“After all these years?” he dutifully asks. Their infantile give and take, word by word, forms a music that never palls, scored for a thousand repeats.

“Oh yes,” she dutifully answers. “More, even, instead of less. Something about the way you look when you don’t think anybody’s looking at you.”

“So you don’t regret … us?”

“Oh no. Not really. I’m glad. Aren’t you?”

“Oh yes,” he says.

Yet she finds, he feels, more and more about him that panics her. “Don’t eat in the middle of the kitchen floor,” she suddenly cries, as if electrically shocked. “Eat over the sink if you must eat all the time. I never saw anybody eat so constantly; no wonder your teeth are always disgusting.”

As a child on Mifflin Avenue he had been afraid the food would give out, and would march through the house nibbling a celery stick or a dirty carrot fresh-pulled from the backyard garden. Phyllis had never appeared to notice his nervous habit of grabbing pretzels, nuts, cookies from the bread drawer, to fill a suddenly felt gap within him. He fights back: “I hate eating over the sink, it makes me feel like a dog at his bowl.”

“Well, the floor everywhere is full of crumbs and the cleaning ladies were just here.” Those bustling Brazilians with their broad bottoms: when they talk together the language is as full of shushing sounds as Russian. Owen suspects that big countries are unhappier than little countries: more responsibilities.

“And don’t slurp,” Julia will say, of hot soup. She rarely serves soup, as if to teach him a lesson. “You had such a terrible upbringing. What was your mother thinking of?”

“She was improvising. She hadn’t been a mother before. She was going for the big picture, not table manners.”

“Good manners are where it all begins,” Julia states, and he accepts the wisdom from her, who looks to be the last of a string of instructresses. “My father used to say, manners are a form of courtesy, and courtesy a form of goodness.” She goes on, “And that’s what I tell my grandchildren. You observe their manners, Owen, and they’ll help you. They don’t slurp.”

He searches the dump of odd information in his head for a self-defense. “It tastes better,” he explains. “In some societies, slurping is considered a compliment to the host and hostess.”

“Well, aren’t we glad we don’t live in such a society? And another thing you do that’s truly terrible—I noticed it the other night, at dinner with the Achesons. You don’t break your bread into little enough pieces and you dabble at it with your butter knife, pat pat pat. It drove me so crazy I wanted to grab the bread out of your hand.”

“Well,” he says, “that would have been a lesson in manners to edify everybody.”

“I’m sorry, but I love you so much, I can’t stand it when you eat like an animal.”

“Grrr.”