Now, if Julia had any weakness, it was for light-hearted female friendship. She had been passed from her father, a New Haven banker and high churchman whose three other offspring were boys, straight to her husband, fresh from divinity school, as an exemplary woman: from model daughter and student into perfect helpmeet and homemaker without a break. The one slip of her life had been falling in love with Owen, which she later construed as rescuing him from a desperately immoral life. He was ready to be rescued, but she was not ready to be at the center of a scandal, and to be shunned not only by her husband’s horrified parishioners but by, with ostentatious indignation, respectable women of Middle Falls like Vanessa Slade, Imogene Bisbee, Trish Oglethorpe, and Alissa Morrissey. So it was a joyful relief for Julia to fall in, a hundred miles to the northeast, with the likes of dithery, slyly witty Bunch Hapgood, gaunt, gentle Jonesie Wilkins, and kindly, sensible Bumpy Wentworth; over sherry, the younger woman would laugh until tears blinded her at their imitations, with appropriate accents, of Irish maids and Italian gardeners in Father’s employ and even of the dear late husband’s stuffy, miserly Wasp business partners. Julia was virtually a girl to them, and Mrs. Wentworth saw to it that she, with Owen trailing along, met the right people and, in time, joined the right clubs. As the New England seasons picturesquely lumbered through Haskells Crossing, and the troubles of the Mackenzies’ half-dozen children—four of his, two of hers—were confided and then soothed and chuckled away over tea, and funeral after funeral put mutual acquaintances to rest, Bumpy was always there. In her mid-eighties, she visibly began to lose weight and to weaken; alopecia obliged her to wear a wig, about which she was very droll, debating with Julia whether peach or apricot would be the most tasteful shade. Even when taken to the hospital with breathing difficulties, the old woman had been merry; at Julia’s last visit, Bumpy got her to giggling unstoppably at the comic side of a tea-pot tempest in the altar guild, which Julia, one of the guild’s mainstays, had been taking too seriously. As light faded in the hospital windows, she sank back on her pillow and patted Julia’s hand with her withered own. She promised her that she was liking her new medicine and was going to get her strength back in rehab on the other side of Cabot City. She had been depressed but could feel her good spirits returning.

So it was in the aggrieved, incredulous voice of a child who has been tricked that Julia, replacing the receiver after a phone call early the next morning, came back to the bedroom and announced to Owen, “Bumpy died!” Tears stood out in her eyes, making their aquamarine more vivid. Julia was a woman who even in the worst of times didn’t cry.