In Haskells Crossing, in the twenty-first century, Easter shows the rich to good advantage. They attend church then, and at Christmas, if never else, as if keeping up the supernatural contract by which they have prospered. The Episcopal is the church of choice, three and a half centuries after the Puritans established their iron theocratic rule. They were fanatics; the United States is a conservative country built upon radicalism. The white wooden Congregational church in many a New England town has grown seedy—the paint peeling, the steeple nearly toppling with dry rot, the bulletin board outside advertising sermons with jocular sermon titles like I’M O.K., GOD’S O.K., or FORBIDDEN FRUITS CREATE MANY JAMS—compared with the sharply gabled, half-timbered structures devoted to Cranmer’s graceful words and Henry the Eighth’s regal whim.

Owen, though himself rich enough, thanks to the split-up and sale of E-O Data in the ’seventies, viewed the rich, the hereditary rich, as an exotic tribe. He believed that the mill-owning wealth of Alton had oppressed his father and had defrauded his grandfather. Certain local textile fortunes had had, in Willow, the mythic resonance of the Mellons, Fricks, and Carnegies in Pittsburgh. But, though he strained to see over the spiky sandstone wall of the Pomeroy estate near Cedar Top, and overheard the distant splashing of a swimming pool, he had never encountered any of these fabulous creatures. At the Scheherazade—a windowless, slant-floored hall, with a siding of tin sheets stamped to resemble bricks, an interior decorated by a few Chinese lamps and Art Deco stripes, an outside ticket booth containing the owner’s gray-haired wife, and a marquee whose lights attracted masses of moths in the summer—the rich, played by Cary Grant and Fred Astaire, Joan Blondell and Katharine Hepburn, Charles Coburn and Eugene Pallette, were projected in an affectionate silvery light, as stars in a comedy of misunderstanding eventually remedied by sexual attraction and a limitless reserve of lightly taxed money. What a triumph of capitalist art that was, deflecting the poor from hatred of the rich into a chuckling pity for them! With a flick of changed fortune, the poor might be rich themselves, as foolish and happy. For the moguls manufacturing these films it was, of course, no fantasy. They had made it in America. So, in a lesser way, had Owen.