He’d known Fern for years, since their senior year in high school. Eva had been in the same class. Unlike himself, the two girls had come from Depression-soured families; grateful to be in school, away from homes whose atmospheres had grown querulous with incomprehension. Fern’s father had been a bookbinder and, once out of work, moved through the little rooms of the house like an exiled prince, remarking acidly on the fine and dependable qualities of leather. Fern’s mother took domestic work—she called herself a housekeeper—to feed and clothe the family, and eventually, Mr. Diedrich found a place for himself in a small real-estate office in Redlands, where his withdrawn nature and a certain poise issuing from his long practice of an exacting craft gave clients the impression they were dealing with someone with class.

Eva’s father, a master plumber, cried between bouts of sodden drunkenness that if it hadn’t been for his damned kids, all female, he could have weathered the bad times like a man instead of taking goddamned Roosevelt handouts.

But Max’s family had tracts of timber, theirs for several generations; his father had owned a newspaper in a town in the north of Oregon. They did with one car instead of two, one maid instead of three—it was hardly deprivation, Max had once been fond of saying until Eva told him he was just showing off. One of Max’s uncles, in trying to recoup what he’d lost in the stock market, had schemed his way into a madhouse, carrying with him, until a male attendant wrenched it from his hands, a suitcase bulging with an ugly metal invention which, he’d sworn, the government was preventing him from patenting because certain inventor rivals were in highly placed positions. During the year of his father’s long dying from cancer of the bladder, Max had been sent to live with an aunt in Los Angeles to finish out his senior high-school year. He received his diploma half an hour after his father had died in a Portland hospital, Mrs. Shore standing by the bed, the wool of an unfinished sweater she’d been knitting trailing from her fingers. Only his aunt had come to Max’s graduation. There had been enough money for Max to go to the University at Berkeley. He had married Eva there during his junior year.

His wife and Fern shared one characteristic, as different as they were in all other ways. They both liked to give orders to men. Suspecting something irresolute and captious underlying their bossiness, he put up with it good-humoredly. He was inclined to put up with a good many unpleasant things in people if he sensed they were really uncertain about what they were doing.