversation surprising, far-ranging, thrilling, even. I thought it was cute how he confessed to waiting for the mail each day. (The last edition of the Missive is mailed each year after graduation to students, faculty, alumni, and the board of trustees.) I even overheard him phone Lucinda Watts, the school secretary, to ask if she knew when the Missive would be put in the mail. “Soon,” she assured him.

Too soon, it turned out. On the day it arrived Tim had already left for the library. I opened the Missive to find that the entire interview/ article had been excised, leaving just a photograph—arguably the worst picture ever taken of my rather nonphotogenic husband. There was Tim, his face filling an entire page of the paper, Tim, looking up from his cluttered desk, Tim, his eyes half closed, his mouth half open, stupidly, as if midyawn. Below, in large emphatic block print, was this caption: HISTORY. And then under it, typeset in tiny script: Mr. Welch takes a leave of absence to finally finish his dissertation. Bon voyage!

Debbie Beebe had called to warn me it was coming, and Claudia Valentine, who was with me at the time, needed only a quick peek before she wondered out loud if we could sue. When Tim arrived home, I tried to pretend I hadn’t seen the photo, but one glance at my pained face and he knew. He understood the awkward circumstance I was in, as there was no bright side to the photograph, no argument to be made that might give a welcome perspective. Tim returned to the photo, squinted for a long moment, then quickly balled up the paper and tossed it heroically into the trash. Done. Forgotten. It was agreed. We would never speak of the picture again. But it had to hurt. “No,” he said after I asked him. “I’m not bothered a bit.” Disbelieving, I studied his face as he looked away, and in a brief flash of something very real, I saw a sense of relief. To his credit, he didn’t mope or pout. Rather, the insult of it all seemed to energize him. He worked a good portion of each day on his dissertation. But even better, when he was with the boys and me that summer, he was with us.