Now he can see in three dimensions and natural color, at the ten o’clock Easter service at Haskells Crossing’s Saint Barnabas, the Wainthrop clan, taking up two front pews. The eighty-year-old matriarch, long a widow, is enthroned in a wheelchair that blocks half the aisle; congregants going up to the rail for communion step around it. Before the service begins, one by one her grandsons, each clad in a blazer and rep tie and button-down broadcloth shirt, lean or squeeze past their elders to do this eldest, in her rigid blue hair and black straw sunhat, honor with a kiss smuggled sideways under the hat’s broad rim. Not a pasha or Mafia don could more grandly receive dutiful homage. Owen pictures all the money stoppered by the octogenarian’s living body, like tons of wheat waiting to pour forth from a prairie grain elevator’s unloading chute. In the meantime, enough trickles through: the boys in their blazers sport the honey tans of winter vacations spent in the Bahamas and weekends spent skiing, and the girls, even those at the awkward age, with braces and acne, display costly dresses and animating hopes of good schools and a fair value on the marriage market. Wealth is health.

Their parents, the middle generation, sit through the readings, the prayers of the people, and the sermon (Yes, He is risen, as He rises up in our lives, on many a personal Easter!) with the polite, slightly smiling expressions they bring to the myriad board meetings and bibulous social gatherings that maintain their membership in the network of the profitably engaged. Owen especially admires two peculiar traits of the male rich: their ability to grow more and more polite as the object of their courtesy becomes more and more annoying, and their ability to wear shoes, not just moccasins but loafers of fine leather, without socks. Owen, of humbler origins, is unable to conceal annoyance and to endure shoes, sticky and unclean, on his feet without socks, the thicker and woollier the better. Rich men and boys deny themselves the comfort of socks in order, he has decided, to display their thoroughbred ankles. Owen also admires the ability of the rich of both sexes, at cocktail parties, to pop enigmatic hors d’oeuvres into their mouths and, when they discover how fiendishly hot they are, to not spit them out but instead meekly, painfully swallow, giving themselves esophageal cancer miles down the road.