But the ghostly center of power, which in Willow had been gathered at the five-cornered intersection, here hovers three miles and many railroad crossings away, at the city hall and adjoining police station, in the center of Cabot City. Once a riverside hamlet named Colchester after the home town of the early Puritan settlers, it was renamed in honor of the creator of the river-polluting leatherworks that, with its sister factories, populated the close-packed streets of triple-deckers with Polish, Greek, Irish, and even Turkish millworkers. The mills have folded, but the descendants of the workers continue to support city administrations notorious, in the precinct of Haskells Crossing, for high assessments and corruptible zoning regulations. Haskells Crossing in 1880 attempted to secede and join the adjacent summer colony, Haven-by-the-Sea, but the move was thwarted on Beacon Hill, not by the Irish legislature but by the veto of the Boston Brahmin governor, who according to some had been influenced by an undeclared donation of leather money and according to others by a high-minded conservative resistance, in the wake of the Civil War, to revolts and remap-pings of any kind.

Owen, like his neighbors, likes Haskells Crossing the way it is. Self-governed Haven-by-the-Sea, with its town meetings and hotly debated tax overrides, seems a village too pleased with itself, too busily inturned. The distant Cabot City officialdom leaves him, save financially, untouched. Water, rusty but drinkable, pushes up his hill from a city reservoir; trash is collected at the foot of his driveway once a week. A policeman, the one time he and Julia reported a robbery, appeared the same day, looking baffled but sympathetic, with glistening oval eyes. He looked like a big squirrel without a bushy tail, hunched over his notebook nearsightedly nibbling at every acorn of a clue. The thief was never found.

Owen, raised in a village idyllically becalmed by hard times, in a nation steadfastly abjuring the quick fixes of fascism and communism, holds a mixed bag of socio-economic attitudes: he votes Democrat, because his parents and grandparents had voted for Roosevelt, but at the same time he expects so little from government that all social services and signs of public order pleasantly surprise him. When Bradley Acheson bemoans to him, on the broad sunlit lawn of the day’s cocktail party, the latest attempt to subdivide and develop the old Judson estate’s sixty-five acres, Owen’s tongue is tied, undecided between agreeing, for the sake of the green spaces that old wealth once kept open and that only government intervention can sustain, and pointing out that the North American continent’s history has been one of development. “Housing starts,” he finally, haltingly says, “are a leading economic indicator, and isn’t crying ‘Nimby’ somewhat anti-democratic, even anti-patriotic under your great guy Bush Two?”

“Nimby?”

“Not in My Back Yard.”