“To me he always looked very handsome and honorable,” Julia said, unanswerably, with a complacent closing of her lips. It was as when Elsie used to come to the house, with a lively courtesy facing his mother down, claiming her share of the son. Women are possessive. The world divides itself into their territories. A smile similar to Elsie’s would stretch Alissa’s lips when, her face perspiring inches from his, her dull blue eyes turned inky. Though we speak of a man possessing a woman it is she who takes possession.

His mother died neatly, quickly, of heart failure, in her little country house, having exerted herself with an unusual spurt of housework. Her old Hoover burned out its engine as her body lay beside it on the clean carpet. All four of the adults Owen had lived with as a boy died tidily, out of sight, as if to spare him unpleasantness and preserve his charmed, only-child sense of life.

Yet something feels amiss; there is something within him that needs to be relaxed. His fulfillment with Julia, his arrival at a harbor of safe uxoriousness and well-heeled retirement, is a strain to maintain, as his restless dissatisfaction with Phyllis had not been. Phyllis and he, in mating, had not so stressed the world that they had to be perfect; they had been the age to marry and leave their homes and make another, according to common social usage. He and Julia wrecked two existing households, and caused a death, though no court could convict them for it. Art Larson, as he calls himself now, left the ministry and enjoys well-paid employment as a p.r. interface in New York, but when he shows up, for a child’s wedding or the funeral of a dear pre–Middle Falls friend of the former couple, his neck looks vulnerable without the backwards collar. His hair no longer has the wiry health of a dog’s tousled, tight coat. His voice, however, is as resonant and gravely melodious as ever, and his manner toward Owen no less benign than at their first meeting. Even vestigial faith arms the believer in fatalism and an energy-conserving disposition to forgive.

There are two evidential arguments, Owen has reasoned, for the truths of the Christian religion: one, our wish to live forever, however tedious the actual experience of eternal consciousness might be, and, two, our sensation that something is amiss—that there has been a lapse or slippage in the world and things are not quite as they should be. We feel made for a better world, and the fault is ours that this is not Eden. The second may be the more solid evidence, since fear and loathing of death can be explained as, like pain, a survival device selected and refined by Darwinian evolution. Because we fear death, we try harder to live. As long as our genes get through, Nature doesn’t care how we suffer.