Owen might argue this, if Julia were in a better temper. His mother taught him a great deal, though it is hard, now toward the end of his life, to say what. Her wisdom, mostly wordless, was fitted to life in Willow—how to survive there, who to obey and who to avoid, how to generate a confidence, a sense of being precious, that would arm him for a future elsewhere. She imparted little about hair-combing, and manners in general; Owen accordingly takes such niceties lightly. He is a slob, yet squeamish. He does not like eating over the sink; it makes him feel like a dog at his bowl. He wants to eat as he did when a child, wandering through his grandfather’s house with a stalk of celery or a bar of peanut brittle in blissful ignorance of any falling crumbs. Mealtimes there tended to be stressful: Grammy, as her Parkinson’s worsened, had a way of choking at the table, and his mother could be having a red-faced temper sulk, or his father, his mournful accountant’s face looking drained of blood, could be adding up in his head how much these many mouths to feed were costing him. Owen found that food eaten in solitude, on the run, in odd corners, tasted best. He happily remembers faithfully consuming a six-cent Tastycake while walking back to school after lunch and, when he was older, walking around downtown Alton cracking peanuts from a paper bag still warm from the roasting.

He does not blame his wife for scolding him, for bursting forth. She needs him to be perfect, or else she has made a lifelong mistake. Each has bought the other dearly, in coin not all theirs. Her repugnance, when she expresses it, he accepts as evidence of her wanting him to measure up to the highest standards. She needs him to be a perfect husband, to justify herself. She does not want to hear about his dream-party back in Middle Falls, with the mischievous women dressed up in colorful porcelain carapaces.

His marriage with Phyllis took a wound, perhaps, in the two years when he was in the post–Korean War Army, enjoying the company of the rapidly obsolescing giant computers devoted, with their skimpy memories and miles of telephone-circuitry wiring, to the calculation of missile trajectories and, linked up with radar, the primitive beginnings of air-traffic control. She gave birth without him, in Mt. Auburn Hospital, to eight-pound Gregory while Owen was stationed at Fort Benning in Georgia. Seven-pound Iris came after Phyllis had joined him in Germany, in military housing outside Frankfurt. Unfortunately, that week, toward the end of his tour, Owen was troubleshooting at a secret missile site in Turkey, and again missed her birth travail.