Jonathan Strasser, for whom lesser things were planned, things such as merely staunching Mabel’s ennui, was committed to his wife, she of the less-than-right immune system. Mabel was more relieved than disappointed when the gossip came back to her. She’d cooled right down on Strasser after the communion he’d had in her hallway with his daughter’s book. She liked what he might have brought, which was—was it too much to ask?—distraction. Anything was better than this torpor, this mortuary of the spirit.

Her enthusiasms were leaching out of her. Like the rest of her bimonthly arriving dinner-party guests, she leafed through the contents and read the last pages—of the War Cabinet group portrait, the fired advisers’ tarantula accounts in hardback, the four fat magazines, the famished opinion journals, policy soft-bounds sent gratis. She and her kind checked the top lines and bylines of the same three op-ed pages, one of which Mabel contributed to every third Sunday. She was the woman’s voice, the diversion from the trade imbalance, election reform, judicial nomination, and corruption columns.

She found daytime the hardest but welcomed November. Avoiding her dauphins Leonard, George, and Robert was no longer her chief occupation. They had moved to dormitories at distinguished schools. Robert, the youngest, had lectured her on drinking the September morning he left, noting with begrudging deference that she’d not imposed one major embarrassment on the family for three entire months, and he had downgraded her condition to alcohol abuser from incipient alcoholic. George, the proto-environmentalist, informed her she’d cut back on dishonesty this summer—keep it up, don’t backslide, yoga helps, and other such whimsies. Leonard, in his second or third chapter of not speaking to her, broke his silence to say he would not be coming home for Thanksgiving or Christmas.

Yet their absence emptied her. Today, Don was away from the home. He had gone to the Hill. She couldn’t quite believe he went to the Hill. It was a place for miscellaneous yearners—coastal summa graduates, Southerners proud of accents, aides in awe at the process, crimson suits on pantyhose legs making the case for moneyed perspectives, bloggers spearing mice. They were all fine people. They were, she insisted. What could be more understandable than going to the Dairy Queen if it was soft ice cream you craved? What was the harm in it? Were these places meant to be Jefferson and Hamilton’s laboratories, workshops for great experiments on the capacities of mankind? They were dance halls. They were bulletin boards. Their doings were Parcheesi.