The Mackenzies, adrift on their wrecked marriage, marvelled at the way the sea parted for Julia: she was walking to the other shore on miraculously dry land. Even in separate residences, Owen and Phyllis shared the same mental space, a collegiate kind of space inherited from a big house on a small lot on a Cambridge street used as a short-cut between Garden Street and Mass. Avenue. A genteel-bohemian decency, extending to the end of life the student quest for knowledge, had been the communicated ideal. Colin Goodhue had become a professor of Romance languages at Cornell. He had married a Frenchwoman, and they spent every August in Provence. Phyllis’s mother and father had both died recently—only months apart, as sometimes happens with long-attached couples—and being gentle with Phyllis in her newly orphaned state had been part of Owen’s rationale for not hurrying the divorce process, with its distasteful facilitators: lawyers, furniture movers, child psychologists.

A fog of deferred intention had descended upon his mind. Of the long interim while he shuttled back and forth between the headless household on Partridgeberry Road and his unkempt semi-bachelor pad on the other side of the Chunkaunkabaug, in a four-story firetrap populated by elderly Polish widowers and overweight single mothers, he remembered little. With a numbed mind he met the surly feigned indifference of his two older, collegiate children, and the eager, round-eyed, yet subtly stilted affability of his two younger when he descended, in his now distinctly scuffed and rattling red Stingray, to glance over their homework or carry them off to a movie. Though his upbringing had been only perfunctorily religious, he could hear the prayers of his two younger children for his return rustling above him like the wingbeats of swifts trapped in the old farmhouse chimney. Phyllis was alternately despondent and jauntily brave in her abandoned state, sharing his sensation of an unreal interim. She had never quite fit in in Middle Falls, disdaining the middlebrow society with the offhand politesse of a professor’s daughter, but some of the local women now rallied to her, and not all of them the ones he had slept with, though these were the most companionably scornful of Julia. “She utterly just doesn’t get it, as if she’s from outer space … Those eyes of hers, they give me the absolute shivers … Parading around in the Acme as if she dared me not to look at her … That poor husband of hers, she must be setting him up for sainthood, Roscoe talked to him the longest time and couldn’t get him to say a word against her”: Phyllis relayed fragments like this to Owen, as if such cattiness, which had once been a kind of music to him, a murmur of initiation, would bring him back. True, he would awake in his squalid room—the odors of other people’s hot plates seeping through the walls, and the squalling of fatherless infants—with the same homesick gnawing in his stomach that he had felt those freshman months at MIT, hung in space by the implacable laws of growth, of aging. But then, as now, he had a mission: then, to survive, to not go back to Pennsylvania, to gain a degree and a career and, as things developed, the willowy girl he glimpsed in the hall. Now, as then, his mission was not purely selfish, and had to do with Phyllis; he wanted to free her of him, as well as himself of her. Their life together, Julia had explained to him, had become a mutual degradation. Staying with her was not doing her any favor. There was sense in this, he supposed, for people who had high standards bred of habitual rectitude; but it left out of account the plea for mercy that goes with human softness. He and Phyllis shared a ’fifties drift, a gliding carelessness. Between them, he felt there had been something off from the start. He had been ambitious and raw, and had used her. Now he wanted to undo his presumption in carrying off this princess; he wanted to give her time to see it his way and to help him divorce her, so it became as much her idea as their marriage had somehow been. At least she had consented to start seeing a lawyer in Hartford, a short dapper rapid talker she was amused by—both Roscoe Bisbee and Henry Slade had recommended him. Named Jerry Halloran, he talked to her in a mathematical language of dollars and cents.