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“Merry” then—“Meredith Ruth Neukirchen.” Her birthday was September 21. A very nice time of year, the Neukirchens believed: a prelude to the beautiful season of autumn. Which was why they’d chosen it for her.
    Which was why she often forgot her birthday, and was surprised when others reminded her.
    She hadn’t minded not being beautiful, as a girl in Carthage, New York. She’d learned to be objective about such matters. There were those who liked her well enough—who loved her, in a way—for her fierce wide smile that resembled a grimace of pain, and her stoicism in the face of actual pain or discomfort; she’d had to laugh seeing her picture in local papers, the expression of longing in her face that was so scrubbed-looking plain it might have been a boy’s face and not that of a young woman of eighteen:
    MEREDITH RUTH NEUKIRCHEN, CLASS OF ’79 VALEDICTORIAN CARTHAGE HIGH SCHOOL .
    It had been the kind of upstate New York, small-city school in which, as in a drain, the least-qualified and -inspired teachers wound up, bemused and stoical and resigned; there had been several teachers who’d seen in Meredith something promising, even exciting—but only one who had inspired her, though not to emulate him personally. And when poor Meredith—“Merry”—hadn’t even been asked to the senior prom, though she’d been not only valedictorian of her graduating class but also its vice president, one of the women teachers had consoled her—“You’ll just have to make your way somehow else, Meredith”—with fumbling directness though meaning to be kind.
    Not as a woman, and not sexual.
    Somehow else.
    Soon after the senior prom to which M.R. had not been invited, M.R.’s prettiest girl-classmates were married, and pregnant; pregnant, and married. Some were soon divorced, and became “single mothers”—a very different domestic destiny from the one they’d envisioned for themselves.
    Very few of M.R.’s classmates, female or male, went on to college. Very few achieved what one might call careers. Of her graduating class of 118 students very few left Carthage or Beechum County or the southern Adirondacks, where the economy had been severely depressed for decades.
    One of those regions in America, M.R. had said, trying to describe her background to her astronomer-lover who traveled more frequently to Europe than to the rural interior of the United States, where poverty has become a natural resource: social workers, welfare workers, community-medical workers, public defenders, prison and psychiatric hospital staffers, family court officials—all thrived in such barren soil. Only fleetingly had M.R. considered returning, as an educator—once she’d left, she had scarcely looked back.
    Don’t forget us, Meredith! Come visit, stay a while . . .
    We love our Merry.
    M.R. had pushed her laptop aside and was examining road maps, laid out on a table in the library-lounge for hotel guests.
    Particularly M.R. was intrigued by a detailed map of Tompkins County. She hoped to determine where she’d asked Carlos to stop. South and west of Ithaca were small towns—Edensville, Burnt Ridge, Shedd—but none appeared to be the town M.R. was looking for. With her forefinger M.R. traced a thin curvy blue stream—this must be the river, or the creek—south of Ithaca; but there was only a tiny dot on that stream as of a settlement too minuscule to be named, or extinct.
    “Why is this important? It is not important.”
    She whispered aloud. She was puzzled by her disappointment.
    Abruptly the map ended at the northern border of Tompkins County but there were maps of adjoining New York State counties; there was a road map of New York State that M.R. eagerly unfolded, with no hope that she could fold it neatly back up again. Some crucial genetic component was missing in M.R., she could never fold road maps neatly back up again once she unfolded them. . . .
    In the Neukirchen household, Konrad had been the one to