Owen misses the old Willow playground, its plateau long bulldozed out of existence. Time hung heavy there, but the weight was delicious, as he moved the marbles of Chinese checkers from one triangle to another, and braided rickrack lanyards for whistles though only Miss Mull had any need to wear one, and retrieved the roof ball from the cornfields when it went over the pavilion’s tarpaper roof, and watched Ginger dangle from the monkey bars or kick high, higher on the creaking swing. He realizes that to the children of Haskells Crossing the country club is their playground, with its pool and snack bar and tetherball and clay tennis courts, and probably with dirty drawings scratched somewhere where grown-ups never think to look, but for Owen this recreational space wears a stupefying glaze of propriety, of that hopeless boringness special to the rich. The poor know boredom but always hope that things will change for the better, whereas the rich simply want things to go on just as they are, which is even less likely to happen. Their problems—the constant crisis state of their golf games, the huge new house some nouveau riche from out of state was putting up right in their ocean view, the impossibility of finding dependable help in the house and garden (even the Brazilians and Albanians are overcharging and learning how to loaf), the unshakable slump in the stock market, the rising real-estate taxes, the adult children who are getting divorces and having disappointing, quixotic careers in the arts or bleeding-heart social work—strike Owen as trivial, compared with the do-or-die problems that afflicted his childhood household and from which he had been sheltered.

As the slate roof of the house on Mifflin Avenue withstood rain and the hurricane of ’38, so his guardians had shielded him from a pelting hail of worries: poverty with no federal safety net, ill health with no post-war medical miracles, loss of social face with no forgiveness in the social system. The child gathered ominous bits of conversation from other rooms in the house: his father’s job was none too secure, the local hosiery industry was a lost cause, his mother’s health was uncertain. She had high blood pressure and female complaints. Beyond the drawing on the playground shed, Owen knew nothing about the female sexual organs, but from what he overheard he gathered they were a one-way street to medical disaster. And Grandpa and Grammy were far from young; they rustled in their room, with its wet-paper smell of old bodies, on the edge of oblivion, and beat the odds by appearing each morning for breakfast. Owen made his way through the days, rising steadily through the grades at school, grateful that his world on Mifflin Avenue stayed intact.