Men watched our driveway for the last of today’s foursome. He’d soon roar up after closing some deal or suturing shut the victims of Falls’s latest teen car wreck. Our house had a horseshoe of parking lot, plus hammocks and the open bar.

Mom, perfectly dressed, with a Master’s degree, hovered, warmly impersonal. Indoors, two black, uniformed maids did her heavy lifting. Dad’s friends lounged and goofed right under my treetop.

After jawing through money news, after gossiping about sewage-bond issues, after the mind-numbing hit parade of their last game’s best shots, “So Dan surprises us, choosing his three iron …,” they finally got dirty on me.

Stripped to shorts, my eyes half shut, breathing Dan’s dollar, nose to nose with George Washington, I’d been ready.

They mentioned certain looser secretaries—those days always named Donna—and who Donna’d “done” now, sometimes three in a hotel room at one time. Smut hushed when Mom reappeared wearing a Dior flared skirt, carrying the silver tray that—some summers—seemed jewelry fused direct to her hand’s red nails. As she swept indoors, trash restarted mid-syllable.

I never tire of hearing deep-voiced, long-legged guys bray through the six key words in human reproduction. Holy Man-tra!

What did a youngster hear, those corny days of sexed-up ’57? Often simple dick jokes of the kind that little boys my age enjoyed. “Hey, Dean,” remarked our youngest bank president, ever, “summer sure has bleached your hair. Or you been dipping into one of Jeanie’s Clairol bottles? So tell us, big-time Lawyer Man, is it true blonds have more come?”

Tree-high, I kept still.

“I’m not answerin’ that directly, sir. But you can state your question direct into my Bone-o-Phone, Phil. Put Mouth Against Tip of Receiver and Inhale Hard … right here.” Many yuks. Above them, half stiff in my seersucker shorts (shorts whose very fabric’s name gave me a minor-major boner), I listened in a trance of premonition, dread, desire.

At anything off-color, Dan grew shy and pebble-kicking. The Six Footers admired him as “too straight an arrow.” When he literally blushed, they seemed not unexcited, watching somebody so handsome redden, laugh, then hide his face behind two palms while bowing forward.

Quiet, he reigned at their group’s dead center. If any Packard or golf cart broke, Dan was first under its hood. The joke ran: he could fix an engine without getting any oil on him. Dan wore his snug, pressed clothes like some proud, poor boy—quietly defending his one good school outfit.

People always included young Mr. R——, though his family wasn’t from Falls. He was token Elsewhere. Dan seemed more mysterious and attractive, being uninitiated. Locals took him aside to explain the genealogy behind a recent land deal—some webbing of tribal traits and 1790 betrayals so complex, you could see he hadn’t a clue. It didn’t matter. Around here, nobody new ever truly knew. Two hundred and fifty years were involved; strangers could never catch up with that many genes and so much ownership.