The hospital, like the still-unregionalized Middle Falls High School, held memories for the citizens. The Mackenzies’ youngest, wistful, sensitive Eve, had been born there, and when Phyllis at forty had her cancer scare (a benign cyst, whose removal barely left a scar) and Gregory at fourteen his broken ankle and Owen at thirty-four his nearly burst appendix, the hospital had taken them in and ministered to their pains and fears. The intense mutual involvement of their particular set of friends did not preclude identification with the larger community. Owen loved the aging commercial clutter of River Street, and saw his firm as a chapter in the town’s industrial history. He and Phyllis many times, on the excuse of a child participant, had cheered at high-school sports events. One cheer, driven home with many lusty arm-pumps and pom-pom shakes from the white-socked cheerleaders, went, “Not too lean and not too fat, Middle Falls is where it’s at! Not too big and not too small, Middle Falls beats one”—index fingers raised, wagging—“and”—expansive arm gesture, fingers spread—“all!” Since the time when Owen had been a partisan teen-ager at Willow High, some slithery dance moves, a legacy of the ’sixties, had been included amid the exhortative flailing and spread-eagled leaps of the young maenads in their pleated skirts and bulky sweaters, but the essential conservatism of youthful rites struck him—the same dwindled outdoor shouts, the same melancholy scent of torn earth carrying into the sidelines from the gridiron or soccer field, the same tribal hope that victory today meant victory forever, in life’s great game.

The fund drive had been successful, subscribed across the village’s social spectrum. There was a triumphant wind-up mêlée in the hospital’s courtyard, in fortunate April sunshine. It had been a gamble to hold the party for workers and significant contributors outdoors; but there were so many, and the dusty function room upstairs at the town hall would have seemed drearily official, and the downstairs rooms of the three-story Georgian Federal mansion that housed the historical society too elitist. In the sunstruck late-afternoon crowd Owen instantly spotted Trish Oglethorpe. Even as he turned to avoid her, she hurried up to him. “Owen! I never see you any more!”

“I’m around.”

“I mean see you to talk to.”

Apologetically, he said, “I guess we’ve been hunkered down for the winter.” We: he and Phyllis, man and wife, more and less than a real person.

“Wasn’t it awful! All that snow. Dwight says we should move to the Carolinas. Especially now that the local leash laws have become so strict.” Their rampaging golden retrievers, everybody knew, had been killing neighbors’ cats and raiding a riding stable a quarter-mile away, gorging on the horse chow in the manger.