Then, when he was thirteen, it didn’t. The mill where his father worked closed down. Its war work had been its last gasp. His father walked the baking summer streets of Alton looking for an accountant’s job. The humiliation of it wore his face thin and tinted it yellow. He became obsessed—absurdly, thought Owen, who never saw the bills—with the expense of the Mifflin Avenue house, the heating, the maintenance, the need for fresh paint. It had become in his mind another “rip-off joint.” He called it “Pop’s folly”; he had to get out from under it. The house, the only house Owen had ever lived in, was sold, for the very same amount, eight thousand five hundred dollars, for which Owen’s grandfather had bought it twenty-five years ago, in the wake of another world war. For half that amount they bought a house in the country, miles from anywhere, surrounded by eroding fields and the buzz of crickets and the scolding of birds. The little stone house had stood empty for a year. Swifts had built nests in the chimney; flying squirrels lived in the attic; feral cats hid in the old bales of hay in the unpainted barn. There was no electricity, no telephone, no plumbing, and putting in these things took much of their leftover four thousand dollars. Also, they had to have a car; in Willow they could walk everywhere, the five of them in five different directions if they wanted, and for seven cents the trolley car took them right into Alton, with its department stores and movie palaces. Daddy could not find a job in Alton. The entire city was slowly dying, and he, over forty, was too old to retrain. A college classmate in Norristown, toward Philadelphia, finally took him on, as an associate in his accounting firm, for less money than the hosiery mill had paid, and this took the car away from eight in the morning to six at night. Owen was left with his grandparents, his mother, a barnful of cats with runny eyes, and two fluffy collie puppies. The nearest neighbors were Mennonites, whose children had no time for play; they all worked on their farm. A mile away was an old tavern and a grocery store in a cluster of six houses along the road, but this was no kind of village. Owen stayed in the house and read science fiction and mystery novels set in English villages and dreamed of farfetched inventions that would make him rich. His retrospective image of his life tended to delete those years; they had no place on his résumé, the six rural years before he went away to MIT and New England.