In this delaying period Owen’s children invented a mode of protest, an automotive caricature of adult disorder. Floyd, just turned sixteen and freshly equipped with a driver’s license, took his mother’s Volvo station wagon out onto Partridgeberry Road and, in his inexperience veering too far to the right to avoid an oncoming pickup truck pulling a horse van, ran into a snow-filled ditch. The Volvo lurched over on its side into a stone wall, at fair speed. The boy was unhurt but the Volvo was totalled. With the insurance money, the Mackenzies settled for a second-hand Ford Falcon station wagon, serviceable although lighter on its wheels than the solid Swedish import.

Gregory, home from Brown for spring break, asked to borrow his father’s Corvette Stingray for a date with a girl he intended to impress, which that “tinny old Falcon” would not do. Though he didn’t like his son’s demanding tone, and regarded even in its old age his lipstick-red convertible as a treasure, Owen felt too guilty to deny the boy. He was wakened at one in the morning by a hysterical call from Phyllis. On the back road leading away from the far side of Heron Pond, where there was a well-known necking-and-make-out spot—one which years ago he and Faye in their innocence had resorted to—the Stingray had somehow veered and taken down four or five aluminum rail posts before coming to a stop. The engine had been moved halfway into the front seat, but neither Gregory nor his passenger was hurt. He manfully took the blame, claiming he had been trying to adjust the unfamiliar radio, but confided to his brother, who confided it to his mother, who told Owen, that in fact the girl, a wild one from Eastern Connecticut State University, had been driving, or at least had her hands on the wheel while pressed against Gregory. No doubt the controlled substance that had enhanced their spooning session at Heron Pond had been still in their systems. Owen, thinking of how not many years before he had sped through the Nevada desert with Mirabella’s bleached curls bobbing in his lap, and years before that had hastily backed out of a perilous wood while Elsie hurried into her clothes beside him, could not find it in himself to be indignant. He deserved these assaults on his hardware.

He was more angered, at his distance, by the difficulties Iris was having in Massachusetts with the little cream-colored AMC Pacer coupe he had bought for her to take to Smith: repeated fender-benders while jockeying in the college parking lots, and weekly traffic tickets from the Northhampton police. It began to feel like a taunting, which hurt the more because Iris, the only one of his children with his mother’s auburn hair, had been the child whom he felt most himself with, the least unconvincingly paternal. Iris had effortlessly, it seemed, entrusted him with the wry, teasing respect that is a father’s due from a daughter.