In his junior year Owen had met her parents a number of times. Their house was on a shady Cambridge street, no doubt once quieter than it had become since rush-hour traffic had discovered it as a short-cut between Garden Street and Mass. Avenue. It was a typical big house on a small lot, with an alarming weight of books everywhere, bookcases even climbing the stairs and filling the hallways of the third floor. The rooms on this third floor had been rented out to Harvard students until five years ago, when Phyllis’s maturing had made the irruption of young males uncomfortable for her parents. Until her young brother, Colin, went off to Andover, he had appropriated one of the previously rented rooms as his lair, adding to the mattress and bureau and yellow-oak desk already there his own little radio of white plastic, a 45-rpm record player, some glue-it-together models of obsolete war machinery, a scattering of faintly redolent sweatshirts and basketball sneakers, and, in several unpainted pine bookcases, a tumble of Batman and Plastic Man comics, science-fiction magazines, paperbacks of baseball stats, Shady Hill textbooks, and a child’s encyclopedia in fifteen volumes whose spines moved through the rainbow from violet to red but were jarringly out of order. Owen’s mother had owned a few books and also borrowed them from the Alton Public Library, travelling in from Willow on the trolley car; in this house books were a monstrous growth, a fungus of reading matter encrusting every surface.

Phyllis was taller than both her parents; the sight of her blushingly towering over them, holding her head at an angle that indicated a wish to shrink lower, Owen found erotic. She was slender but ample-breasted, with abundant dirty-blond down at the nape of her long neck and in her moist places—a hormonally replete body sprung from these two dainty, dry people. Their bodies seemed the last things the senior Goodhues thought of. They dressed almost interchangeably in layers of mousy wool. Mrs., named Carolyn, wore nubbly straight skirts and low brown heels and unbuttoned cardigan sweaters of which one half always hung noticeably lower than the other. Her washed-out coloring and air of distraction linked her to her daughter, but there was an impatience, a habit of interrupting utterances she felt were too slow or obvious, which gentle-spoken Phyllis did not share. “This house—” Owen said, looking about him the first time he entered it, marvelling at the wealth of varnished stickwork, knobs, and moldings, the massive double doors, the walnut-dark staircase forcefully thrusting up to a landing where tall leaded windows cast tinted shadows.