“Why don’t you have any friends? We’re spending money to send you to school where you’ll meet worthwhile girls. You can have them over, we have a nice home now,” her mother said.

It was, in fact, Carla’s idea of Home at last: There was a sweeping staircase down to the hall, a paneled study where the Harvard Classics were displayed, a glassed-in flagstone sunporch, a breakfast room, a fireplace downstairs and another in the master bedroom, a rock garden, a goldfish pond, and a two-car garage.

It was a home in which they never lit fires in the fireplaces. It began to strike Marguerite that in her family all of them, including herself, were as unlit and unnatural as the clean white birch logs neatly arranged on the brass andirons of fireplaces that served no purpose. Fires of understanding and affection never glowed in that household, throwing off either light and warmth or those shadows of conflict and passion that come from deep involvement. They didn’t touch. But separately they were all susceptible to the sudden combustions of rage and crisis.

For all their material well-being, a vague despair stuck to them like a low-temperature contagion. It hung there constantly, a bitter aroma ever-present in the air with Sam’s cigar smoke, curling around them with each sarcasm voiced, each judgment passed, each repression, and permeating their lives with something as bitter as the cigar smoke in their clothes.

“We only want you to be happy,” her father would say, and she felt the terrible pressure of trying, somehow, to produce happiness for him. She wanted his approval. She didn’t want to exasperate him. But where could she find happiness? Was it a standard brand she could go out and buy herself? It was as if life was still and always Saturday afternoon at the Schiller.

There seemed gulfs between her and her family. They were completely into the American way of progress: college fraternities, Rotary Club, country clubs, Ladies’ Home Journal. She didn’t know yet what she wanted, but it was none of those.

Sam and Carla Scalzo counted, added, figured interest and dividends, and always came out on the credit side for having given so much to their children. They pushed their generosity, shaping the family around it; and if they had been told that the only gift a parent can make his child—the unconditional affection that alone generates freedom—had been withheld while they figured the dollar costs of camps, private schools, sailboats, clothes, sports cars, and allowances, they would have been indignant: “That’s gratitude for all we’ve done!”

Marguerite hated that about them—the constant figuring of returns. But she also loved them and needed them, and it hurt her to see the gulf widening.