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still a baby.”
    “Ha ha,” I laughed. “Ha ha.”
    Mrs. Donegal did not appear to detect the hollowness of my laughter. Glad to have a new audience for old stories, she went on and on about Mummy’s taste in caviar and her own debutante days at the Stork Club, her wedding trip to Europe with Ven (the Delahaye broke down in the Alps), and how darling Trick was as a baby. All the while she chain-smoked Pall Malls, downed martinis, and popped one hors d’oeuvre after another into her mouth.
    Dart had told me that his mother slept till five each day, virtually never left the house, and was terrified of what she might find in the outside world, from which she had retreated shortly after his birth. I had expected to find her strange, but her strangeness surpassed even my expectations. It was not that she wasn’t pleasant; she was. It was that she seemed to talk in set pieces, each of which seemed rehearsed.
    “The cards!” said Mr. Donegal. “We have forgotten the cards!” Whereupon he retreated to the nearly impassable sun room (filled with newspapers, cartons, never-unpacked appliances, and clothes) to obtain a series of envelopes of assorted sizes and two waxy boxes from the florist’s shop.
    “Oh, Ven! How sweet of you,” Mrs. Donegal said.
    “One for you! And one for you!” Mr. Donegal said, giving each of the ladies a florists’ box.
    I opened mine with trepidation, for not only do I hate corsages, but I was wearing a very thin chamois dress, which would be ruined by a pin. In the box was a corsage of somewhat wilted Tropicana roses, festooned with orange and gold ribbons.
    “Oh, thank you,” I lied. Mrs. Donegal had an identical corsage, which seemed to delight her. She put it on immediately, pointing the tail crookedly at her jiggling bosom.
    “Oh, goody!” she said. “Now let’s see the cards.”
    I fiddled with my corsage, hoping no one would notice I wasn’t wearing it. No such luck. Mr. Donegal came over and pinned it on my bosom, ruining my suede dress and copping a quick but unmistakable feel.
    “‘Happy Thanksgiving to my beloved wife,’” Mrs. Donegal read aloud. “ ‘At this most special time of year, / My dearest wife, I bring you cheer. / For you make every holiday a cause for being bright and gay. / Without you life would be no fun, / so I salute you, dearest one. Happy Thanksgiving from your adoring Ven.’ ”
    At his cue, Mr. Donegal bent down and kissed his immobilized wife.
    “Oh, Ven,” she said. “How sweet.”
    “Not as sweet as you, m’dear,” said Ven, as if by rote.
    “What a loving family we are!” said Mrs. Donegal.
    You could tell from the expressions of the two men that this charade had been played many a time.
    Mrs. Donegal proceeded to read out the other cards from her husband, all of them equally saccharine and self-serving. She seemed genuinely delighted with the sentiments expressed. Never before having met people who took greeting cards seriously, I was astonished. I had grown up in a world where such sentiments were occasions for wild hilarity. At my family dinner table—such as it was—wicked humor and satirical kvetching were the rule. I had always wondered who bought such greeting cards—and now I knew.
    At some point before dinner, Dart disappeared into the upper reaches of the town house and was gone for some time.
    I was left struggling for conversation with Muffie and Ven.
    What was oddest about them both was that all their conversation seemed to be about things that had happened before 1947. She loved to talk about Miss Porter’s School, her coming out party, and her honeymoon—a two-year spending spree in Europe—and he loved to talk about Princeton days, his eating club, and his classmates’ merry pranks, and how he almost made Review at Harvard Law. This was the house where time stood still. Miss Havisham could have moved right in, not to mention Mr. Micawber. No wonder their only son had disappeared to the bathroom, seemingly never to