“Oh yes we will. Why do you put me through this every time? You always enjoy yourself once you’re there. You’re charming, in fact, in that ah-shucks way you have.”

“I pretend to enjoy myself. I have nothing to say to those people. Nothing.”

Owen’s lifework has been the creation and vetting of computer software, and now that he has closed his last little office in Boston, a four-man (three-man-and-a-woman) consultancy, he has little to say to anybody. The technology has, by geometric leaps and bounds, left him behind; his dashing algorithms and circuitry-saving forked commands, his IF … THEN … ELSEs and WHILE-loops, have become as homely as patchwork quilts. The chip-power of a thousand-dollar desktop IBM clone dizzies and disgusts him. All those bells and whistles: realistically three-dimensional computer games animated in real time; hard-wired programs for storing and cropping and shading digital photos, for editing digital home videos, for printing in a hundred type fonts; programs for playing music broken into ten thousand digitized tones, for drawing upon the Internet’s endlessly enlarging Library of Babel; programs for fending off viruses and worms and spam and unwanted e-mail correspondence. The dot-com bust has made the whole industry seem disreputable, including those who, like him, got out near the top. Correctly judging the Clinton bubble to be unsustainable, Owen reversed the course of his grandfather’s investments, bought during the ’twenties bubble and wiped out by the Crash of 1929. He has avenged the old man, whom he loved most purely of those he early loved.

Unlike his mother, Grandpa Rausch had not been too present, nor had he been, like Owen’s father, too absent. He had been just right, sitting quiet in the center of the caneback sofa while Owen played on the living-room carpet with his Tinker Toys and lead warplanes, or made the Lionel train go around and around, backwards and forwards, the little black transformer box overheating to emit a slight, cozy stink of burning, like his mother when she ironed. She also emitted this smell when, sitting at her dresser, she used the long-nosed curling iron on her auburn hair. His mother was hot, hot like the top of the coal-burning kitchen stove, dangerous to touch, though she warmed the kitchen, and the whole house for that matter. She had a redhead’s temper, what his father called “a short fuse”; her hand would flash out and slap Owen’s face quicker than he could duck. All his life Owen wanted women to be cool and calm except when he (more and more rarely) desired them otherwise.

“Talk about the news, the economy,” Julia advises him. “Whether or not we should go to war with Iraq again.”

“Another thing that happens at seventy—thank God, darling, you’re too young to have it happen to you—is you cease to care about the news. It isn’t new. Didn’t we do Iraq a Bush or so ago?”