The children, as children must, adjusted. Rachel and Thomas Larson, aged nine and seven at the wedding (a simple, bare-bones service in the Lower Falls Universalist Church), deferred to the four Mackenzies chronologically arrayed above them; they sheltered in their blood mother’s presence even as Julia put the bulk of her maternal effort—a heroic output of empathy, patience, and affection—into the traditionally suspect role of stepmother. Owen’s children, two of them in college and all four imbued with the stoic sophistication of a generation to whom family dysfunction is common TV fare, didn’t much blame their stepmother for what had befallen them. Only little Eve kept her distance, those first years. Then, as sexuality caught up with the child, she had no mature female to turn to but Julia, and they became, briefly, close, before the girl, at sixteen, drifted away into a woman’s necessary secrecy. It is a life-stage, Owen reflected, when one’s children become instructors in acceptance and sophistication—in rolling with the punches.

It had been Julia who had known of Haskells Crossing. Arthur’s first call, fresh from Andover Newton Theological School, had been as assistant minister to a failing Episcopal parish in Cabot City; the more sedate, more prosperous Saint Barnabas in Haskells Crossing had been envied, a kind of rich younger brother. From the perspective of Middle Falls—where the old riverside gun factory again stood empty, though the E-O Data sign stayed up above the loading platform, and a select few of its employees had found employment with Apple—Haskells Crossing seemed a fairy-tale abstraction, an ideally remote and obscure site for their new life together. But no village is remote and obscure to itself; its inhabitants occupy the center of the universe. After twenty-five years, Owen and Julia are woven into that center. Their relationship is loving but haunted. He thinks of Phyllis every day, though her image seldom troubles to invade his dreams; there is instead a generic oneiric wife-figure who, on his awaking, Owen is not certain had been Julia or Phyllis or yet another female. Sometimes she presides over a house whose corners and floorboards and scattered toys and chipped dishes are those of his first house, the home of Isaac and Anna Rausch on Mifflin Avenue in Willow. Everything in that house, every trivial little object and square foot of carpet, was supercharged with significance. His mother had existed in the house as a nexus of need, a wife, child, and mother all at once, hovering between Owen’s head and the ceiling, a constant voice in the middle distance, where the view from the window intersected with the dirty wallpaper.