Larson moved a half-step to the side, revealing a woman with him, who had tactfully lagged behind, on the other side from Vanessa. She was compact and silken, like Elsie, with a touch of double chin, but also radiated the inscrutable, somewhat humorless vitality Owen had last admired in Ginger Bitting. Her handshake startled him, those fine female fingers coolly sliding into his palm. Her eyes were the sharp aquamarine of, in Willow, the tinted wineglasses and scallop-edged little glass candy dishes that houseproud aunts and elderly female neighbors would set on the locked upper edge of the lower window sash to catch the light. In his schooled and preening baritone, dipping a bit deeper into his chest than mere communication demanded, the other man announced to Owen, “And this is my good wife, Julia.”

xiii. You Don’t Want to Know

In Haskells Crossing, people die. They show you how to do it. They do it out of sight, among professional nurses and faithful retainers usually, though in rare instances they drop dead without warning while, say, pushing up the hill on the thirteenth hole, or in the middle of a nap after a boozy Sunday lunch. Death never loses its quality of unexpectedness. Life does not expect it; the living mind cannot conceive of it. Some citizens die soon after elaborate cosmetic surgery, or a difficult multiple-bypass operation, or an expensive house renovation, preparing for the years ahead; they die regardless.

In church, which Owen and Julia attend regularly, though for her less regularly than when she was a clergyman’s wife, the process can be seen at work. The dying, Sunday after Sunday, are by increments more hesitant and emaciated as they totter back from the communion rail with defiant eyes and munching jaws. Next, they can no longer make it to the communion rail, or cannot kneel, because of a dropsical knee or an excruciating hip, and take the wafer into their lips standing up, like Roman Catholics or Lutherans, or else—the next stage—the minister and his acolyte bring it to them afterwards in the pews. At this break in the customary ceremony there is no other sound than that of the minister murmuring, no other motion than that of the communicant’s shaky white head bobbing and her hand, if she is of the old high-church school, making the sign of the cross after receiving the wafer and wine. The men lose color in their faces, turning a stony gray as their eyes sink in the sockets; the women, who even in life’s last stages can draw upon the fleshy tints of makeup, show a glittering gaze above withered but ruddy cheeks. Dying flatters some women, highlighting the austerity and doughtiness that were always theirs. Others, like remarkably rich Florence Sprang, appear as painted, overdressed grotesques hobbling up the aisle between a cane and a retainer to receive their portion of the body and blood of Jesus Christ.