'And if Francis buys the house?' I said finally. 'Think he'd let us live here?'

'Sure. He'd be bored stiff if it was just him and Henry. I guess Bunny might have to work in the bank but he could always come up on weekends, if he leaves Marion and the kids at home.'

I laughed. Bunny had been talking the night before about how he wanted eight children, four boys and four girls; which had prompted a long, humorless speech from Henry about how the fulfillment of the reproductive cycle was, in nature, an invariable harbinger of swift decline and death.

'It's terrible,' said Charles. 'Really, I can just see him. Standing out in a yard wearing some kind of stupid apron.'

'Cooking hamburgers on the grill.'

'And about twenty kids running around him and screaming.'

'Kiwanis picnics.'

'La-Z-Boy recliners.'

'Jesus.'

A sudden wind rustled through the birches; a gust of yellow leaves came storming down. I took a sip of my drink. If I had grown up in that house I couldn't have loved it more, couldn't have been more familiar with the creak of the swing, or the pattern of the clematis vines on the trellis, or the velvety swell of land as it faded to gray on the horizon, and the strip of highway visible -just barely – in the hills, beyond the trees. The very colors of the place had seeped into my blood: just as Hampden, in subsequent years, would always present itself immediately to my imagination in a confused whirl of white and green and red, so the country house first appeared as a glorious blur of watercolors, of ivory and lapis blue, chestnut and burnt orange and gold, separating only gradually into the boundaries of remembered objects: the house, the sky, the maple trees. But even that day, there on the porch, with Charles beside me and the smell of wood smoke in the air, it had the quality of a memory; there it was, before my eyes, and yet too beautiful to believe.

It was getting dark; soon it would be time for dinner. I finished my drink in a swallow. The idea of living there, of not having to go back ever again to asphalt and shopping malls and modular furniture; of living there with Charles and Camilla and Henry and Francis and maybe even Bunny; of no one marrying or going home or getting a job in a town a thousand miles away or doing any of the traitorous things friends do after college; of everything remaining exactly as it was, that instant – the idea was so truly heavenly that I'm not sure I thought, even then, it could ever really happen, but I like to believe I did.

Francis was working up to a big finish on his song. ' "Gentlemen songsters off on a spree… Doomed from here to eternity Charles looked at me sideways. 'So, what about you?' he said.

'What do you mean?'

'I mean, do you have any plans?' He laughed. 'What are you doing for the next forty or fifty years of your life?'

Out on the lawn, Bunny had just knocked Henry's ball about seventy feet outside the court. There was a ragged burst of laughter; faint, but clear, it floated back across the evening air.

That laughter haunts me still.

Chapter 3

From the first moment I set foot in Hampden, I had begun to dread the end of term, when I would have to go back to Piano, and flat land, and filling stations, and dust. As the term wore on, and the snow got deeper and the mornings blacker and every day brought me closer to the date on the smeared mimeograph ('December 17 – All Final Papers Due') taped inside my closet door, my melancholy began to turn into something like alarm. I did not think I could stand a Christmas at my parents' house, with a plastic tree and no snow and the TV going constantly. It was not as if my parents were so anxious to have me, either. In recent years they had fallen in with a gabby, childless couple, older than they were, called the Mac Natts. Mr Mac Natt was an auto-parts salesman; Mrs Mac Natt was shaped like a pigeon and sold Avon. They had got my parents doing things like taking bus trips to factory outlets and playing a dice game called 'bunko' and hanging around the piano bar at the Ramada Inn. These activities picked up considerably around holidays and my presence, brief and irregular as it was, was regarded as a hindrance and something of a reproach.

But the holidays were only half the trouble. Because Hampden was so far north, and because the buildings were old and expensive to heat, the school was closed during January and February.

Already I could hear my father complaining beerily about me to Mr Mac Natt, Mr Mac Natt slyly goading him on with remarks insinuating that I was spoiled and that he wouldn't allow any son of his to walk all over him, if he had one. This would drive my father into a fury; eventually he would come busting dramatically into my room and order me out, his forefinger trembling, rolling his eyes like Othello. He had done this several times when I was in high school and in college in California, for no reason really except to display his authority in front of my mother and his co-workers. I was always welcomed back as soon as he tired of the attention and allowed my mother to 'talk some sense' into him, but what about now? I didn't even have a bedroom in California anymore; in October, my mother had written to say that she had sold the furniture and turned it into a sewing room.

Henry and Bunny were going to Italy over the winter vacation, to Rome. I was surprised at this announcement, which Bunny had made at the beginning of December, especially since the two of them had been out of sorts for over a month, Henry in particular. Bunny, I knew, had been hitting him hard for money in the past weeks, but though Henry complained about this he seemed oddly incapable of refusing him. I was fairly sure that it wasn't the money per se, but the principle of it; I was also fairly sure that whatever tension existed, Bunny was oblivious of it.

The trip was all Bunny talked about. He bought clothes, guidebooks, a record called Parliamo Italiano which promised to teach the listener Italian in two weeks or less ('Even to those who've never had luck with other language courses!' boasted the jacket) and a copy of Dorothy Sayers's translation of Inferno. He knew I had nowhere to go for the winter vacation and enjoyed rubbing salt in my wounds. 'I'll be thinking of you while I'm drinking Campari and riding the gondolas,' he said, winking.

Henry had little to say about the trip. As Bunny rattled on he would sit smoking with deep, resolute drags, pretending not to understand Bun's fallacious Italian.

Francis said he'd be happy to have me to Christmas in Boston and then travel on with him to New York; the twins phoned their grandmother in Virginia and she said she'd be glad to have me there, too, for the entire winter break. But there was the question of money. For the months until school began I would have to have a job. I needed money if I wanted to come back in the spring, and I couldn't very well work if I was gallivanting around with Francis. The twins would he clerking, as they always did during holidays, with their uncle the lawyer, but they had quite a time stretching the job to fat the two of them, Charles driving Uncle Orman to the occasional estate sale and to the package store, Camilla sitting around the office waiting to answer a phone that never rang. I am sure it never occurred to them that I might want a job, too – all my tales of Californian richesse had hit the mark harder than I'd thought. 'What'll I do while you're at work?' I asked them, hoping they would get my drift, but of course they didn't. 'I'm afraid there's not much to do,' said Charles apologetically. 'Read, talk to Nana, play with the dogs.'

My only choice, it seemed, was to stay in Hampden town. Dr Roland was willing to keep me on, though at a salary that wouldn't cover a decent rent. Charles and Camilla were subletting their apartment and Francis had a teenaged cousin staying in his; Henry's, for all I knew, was standing empty, but he didn't offer its use and I was too proud to ask. The house in the country was empty, too, but it was an hour from Hampden and I didn't have a car. Then I heard about an old hippie, an ex-Hampden student, who ran a musical-instrument workshop in an abandoned warehouse. He would let you live in the warehouse for free if you carved pegs or sanded a few mandolins now and again.