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that year in her father’s cow pasture. She wore a white Mexican peasant dress trimmed with white eyelet. Her sister, the matron of honor, wore cornflower blue, and her bridesmaids, including me, wore soft, vaguely Empire dresses like nightgowns in different pastel shades, wreathes of daisies on our heads, and bare feet. I learned I was the only one among these girls who varnished her nails or owned a girdle. I learned that it was very wrong to refer to us as “girls,” and that in some circles, shaving your armpits was a political act. Once again, I’d been reading all the wrong magazines.
    The minister wore sandals and little round wire-rimmed glasses, and the wedding march, played by a local jug band, was the Beatles song “When I’m Sixty-Four.” Toasts were drunk in fizzy cider that packed quite a wallop, brewed by the bearded philosopher from the next farm over. We square-danced in the dairy barn, and when the full moon was high, the bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes, departed on horseback. It was incredibly romantic, and the first wedding I’d ever been to where the newlyweds turned up in jeans the next morning to join all their friends for breakfast.
    A lot of fates were sealed that night. Certainly Meg’s. One of the groomsmen introduced a game in which you whirl around and around holding a broomstick while everyone claps and then at a signal, drop the stick and try to jump over it. The second fellow who tried it missed the jump by a mile, fell over, and cracked his head on a stall door and nearly put his eye out, but later he married the bridesmaid who drove him to the hospital. And I met a man who changed my life. He was Meg’s godfather. We were the only two people there from New York, and he gave me a ride back into the city Sunday evening.

Chapter 4
    P robably the man who most changed Avis’s life was Victor Greenwood. We went together to his funeral three years ago and afterward she told me the story of what turned out to be her job interview.
    She’d been one of the bright young things from the Social Register working at Sotheby Parke Bernet when Victor noticed something special in her and asked her to come see him. This was in 1970. When she went to her boss to ask for an hour off one afternoon, he said, “Victor Greenwood asked you to come to his house?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWhy you? He doesn’t collect Old Masters.”
    â€œI have no idea,” said Avis. “He was mooching around some Dutch still lifes while we were preparing the catalogue, and he started asking me questions.”
    â€œWhat kind of questions?”
    â€œWhich one was better. More important. If I could buy one painting in the gallery, money no object, which one would I buy.”
    Her boss had laughed. “That’s Victor. Well, go, of course. Give me a call when you’re done, I’d love to know what he wants.”
    Although she was twenty-eight and probably as toothsome as she would ever be in her life, Avis didn’t imagine Mr. Greenwood wanted her body. His taste in women was well known, and she wasn’t it. Naturally I asked what she wore. She said she had chosen her usual uniform of very simply cut grays and blacks that caused her roommate to call her the Art Nun. Apparently this had been the right call.
    She’d arrived on time at his house, a five-story limestone edifice in a French château style on a quiet side street in the east seventies, and been shown into a vast room on the second floor hung with nineteenth-century paintings. The butler offered her coffee, tea, or a cocktail but she had declined, not thinking she would wait as long as she eventually did. When her host failed to appear, she got up and began to examine the paintings. One small Caillebotte she recognized at once as having been sold by Sotheby’s two seasons before for a record sum for the artist. To a dealer named Gordon Hall, she thought. And