Here on this lightly lapped crescent of trucked-in beach the town’s vivid young matrons burnished themselves in bikinis or, as the lakewater autumnally cooled but still kept small children entertained, gossipped at the picnic tables, smoking cigarettes and nibbling bits of the children’s lunches they had packed: “I swore I’d never eat Marshmallow Fluff again and yet here I am, an absolute addict! Peanut butter and jelly, don’t talk to me about it—it’s making me fat! But it’s so much easier, when you’re throwing sandwiches together for their lunch anyway, to make one extra for Mommy!” This was Alissa Morrissey, talking to, say, Faye Dunham and Imogene Bisbee. Newcomers to motherhood and one another, the women had quickly grown into a familiarity that allowed them to utter whatever floated to the tops of their heads. They seemed to Owen to have a collective loveliness, like that, in his threadbare childhood, of Ginger Bitting and her brown-legged satellites. But now he was more closely among them, as if he had moved up from Mifflin Avenue to Second Street. His wife, with her fondness for sunbathing, and her trio of small children—the infant, Floyd, had been named after his paternal grandfather—joined them. She reported back, “They’re like Army wives, but not so coarse and vapid. They’re nice, if a little superficial. All they seem to think about is other people—their children and their husbands. And each other. When one of us doesn’t show up, she gets it. In the nicest possible way.”

In Middle Falls, all personalities were studied, cherished, and glamorized. Women reigned; the wives lent fascination to their husbands. Husbands and wives were biform creatures, semi-transparent so that each could be seen through the other, imperfectly. This freakishness was part of their magnetism and the overall comedy in the round of parties, meetings, games, picnics, pickup lunches, gourmet dinners, amateur theatricals, choral-society rehearsals, bird walks, canoe trips, ski excursions, and sleepy, gently boozy Sunday-afternoon get-togethers that compensated for the town’s isolation from metropolitan entertainments. The children were the ostensible point of much of it—the skiing, the skating, the April kite-flying, the August clambakes—and yet much of it was an escape from the children, even while they were present, jostling and quarrelling underfoot, sitting blearily on the edge of the lawn while their parents leaped and dived in the heat, say, of a volleyball game. The wives played along with the husbands, and their easily bruised flesh was elbowed and bumped, yet they continued—barefoot, lightly clad—to take their places, as in a village chain dance. Such rites were strange to Owen and enchanted him.