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the Hudson and beginning at Poughkeepsie Bridge. Boys from Cornell, Columbia, and as far away asStanford, swaggering young men with sunburned faces and straw hats worn at a tilt, filled the town during regatta week. The girls of Poughkeepsie rolled down their stockings and rolled up their skirts, rouging their lips as soon as they were out of sight of their frantic mothers.
    And every year, nine months after the regatta, some girl, or perhaps two, would give birth to a baby whose father had long since returned to Ithaca or La Jolla. If the girl was rich, she went “to visit an aunt” as soon as she began to show, and came back after the baby was born and handed over for adoption. If poor, she gave birth at home, and that was that.
    Either way, she was ruined. Forced to marry beneath herself or face not marrying at all, the working-class girl married her father’s mechanic and the rich girl married an unattractive boy from a family down on its luck, willing to overlook her fall from grace in exchange for currency. For the rest of her life, conversation would cease momentarily when she entered the room. People would whisper; ruder people would point. And the already-poor girl would spend the rest of her life doing laundry for the richer folk.
    “I find you messing with those boys, don’t expect anything from me,” Momma said one Christmas after church, when we heard that Mrs. Charles’ daughter, Edith, had gone “to visit her aunt.” “Don’t expect help or sympathy.”

CHAPTER THREE
    O nce in a while during my girlhood years, I saw Elizabeth Miller from a distance.
    When we were ten, the country entered the war already going on in Europe. Overnight all the shops and facades of Poughkeepsie were draped in flags and patriotic signs. I saw Elizabeth at the Collingwood Opera House, which was also our movie theater. They showed Saturday afternoon matinees of German soldiers looking like hellish fiends in their spiked helmets, raping girls and nuns as the Kaiser laughed.
    The next year I saw Elizabeth at the Collingwood when the Divine Sarah Bernhardt recited Portia’s speech from The Merchant of Venice . Sarah Bernhardt spoke in French and no one knew what she was saying, but it was Portia’s speech, and we cheered and stamped like mad.
    I glimpsed Elizabeth at the Armistice Parade when the war ended, and later, when she played the White Queen in a stage version of Alice in Wonderland . She was already tall by then, very athletic looking. No one would ever guess how much of her childhoodhad been spent in illness. When she was just entering high school, Elizabeth Miller set tongues wagging when she marched into a barbershop and had her hair bobbed, like the girls in the Fitzgerald story “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.” Elizabeth wore short, expensive dresses bought in New York City, had a gramophone, played jazz music, and read Photoplay magazine, according to gossip. She was friends with the rich prep girls from Putnam Hall, had tantrums, ran away from home often, used foul language, smoked cigarettes, and drank gin out of a flask.
    When I was sixteen, I lost interest in the doings of Miss Elizabeth Miller. Whenever I was in a crowd or at some public event, my eyes were on the lookout for Jamie Sloane. And when I did find him, when our eyes met, I was certain he was the only boy in the world, and I the only girl. Everything else was shadow.
    Jamie, the school’s star quarterback, who sat behind me in our French and Latin classes, was tall and sandy haired and had a long nose made all the more interesting for having been broken in a football game. The youngest son, the darling of the Sloane family, he had that I-own-the-world self-assurance of beloved children. He was a star on the field, in our Latin and physics classes, on the dance floor, and there was something in his stride that made you want to walk with him, in whatever direction he was going.
    When he looked at me, he locked onto my gaze the way big cats in the zoo