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    My mother had supposed the dress, left in the snow, was ruined, but now, stepping into it this night before the Vassar/Princeton mixer, she thinks it looks as if she has never lain in the snow, never drunk champagne, never sung French songs with Sabine.
    “I just don’t know about all of this,” my mother says, feeling it to be a mistake as soon as she leaves the room for the dance. Even as she walks forward down the path, she is stepping inward and bowing her head in shadow.
    My father might have missed my mother completely, standing against the wall, partially hidden by two larger, more aggressive members of the senior class, had he not been primed to see her, and in fact, had he not been actually looking for her. Grace, the wedding, the ocean in Monaco had buoyed him forward. Joel’s filthy car plastered with Princeton stickers had become the leading limousine in the entourage, and that evening he was a prince in a great ballroom, his French was impeccable, his shoes shone, his gait was confident. He did not hesitate when he saw her.
    “God, what’s Turin doing?” one of his classmates says, as he sees him gliding toward my mother, the most beautiful woman any of them had ever seen.
    “She was more beautiful than Grace Kelly,” my father told me once, and there was a thrill in his voice still. As he approaches her, she turns her head to the side and he sees that classic, timeless profile. His eyes haze over. He does not dare look at her straight on, he thinks. He does not dare focus on such beauty; it is too much to bear.
    “Would you like to dance?” he asks, concentrating on a space somewhere over her left shoulder. He cannot look directly into her eyes; it would be too dangerous. She would disappear, he thinks, be gone forever after one dance; he has to be careful, to watch out, for those eyes, that face could return over and over to haunt him long after she has left.
    “Yes, I’d like to dance,” my mother says quietly, looking at this impossibly tall, skinny man in front of her.
    Through the entire first dance and then through the second and third, my father talks continuously and very quickly and still looks over her shoulder, not at her, though as the night progresses he moves his gaze slowly from over her shoulder to her actual shoulder, and then to her neck, and then to the top of her head. He closes his eyes and the dream presses close to his new suit.
    He saved all his money to buy the suit he is wearing. He saw it advertised in the New York Times for sixty-nine dollars at Saks Fifth Avenue, and, touching it on the page, he felt as if it already belonged to him. It was his prized possession—the famous gray flannel suit Gregory Peck had worn in The Alan in the Gray Hannel Suit , so the advertisement said. And as my mother, more beautiful than Grace Kelly, placed her silky head on my father’s chest, he must have felt as if this indeed were a movie. He tries to think of the gestures of his favorite film stars but he cannot think of one. And so he keeps talking.
    “He was charming,” my mother told me of that night, “and more nervous than I.”
    It must have been hard for my father to detect any nervousness at all in my mother, for she had an innate composure and a grace that masked any uncertainty. He kept talking.
    “What the hell is Turin talking about?” Joel asks Teddy. “He hasn’t shut his mouth for one second.”
    “I’ve got two tickets to this new play on Broadway,” my father says. “‘A tragicomedy in two acts,’ it’s called. Would you like to go?”
    “Why, yes, I suppose,” my mother says softly. “Yes.”
    “He’s an Irish writer. Lived in Paris for years as secretary to James Joyce. Bert Lahr and E. G. Marshall are in it.”
    “Sounds good,” my mother says.
    “Brooks Atkinson reviewed it in the Times and described it as ‘a puzzlement,’ a ‘mystery wrapped in an enigma.’
    “Yes, yes,” my mother thinks to herself.
    “I was planning on going