It had been a setup. Gregory had just finished his freshman year at Marist College in upstate New York. His older sister, who had been a senior at Ladycliff College, had spent most of that year “keeping tabs” on her little brother, driving over on weekends to surprise him in his dorm, calling him at odd hours, or sending friends who were going that way to fetch him for Sunday brunch or a Friday-night hamburger. From all that she could see, he had adjusted well to college life-he had always been to her a gentle giant, a sweet and quiet kid whose size, from an early age, had promised athletic prowess but whose coordination had never delivered it. Her friends and roommates all thought him adorable, but it became clear over the course of the year that his own social life was limited to these visits from her and occasional weekend tagalongs to bars and dances and rock concerts with his more sociable and hard-drinking friends. A mere continuation, as she saw it, of his dateless high-school days. “Never had a date,” she would tell her friends who had praised his sweetness and his shy affability. “He’s going to be nineteen.” At the faltering Ladycliff, where the few recently enrolled male students were mostly pudgy or gaunt young men on their way into or out of the seminary, and where nearby West Point was the fount of romance (MPs being easier pickings than the sometimes snotty cadets), this became a subject of many late-night studies. A blind date was in order, they concluded, but how, and with whom. Finally, sometime in second semester when a late-season snowstorm kept them all in their dorm rooms with endless bowls of buttered popcorn, Betty Kelly who lived down the hall offered up her “little cousin” Clare, who also lived on Long Island, also went to Catholic school, and had never, as far as Betty knew, had a date either.

Betty Kelly was very pretty. Even with the three feet of snow that covered the steep and winding streets of the college, and hermetically sealed the girls’ dorm against the possibility of an impromptu visit from an ardent male, she resisted the day’s call to slovenliness and remained impeccably well groomed. She was a senior, and engaged to a cadet. She was to be married at West Point in June, after graduation, and she would see her little cousin then, she told the girls, at her wedding.

When Betty Kelly was inclined to be kind, she thought the reconciliation with Clare’s family was an indication of her mother’s best nature. Betty had been fifteen at the time. At the back of the huge round church, she had watched her mother put her arms around the uncle who had lost the boy, the uncle who was only a pale stoop-shouldered version of the man in her mother’s wedding photos. She had seen him close his eyes in her mother’s embrace, as if it was just what he needed. There had been two other cousins that day, a boy and a girl, both older than Betty and both alternately sullen and weepy, surrounded by a changing orbit of identical friends. Only Clare was approachable, and back at the small house, Betty had sat next to her, introduced herself, and then, eventually, had taken her hand. The photographs of Jacob, the cousin she had never met, made him seem young, and, she’d told Clare, very nice. Even at fifteen, Betty believed her attractiveness came with an obligation to be good, and she had thought, that day, that both she and her mother had succeeded quite well in being beautiful and good.

But when Betty Kelly was feeling disinclined to be kind, she knew that the death of the boy in Vietnam had actually made his family more socially acceptable to her mother, more interesting at least, and that the sudden reconciliation was as motivated by her mother’s desire to be an insider to the tragedy as much as it was by any pity she felt for the family’s pain. Rather than expose the shallow roots of her own social history, Jacob Keane’s family now provided her mother with a certain moral authority when the war was discussed with her Garden City set, few of whom knew anyone who had even served, much less died, over there. Her uncle’s old car in the driveway when the family came for dinner was no longer an indication to the neighbors of a less than illustrious pedigree, but of a sympathetic noblesse oblige. This was the family, after all, who had lost a boy in Vietnam, so close to the end, and Catherine Kelly was doing what she could for them.

Betty Kelly wondered, too, from time to time, if both her mother’s sympathy for the family and the satisfaction she felt at being able to display that sympathy were equally real. Preparing now to be a military wife herself, she had, on occasion, mentioned Jacob to her future in-laws, without ever adding that she and her soldier cousin had never actually met. She had seen the advantage the connection gave her; she had, to be honest with herself, savored it, without for a minute feeling any less pain for poor Clare and the gray-haired parents who were left to raise her.

The blind date, it was agreed-all the girls in the discussion warming to the possibilities-would be arranged by saying that Gregory/Clare had just broken up with his/her girlfriend/boyfriend and wanted to meet someone new. This would eliminate, it was agreed, any hint that either one of them was a loser who’d never had a date, while at the same time taking off some of the pressure to be charming that might move either one of them, shy souls both, toward total catatonia. “Just tell them it’s not really a date,” one of the girls offered. “They just want to have someone to talk to while they’re between serious relationships.”

“Just a friend,” Gregory’s sister said, nodding, and all the other girls in the circle of T-shirts and pajama bottoms and fuzzy slippers echoed the phrase with such wistful enthusiasm it might have been a refrain from their own prayers. “Just a friend.”

Gregory’s sister, who was in awe of, and a little in love with, Betty Kelly and her clean hair and pink nails and turquoise jogging suit-not to mention the diamond in its Tiffany setting-pictured Clare as a younger, shyer version of her cousin; a willowy beauty who her brother would love instantly, cherish like a delicate bird in his soft big hands: an incongruous but perfect pair.

Betty, who knew her cousin and had met Gregory in the Ladycliff dining hall, thought more along the lines of beggars can’t be choosers. At her wedding reception, with her train pinned up and her veil pushed aside, she drew Clare’s arm across her beaded waist and walked her to a corner of the room. She whispered, “Would you do me a favor? Would you go out with this boy I know?” From the corner of her eye, Betty saw her new mother-in-law in her raw silk suit smiling at the two of them, making note-Betty was sure of it-that this was the cousin who had lost her brother in the war, making note of the sweet special attention Betty was giving her.

For Clare, the rapidly accumulating number of “firsts” that her blind date marked became a mantra for the entire summer: first time she talked to a boy on the phone (to set up the time and to give directions); first time she shopped for something to wear on a date; first time she showered and washed her hair and dressed for a date; first time she heard the doorbell rung by a date while she was still getting ready upstairs; first time she heard her father say, “How do you do,” to a boy at the door, heard her mother’s “Nice to meet you Gregory,” and the self-consciously soft, mellifluous call up the stairs, “Clare”-not the usual sweetie pie or baby doll or Clare de Lune-”your date is here.” First time she came down the stairs to greet a boy in the living room (first time in these new shoes, too, which were wooden-soled sandals all the girls were wearing but which she had not gotten the toe-gripping hang of yet). First time she laid eyes on him: a big guy (that was good) in neat shorts and Top-Siders (that was good) and a polo shirt and with not too long hair-all good. First time she said, “Hi,” and he said, “Hi,” before both of them let their eyes drop to the floor. First time her mother and father both moved forward to sweep her out the door by the side of a strange young man. First time she looked up to see Pauline at her brothers’ window, giving a brief wave. First time he opened the car door for her (good) of his father’s Ford Torino (okay) and got in the driver’s side, and before turning the ignition leaned his head toward the steering wheel and said to her, smiling a little and from under a falling shock of his brown hair, “Hi again.” First time he made her laugh.