When Owen tried to remember this conversation, he had trouble locating it. The authorities of MIT discouraged privacy for mixed-sex couples. MIT didn’t know where to put its female students; some were housed across the river, at 120 Bay State Road, and then the university opened up a section of Bexley Hall. Phyllis’s room in either dormitory was out of bounds, but there were chintz-covered sofas at 120 Bay State Road, and corners of the big reception room where the lights—stately floor lamps with pleated shades and three-way bulbs—could be dimmed to coziness. Students would lounge and lie in the semi-dark with their brush-cuts and perms; the boys then wore white bucks and narrow rep ties, the Ivy look not yet yielded to the blue-jeaned geek look, and the girls wore single-strand pearls and pastel sweaters whose wool seemed to melt in the hand. It wasn’t until Phyllis moved in her senior year back to her parents’ home off Garden Street that she and Owen could be alone between four walls; but that was later, surely, than the scare from Ralph Finneran.

“Smart enough,” she answered, “but he had a pugnacious way of making students feel stupid. He came from—how can I say this?—very ordinary people, near Worcester. He took me out there for Thanksgiving once, and all anybody cared about was the high-school football game, this sacred rivalry between two old mill towns; we all had to go, though it was bitter cold that year. His nephew was playing and got injured, even. They were tough, I should never have tried to be nice to him. After that Thanksgiving I knew it and tried to pull back.” Owen made noises of sympathy but she talked through them, her gray eyes gazing at that past gray day. “They were Roman Catholic, and though he was quite dismissive of what he thought were people’s attempts to cling to illusions, he once told me that we of course would be raising our children Catholic. When I expressed surprise, he became very angry. When he was angry, he would go all dark in the face, I don’t know how he quite did it, but it frightened me.”

She tried to imitate, in her fair and passionless face, Ralph’s lethal look, and the effort was like a cheap beer poured into a crystal wineglass. Owen thought for the hundredth time how fortunate he was to be with her, if only for the time being. She was an education. “And me?” he asked her. “Am I tough and ordinary?”

“Owen, don’t fish for compliments. You’re a Bird.”