The dinner party of Mabel Cannon and Don Grady had gotten as far as the first drink. The guests were people known to be known. They presumed they were on the written-about-but-not-actual A-list. It was not called the Social Register. In conversation, if spoken about at all, its peripheral aspirants thought it was called “the circuit.” These guests were lavishly parodied. Unknown to their diagnosticians, they were also people who knew they were satirized. It felt fine to them. Mockery was the living sign of envy.

Mabel had come to see that her husband was almost the last of a time past. No one else was in his rank. He had promoted his home as the place most important conversations occurred, more than in any official location. One guest, whose wife was out of town, had been attending dinner parties here since he was a somewhat young man. Yet he, a historian, had come to think of Mabel Cannon and Don Grady, who’d been so reliantly welcoming to him over the years, as not unlike the European aristocracy before the First World War. It was all crumbling around them. It would never be as it was. It had to end, it would end, and no one believed it ever could end.

But people—having faith in what they had read of power, or had seen of it onscreen, or, most often, believed through the sanction of asides describing it—still came. They averted their eyes and drank up, spoke of things that reinforced what was supposed, wore smiles, stayed late.

The conversation this night was when one war would end and another begin. Don Grady, working on a national-security book, could not speak of events as they unfolded, but only when they were completed. Interest in any event was highest when it was unknown but presumed to be knowable. That was one of the privileges of dining at Mabel Cannon and Don Grady’s: you might be able to divine, through observation of Don’s reaction to a guest’s proffered scenario, what was going on—in that worn expression—behind the scenes. Someone could then say, I was at Grady’s, and when someone said war was coming next week, Grady winced. If war came next week, this moment would be remembered and recounted, proof of Grady’s unimpeachable access to power’s highest balconies. If war did not come next week, the wince would be interpreted as his tut-tutting at the wrong many who could only guess, and badly, the future. As for Don, he was constantly bewildered and had made a profitable art out of masking his confusion. His books were best-selling. He felt despicably lucky. He acted like a bishop.

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