The village he now lives in, his last village most likely save for the Bide-a-Wee Terminal Care Complex, has no government of its own; it is a precinct of a city of forty thousand, Cabot City. Haskells Crossing is the old summer-estate section, where the acreages of Pittsburgh and Chicago millionaires—billionaires in today’s money—have been broken into smaller holdings but are still remembered, still felt as a foundation layer of comfort and spaciousness. The great plutocrats, with their yachts and private docks and miles of granite wall and flaring stone staircases leading up to long swimming pools and neo-classic changing rooms and red-clay tennis courts and fanciful gazebos, left a certain aura as well as children who, themselves now nearing extinction, remember coming east from Chicago or Cleveland every June in Daddy’s private railroad car. A century before, as the B & M tracks came out from Boston along the North Shore, the crossing took its name from a local salt-water farmer, Enoch Haskell, who had been bought out; his weathered wooden buildings were knocked down and burned and his struggling fields turned into emerald lawns, but his name has outlasted those of those who ousted him. The South Shore lost its commuter lines after the war, but in this direction they hung on, and once an hour a passing train makes the granite bedrock underlying Owen and Julia’s house slightly but perceptibly tremble. He likes this elemental touch, this tangible connection between transport and geology.

There is a small downtown—the fire station, the war memorial, the French baker, a branch bank, a 7-Eleven, a fruit store, a health-food store, a drugstore eventually driven out of business by competition from the mall CVSs and Walgreens, a bookstore always on the verge of being extinguished by the Borders and the Barnes & Noble in the mall ten miles distant, a pizza parlor, a dry cleaner’s, two competing hairdressers both from the tropics (Costa Rica, the Philippines), a failing florist beside a vacant office that had housed a travel agency fatally undermined by the World Trade Center disaster and subsequent airline economics, a family restaurant, and a twice-as-expensive restaurant for courting couples and the local well-to-do when they have guests to impress. There is even a Haskells Crossing post office, from the days when the estate owners were deemed as deserving of one, at least, as a Nebraska whistle-stop.