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aberrant move by thefamily, which they managed to blame on Molly, the Southern parvenu in their New England ranks; traditionally all the Starck men were doctors, a fact to which Molly only gave some thought, a lot of thoughts, some years after her troubles with Henry and his family were over, and those with doctors had just begun.
    “It was sort of like being in love with an Easter egg,” Molly once explained to Felicia, trying to describe that marriage. “This perfect smooth surface, but brittle and hollow. Maybe dyed blue. But an attractive, very fragile egg.”
    “And holy? Easter?”
    “Oh, very. Groton, all that. They all wanted to be more New England than Down East. More Bostonian than really from Portland.”
    “God, I’m glad I’m from California.”
    Molly had fallen in love with New England, along with Henry, or perhaps the other way around: she loved Henry because she loved Maine and all of New England that she saw—the weather (it was always such definite weather, days in Virginia could be so blurry, ill-defined), the landscape, the rocks and birches and firs, the coast and lakes and marvelous vistas of blue mountains. And local accents, like the weather and the landscapes, clear words with a definite end. In Southern talk she had often found no closure and quite often no meaning, hidden or otherwise.
    They drank a lot, Molly and Henry. They used to drive out to Bailey Island with a shaker of martinis, climb down to a rocky beach and drink, and watch the waves. Drink often made Henry loquacious, and occasionally amorous, but never slurring or sloppy, like certain Southern boys. And drinking out there on the coastal rocks seemed much more romantic than smoking dope on the edges of the hockey field, at St. Catherine’sSchool, in Richmond, with boys from St. Christopher’s.
    Henry’s kissing was restrained, was pleasant but never pushy; he did not try to shove her into bed. At first she thought him chivalrous, later just unenthusiastic. The problem was that she herself was aroused; she was very excited by Henry’s very light kisses. She wanted to go to bed with him, to make love, screw, fuck—to do anything and everything that they were not doing.
    When Henry remarked one night in a casual way that maybe they should get married, Molly instantly agreed—mostly by way of getting him into bed: Now he’ll have to make love to me, she thought. We’ll sleep together—every night!
    Henry did make love to her, and Molly enjoyed it very much. But sex made her greedy, she found, she wanted to do it more and more. At least every night, and preferably twice. Whereas Henry seemed satisfied with much less, and down in Cambridge Molly came to feel, as months went by, that Henry made excuses not to sleep with her. Ostensibly studying late, he would fall asleep in the big chair in his study. Or he began taking long solitary walks around Harvard Square in the evenings. “I’m in classes all day, I’ve got talk and people coming out of my ears.” She knew that he was doing exactly what he said he was, he was walking around alone, but still she was hurt. Was it too much to expect that he would look forward to going to bed as much as she did? Molly supposed that it was.
    In a way that she could not explain to herself, she continued to be in love with Henry. She longed for him.
    “I kept thinking someone wonderful would emerge from that shell,” she told Felicia—and her shrink, Dr. Edgar Shapiro. “I had to keep reminding myself that it was empty.”
    “An excellent image,” he kindly murmured.
    “Am I your first patient to fall in love with an Easter egg?” Molly had a tendency to make a lot of bad jokes to entertain and possibly to throw him off—she later realized.
    He laughed, the smallest sound. “Probably.”
    •  •  •
    Also, Henry really drank a lot. Molly was used to heavy drinking; civilized people had a couple of martinis every night and then some wine with dinner. She had been taught