Just slightly above the administrators of local order were the national celebrities. They were, indeed, more accessible and familiar: Jack Benny and Fibber McGee cracking their jokes and suffering their embarrassments in the little Philco right in the piano room, next to the greasy-armed easy chair where Owen ate peanut-butter crackers in a double rapture of laughter and mastication; Tyrone Power, his black eyebrows knitted in a troubled frown, and Joan Crawford, her huge dark lips bravely tremulous and her enlarged eyes each harboring a tear that would fill a bucket, on the screen at the Scheherazade; and the tweedy, pipe-sucking writers and bespectacled lab-coated inventors and slick-haired café-society people present in the shiny magazines, Life and Liberty and Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post, on the upright wooden rack at Eberly’s Drug Store, buyable by any local person with a dime. There was a friendliness, a closeness, in the way this firmament curved over Willow in its valley. The voices of Bing Crosby and Lowell Thomas and Kate Smith carried none of the abrasive demands of real voices—his mother’s, his teachers’, the teasing girls’—and yet these celebrities, to judge from the scripts of the radio comedies, lived lives much like ours, visiting the bank and the dentist. Jack Benny even went next door to borrow a cup of sugar from Ronald Colman. At their continental distance these stars partook of the life lived in Owen’s neighborhood, with its spindly porches and buckling retaining walls. There was no better way to live, no grander, more virtuous country than America, and no homier state than Pennsylvania. God figured at the top, the unthinkable keystone, but at a mercifully great distance, farther away than even Hollywood and Beverly Hills.

“There you are,” he tells his wife, when he has deciphered “Here” and found her in the flesh—her frosted hair, her blue flip-flops—out on the veranda, reading the New York Times.

He insists on reading the Boston Globe—another misalignment. “I had the weirdest dream,” he begins. “You were in it twice.”

“Please, baby,” she says, not turning her head. “Couldn’t you tell me later? I’m trying to understand Enron—the way they did it, siphoning off these fortunes for themselves.”

“I’ll have forgotten it later, but never mind,” he says, feeling the splash of imagery in his mind evaporate, sparkling though it was with an elixir of her, of their life together. “Never mind. Tell me what’s on for today.” Today was Saturday, his favorite day as a child, but threateningly formless in his retirement.

Julia, her eyelashes fluttering in irritation as she stared into the Times version of breathtaking corporate corruption, says, “Nothing until cocktails at the Achesons’.”

“Oh, God. Do we have to go?”

“Of course, dear. Miriam is one of my best friends. As Brad is yours.”

“They’ll be having everybody; we won’t be missed.”