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five. They rarely met, and when they did the greeting was cool.
    "Admiral."
    "Ronald."
    Alec thought the neighborhood had a European feel to it, though precisely what that feel was he could not say, since he had been to Europe just once, as a child, accompanying his parents on a senatorial junket that featured American hotels and French museums; an embassy reception ended the day. Perhaps it was the lack of haste in the streets, and the regularity of the neighbors' habits, and the uniformity of the houses, many of them dating from the Federal period. The small shops, the dry cleaner, and a tiny grocery store down the street lent the neighborhood a mom-and-pop commercial aspect. Also, Alec found an appealing modesty to the cars that lined the streets—Volkswagens and Ford Falcons, the admiral's black Chevrolet, Ronald diAntonio's Dodge. Mrs. Wheatley had a Vuillard on the wall of her dining room but the car on the street outside was a 1955 Buick. European egalitarianism, Alec concluded, a disinclination to display wealth, at least out of doors. Lucia, who had grown up in Europe, agreed that the street was not the normal American street—whatever that was—but it did not remind her of Europe, either. It was true that many of their neighbors were elderly, Mrs. Wheatley near sixty and the admiral at least eighty years old, but there were couples their own age, too, with children. Tricycles and red wagons crowded the front stoops of three houses across the street, and that was not at all normal in a settled district in a European capital; young people could not afford the rent. More to the point, Lucia had the feeling that in Washington life was lived not in houses but in offices downtown, whereas in Europe it was the reverse. Alec was habitually late for dinner, and at parties the men seemed able to talk convincingly only of work, the projects they were involved in and office intrigue, meaning political intrigue. With the advent of the Kennedys, government had acquired a glamour entirely absent in Europe. Glamour would not be the word attached to Chancellor Erhard or Prime Minister Macmillan, though the Profumo mess suggested the presence of a demimonde, willing girls and their middle-aged suitors meeting at country houses for a weekend frolic while the wives looked on, and all of it spread across the front pages of national newspapers. There seemed to be no such demimonde in Washington, so buttoned up and serious-minded. Lucia's view was changed only marginally when one afternoon she encountered her father-in-law's great friend Eliot Bergruen emerging from Mrs. Wheatley's doorway. He was charming as always but a little distant and he did not linger. Eliot Bergruen had failed to ask after Alec.
    Eliot? Alec said that evening. Impossible. You must have been mistaken.
    No, it was Eliot. We spoke for a moment.
    Huh. Well, Eliot handles wills and trusts among his other specialties, so probably that was it. A house call.
    He looked so debonair with his boutonniere and his cane, Lucia replied.
    Thick-waisted trees lined the street, at midmorning giving it the ambiance of a settled neighborhood in a small historic town. No one was about. In summer the trees provided welcome shade even in the back yard, the one that measured twelve by twenty feet, space enough for a round table and four chairs, bounded by a high wooden stake fence. The roses climbed the fence, white and yellow and five shades of red, large and small roses with gnarled stems that reminded Alec of the faces of old-timers in the city room of the newspaper, men (and a few women) with taut self-conscious faces, seen-everything faces, habit-of-service faces, world-weary and droll. They had unexpected answers to routine questions, as Alec explained to Lucia one night after she had asked about his colleagues at work, what sort of people they were. Alec rarely brought home anyone from the newspaper office. They were old, he said, with college-age children and, in a few