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time, they said; now they would try it. It will only be a few months, they said, and we’ll have years.
    But even as they said it she was worried. Suppose they didn’t have years together. Suppose he left her—he would be without her for months. No one could relax about a marriage now; one in two failed, the corpses lay out everywhere. No one of her generation could imagine with any confidence a separation that would leave chastity—to say nothing of the marriage itself—intact. She knew her husband was attractive. He was one of those men who grow into their bodies only in their thirties. She’d married a gangly boy but the man she lived with was lean and princely, a young nobleman Piero della Francesca would have liked to paint in profile.
    “Would you like me to take the children, so you can really do it right?” he’d asked. “That way, they wouldn’t lose the advantages of being in France for a year.”
    She’d felt ill with fear when he suggested it. She could barely explain to him what the prospect of living without her children made her feel: derelict, unfranchised, as if she were sleeping on the street. No, no, she said; they’re better off here. Leave them with me.
    And so the summer passed, amorous, familial. Her work was pleasant and absorbing. Everyone behaved unnaturally well because they knew Michael would be leaving soon; they could see it rolling at them like a stone down a mountain. She didn’t allow it, till the last few days, to take over: the grief, the small fears, the apprehension that she couldn’t, even for a few months, run a house alone and rear two children. Michael had left detailed instructions about the things he usually took care of: the oil burner, the electrical system, the storm windows. But it wasn’t those she was most afraid of; she was afraid that she wouldn’t be anyone she recognized without Michael; she was afraid of discovering a fathomless weakness that the darkness of marriage, its dense, tough material, had covered up.
    The week before Michael’s departure she woke regularly at five in the morning. I can’t do it; I’ve made a terrible mistake, she would tell herself. But she would think of Caroline; the daunting girl, the challenging matron, her foot on the running board of the car she drove herself. She thought of Caroline’s paintings. So there was a woman, forty-five years dead, whom she would know as she knew her own family. But to do it she had to let her husband go away from her. For a while, she kept telling herself. Not long. We’ll be together in four months, she kept saying. It isn’t much.
    But when the day came and she saw Michael zip his suitcase shut, it was unbearable. All morning the children cried, on and off; they argued about ridiculous things; Michael mislaid his passport.
    They arrived at JFK two hours before the flight. Anne kept squeezing Michael’s hand; he kept giving her the name of the plumber. When the flight was announced, all of them cried except Sarah, who sat in her chair not looking up and reading Goodnight Moon , an atavistic gesture she performed when she was frightened. Peter made Michael sign an agreement that they would see each other on December 15. And then, Michael was simply gone. There was nothing more to wave to: the door of the plane closed up, and they couldn’t see where he was sitting.
    The children slept in the car on the way up to Selby. When they got home, the children were cross and sleepy, and she felt she had used up all her strength on the drive. She didn’t even make the children bathe or brush their teeth. She said they could sleep in their underwear. When Peter asked if they couldn’t all sleep in the parents’ bed, just for one night, she agreed. She could have fallen down on her knees in gratitude before her son. Never, she thought, had anyone had such a good idea.
    Now she was doing it all, all they had talked about and thought about and planned for. She was researching Caroline; she was living