In Haskells Crossing and the near section of Cabot City there are public tennis courts, used by those who do not have their own or access to a country club’s. The sight of them quickens in Owen a memory that surfaced after long suppression: when he was a boy of nine or ten his auburn-haired mother would put shorts on her pale, growingly plump legs and walk with him and two wood-framed rackets down through the Mifflin Avenue back yard and across the wide high-school grounds past the cinder track and little bleachers for the cinder-circumscribed football field, and open the latch of the four Willow public courts, fenced in by heavy galvanized wire. He and she would attempt to play. Neither had ever had lessons; it was frustrating, so many balls bopped into the net (also of heavy playground fencing, which sang when struck) or blooped into the air where the other could not reach them. He was embarrassed by her bare-legged figure joining him in this lonely game, her face growing redder as her clumsy efforts continued; trolley cars and traffic passed on the Alton Pike close enough for people to stare at this little boy and grown woman trying to pat an uncoöperative ball back and forth. Only now could Owen glimpse her purposes: to combat the weight problem that was overtaking her and to help him gain a skill he might need in life. In fact he went on, in the playful milieu of Middle Falls, to play a lot of tennis, though never with much of a backhand; he gave it up early, in the first years of his marriage to Julia, because of a rotator cuff that hurt when he tried to reach up into the serve. But the game had always been tainted for him by that shameful memory, the public struggle with his mother, while people in the trolley cars stared, to get the ball back and forth; there had been a pathetic impotence to the fuzzy balls—white, back then—as they hit the wire of the net or the fencing with a sad, reverberating thud. Mother and son had seemed so lost, the two of them, there at the far end of the flat school acreage, linked in a common ordeal as they had been at his painful birth.

She had died, finally, some years after his marriage to Julia, having made an impressive, white-haired, broad-bodied presence among the few wedding guests that day in Lower Falls. She didn’t have the energy to create with Julia the tensions that had existed with her first daughter-in-law; rather, she let the younger woman roll over her, even submitting to the massages that Julia skillfully applied to the aches in her osteoporotic shoulders and neck. She had never liked being touched; or so she had thought. “Julia,” she said to her second daughter-in-law, “you have a healing touch. Owen looks so much better since he took up with you. He had a sneaky, pasty look before, didn’t he?”