Nearly nuzzling my slow-dance partners, I admitted how, boarded at a first-rank second-tier military school, I had truly thrown myself at studies. Nothing else to do, I went at Latin and then Greek as if I were some regular kid rabid for sports trivia or car statistics. To these women, dancing warm and ample in my arms, I let myself admit how surprisingly well I was actually doing, considering the early trouble. Still a bachelor, yeah. But I’d just met a beauty, a very witty skinny woman named Bethany. I was already an associate professor in far-off New England. If forced, I mentioned my two—and only—books. (One, that international blockbuster The Relationship Between the Published and Original Versions of Cicero’s Speeches. My second is Questions of Authenticity in Seneca’s Plays. And, as of the present writing, the film rights to both remain available!)

This far south, even if my tweeds felt somewhat costumey, they comforted like a flimsy sort of armor, the uniform of choice. I was so aware of being back in Dad’s chosen town. I imagined phoning him to meet me for a drink. I guessed how happy my return, my small-time ivory-tower career would’ve made the Itinerant King of “Swank” Cufflinks.

I had driven south along the superseded U.S. 301; this road once offered the feeder stream to many of our sleeker Bible-clients. Headed toward Falls, I pictured coming upon some old motel; those few rooms that didn’t leak would now be rented by the month to squads of Mexican workers. But I might find, in weeds behind the place, a letter “T” still pressed there, fine white quartz crisscrossing Trixie’s grave.

I discovered that Janine’s American Bar and Grill was now the Hello Deli and Sushi Bar. (Who says there’s been no progress in our national culture?) Brave, I now aimed my Hertz car past our old rental home. The property was rendered far more desirable by trees full-grown, fresh yellow paint, and some young couple’s new petunia-spilling windowboxes. Beside the drive, a tricycle with a pink seat, new plastic streamers windblown on its handlebars.

During my reunion weekend, I was spared deciding if I should bother visiting my mom.—Veterinarian Dix (no surprise) had chosen not to marry a young widow suddenly too visible, controversial; everybody knew he’d never desert his wife of two decades. Everyone but poor Mom. She waited around for two whole years, that sure he’d change his mind. He did not “call” again. Her little Meadows had fixed that but good! Shunned, even in her favorite hangout, the Falls Public Library, Grace finally moved to Boca Raton. For many subsequent seasons, Mom worked there as “hostess” for an eating place she seemed to assume most everybody civilized must know; her postcards called it “The exclusive ‘Thunderbird Supper Club.’”—Right.