That May Saturday turned out as sunny and warm—the tufty lawn a garish virgin green, the oaks overhead not yet fully leafed, the blooming azaleas already shedding a few pink petals. Late in the preceding year, President Kennedy had been shot and Phyllis had produced a fourth child, bright-eyed, sweet-natured Eve; both events left Owen a little shaky, feeling his mortality. Eve had come a week before predicted, and he had been in California, at Fairchild Semiconductor, to keep abreast of what the new integrated circuits might mean for the art of programming, when the contractions came, and Ed had been the one to drive her to the hospital in Hartford. The nurses had kept mistaking him for the father.

Faye Dunham, when the shadows had thickened under the oaks and the drinks had gone to everyone’s head, came up to Owen and said, “Owen, you seem rather down lately.”

“Down? I do?”

As if to steady her stance on the soft lawn, in her rope-soled espadrilles, Faye rested the fingertips of her right hand on Owen’s forearm in its plaid sleeve. The madras jacket was new this spring; in fact he had put it on for the first time to wear to the Dunhams’ party. He was still learning about clothes. “You’re usually so exuberant,” she said. “So glad to be here.” She was wearing a sparkly brown bodice, sleeveless, with a long skirt she had made from a piece of pool-table felt. Her frizzy thick hair, its coppery glints sharp in the slanting golden sun, was bundled up loosely and held in place by a high Spanish comb, of tortoiseshell engraved with silver arabesques. She sparkled, Faye did; she was the woman you noticed in a room, with that sudden piercing girlish laugh. Owen had been struck by her from their first weeks in Middle Falls, though she and Jock moved, he felt, in a slightly different orbit, at a superior height of travel, consumption, and self-indulgence.

“Here in Middle Falls, or here chez Dunham?”

“Both?”

“That comb,” he said, to divert her disconcertingly intent, somewhat glazed stare. “Did you and Jock pick that up in Spain?”