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this by her own parents, her Republican (still somewhat unusual in Virginia) ex-VMI football-star father, Boyd Bonner, and her ex–Sweet Briar May-queen mother. They drank a lot at home, and then more rowdily on Saturday nights at the Country Club, out in Westmorland. (And they fought a lot drunkenly; they were living disproof of the romantic adage holding that couples who yell and scream a lot are basically loving and sexy.)
    But Henry and all his family drank and, though enormously, they did so with great discretion. At Molly’s wedding reception, which was naturally held at “the club,” there was considerable talk about how much these Yankees drank, and how well they did it. (Molly’s own parents were known for not holding it well at all.) “Those folks can really put it away. I never saw or heard a one of them give any sign” was the Richmond post-wedding verdict on the Starcks.
    Except when you get to know them, was Molly’s inward response to that remark. Intimate exposure to the family soon taught her to read certain signs: when Henry’s mother said she was tired, was getting a headache, was going up to lie down, she meant that she was plastered, about to pass out. And when Dr. Starck, the father, shifted accents within the same sentence, Portland to Boston and back, that meant he was drunk. He was like an old railroad, Molly thought, the Boston & Maine.
    “What happens if your father has to leave a dinner party for some emergency surgery?” she once asked Henry.
    Stiffly: “I’m sure he could always perform as he should,” Henry told her.
    Which is more than I can say for you, she did not say.
    But such moments of malice directed at Henry were rare for Molly, which in a way was too bad; they might have had a certainsaving quality. Mostly she was very confused, and hurt. “I must truly be crazy,” she said to Dr. Shapiro, later on, referring both to Henry and to Paul.
    “I really don’t think you are.”
    Before Henry, though, there had been a few other “unwise” choices; even at St. Christopher’s, Molly managed to find ostensibly nice Southern boys who were seriously deranged. She wished that she could blame all those boys and later men on Boyd, her cold and raging, lethally handsome father, who was often incredibly charming, often drunk, and almost never warm. Or even on Angelica, her lovely, silly, and loveless mother, also a drunk, who during the sixties, the years of Molly’s adolescence and Angelica’s early middle age, took up smoking dope in a serious way. Dr. Shapiro, whose orientation was generally Freudian, took more than occasional swipes at both those parents. Molly’s own conclusion was that she simply had very poor judgment in terms of men. She was not at all smart; in that way her needs far outstripped her intelligence.
    In any case, young as she was, and foolish, she knew better than to marry Henry; poor reader that she was, she could still read danger in his drinking, in his sexual diffidence, but she married him anyway. Perhaps she had meant to rape him, and certainly their marriage was a form of rape for Henry.
    Despite the confrontational habits of their generation, Molly and Henry were quite unable to talk about sex, nor were they able to talk about their other, possibly more pressing problem, which was lack of money. Molly’s father, the hotshot lawyer, in the course of their many Vietnam fights, took the view that Molly was close to retarded in worldly matters, and he monkeyed around with a trust fund from Molly’s grandfather, Angelica’s parent, so that instead of getting her money at twenty-one she would have to wait until she was forty.
    She investigated auditing courses at Harvard or Radcliffe, but even auditors’ fees were high. Since Henry already rantedabout their expenses, she did not dare to cross him in that way, but she found a cheap secretarial school in Belmont, a six-week course, after which temp jobs were guaranteed.
    Which is how Molly Bonner became