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alliance much as the creeping ivy attached itself to the stone
     wall bordering their backyard. Simply by agreeing to be his wife, Mrs. Owen had insured herself against betrayal. Dexter had
     risked love once—and won. He would never take such a risk again.
    Redfield Doyle Pharmaceutical managed to flourish right from its inception, and the Owen family seemed to all a paragon of
     good fortune at a time when so many fortunes were being consigned to memory. Helen grew increasingly satisfied with “the lot
     of it,” as she liked to say. She grew in other ways as well: she didn’t resist when her already square figure began to expand,
     puffing at the wrists and ankles, pouching a bit on either side of her jaw. She was too confident a woman to worry about pounds
     and dimensions. As the years passed and her friends found themselves losing control of their lives, they turned to steady
     Helen Owen for consolation, finding in her a faithful listener who had no turmoil of her own to relate.
    The women tended to confide in Helen over coffee during the blank hours of midmorning. While the babies napped, Helen’s friends
     told her of unpaid bills and second mortgages. They told her of heirloom jewelry that they’d been forced to pawn at a shop
     over in Great Neck. They told her of husbands who insulted them in public, slapped them in private, ignored them, berated
     them, even threatened to abandon them. Helen led the women through their monologues with a frown that conveyed her concern
     more fully than any words could have done. But it wasn’t enough for them to tell—and to be heard. Helen could do nothing to
     help them. She found herself privately predicting the mistakes they would make and wasn’t at all surprised when, once their
     children started school, her friends began taking lovers.
    They were wrong to think that she would disapprove of their behavior, but apparently their shame was strong enough that they
     stopped visiting her, and Helen had to learn the details of their affairs through gossip at club luncheons. Though she’d expected
     to hear of such adventures in their lives, she couldn’t help but feel deserted. She guessed that nothing short of a serious
     illness would revive the old intimacies.
    To ward off the loneliness of vacant mornings, she threw herself into charity work. She wanted to help those truly in need
     of help. With her characteristic determination, she set out to become the kind of community volunteer who would be recognized
     one day with a full-page obituary in the local paper.
    As it turned out, the two people who needed her least were her own children. In their early years, Jackie and Gregory—or Gimp,
     as Jackie had named him when he was three—had been polite, mild children, perhaps more inclined to sob over little disappointments
     than others their age, though Helen attributed this to their intelligence and felt sure that their weakness would develop
     into impressive strength of character. Indeed, by the time Jackie was twelve and Gimp ten, they were admired by other parents
     for their studiousness and self-control. Dexter, though he didn’t spend much time with the children, saw in them his own best
     traits and never found reason to punish them. His pride verged on happy foolishness, and the infrequent Saturdays he was at
     home he liked to sit in the garden watching his children play their make-believe games.
    Everyone agreed that they were beauties, miraculously so given the plain generations preceding them. Helen liked to think
     of them as two angels sucked to earth by the vacuum of their mother’s love. For she’d loved each of them before they’d been
     conceived, had seen the children in her dreams dancing across the cotton-ball floor of heaven: a girl first—chestnut hair
     lit with strands of yellow; round, chocolate eyes—and then her son, blue-eyed, his blond hair streaked with brown. In life,
     as in heaven, they seemed perfect complements to each