Most of the people that the Mackenzies came to know were from somewhere else. Some were refugees from New York, half-failed artists licking their wounds and working in their homes; some commuted to Hartford, serving the state government or the insurance industry; a few were professionals, lawyers and contractors and pediatricians, content with the relatively thin local pickings in exchange for the old town’s tonic air of freedom, a freedom bred of long neglect, of being bypassed and as yet little spoiled, of being no place special and triumphantly American in that. These immigrant citizens all shared the assumption that their village was ineffably special and superior, rakish yet stylish; by comparison, Lower Falls was a virtual ghost town—a gas station, a convenience mart, and a little brick post office amid a scattering of run-down barns and sheds and vegetable stands and rusting mechanical remnants from a viable rural past—and Upper Falls a dreary bedroom community on the far edge of Hartford’s sprawl, with flat tracts of ’fifties ranch houses, gimcrack “starter homes” built on a slab. In Middle Falls, Federalist mansions, waiting for a coat of paint, safer wiring, and a new furnace, stood around the triangular green, once a common pasture and still called the Common. Farther out, charmingly Spartan farmhouses from later in the nineteenth century, with acreage for horses or a tennis court, also could be picked up reasonably, in the low five figures. There were a few surviving pre-1725 structures, with massive central chimneys, small windows, and saltbox profiles; they had been turned, by and large, into antique shops or candlelit, low-ceilinged restaurants. There was a minimal country club, with a nine-hole golf course and four clay tennis courts, and a lake, called Heron Pond, with imported sand, a shallow section roped off for toddlers, and a tall white lifeguard-chair occupied, when it was occupied at all, by the seal-shaped, mahogany-brown teen-age daughter of the local high-school principal. The key to her chest of medical supplies was worn on a red elastic circlet around her ankle, and her long black hair, as straight and as matte a black as a Native American’s, was caught back in another such utilitarian elastic. She had not only a seal’s adipose shape but a seal’s style of basking as she lazed, with half-closed eyes, above the mothers and children and the adolescent boys whose roughhousing and splashy horseplay over by the rope swing occasionally brought her upright, the whistle shrill in her zinc-oxided lips.