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Martin didn’t talk about their feelings for each other to any of their friends, and Claire never mentioned it to her older sister, Margaret, but it was inevitable that people would find out in such a small town as Longwood Falls. They had been seen together often enough, and one day the talking simply began, an energetic cicada whirr of it among both the people in the Swifts’ social class as well as up on the Crest.
    “What’s this about your daughter and that millionaire boy?” the checkout woman at Stover’s market bluntly asked Claire’s mother, Maureen Swift, one afternoon as she stood on line. “It’s nothing but trouble, if you ask me, not that you have,” the woman went on. “The father’s a bully, and the mother drinks, and everyone knows they’re the worst snobs in the entire county.”
    Claire’s mother, who didn’t know anything about it, pretended that she did. “Oh, it’s all just talk,” Maureen said smoothly as shepicked up her grocery sacks and collected her change, but that evening in the kitchen, standing side by side with her daughter as they washed a hill of supper dishes together, she confronted Claire, who first bit her lip, denied the accusation hotly, then immediately broke down and told her mother the whole story. A lifetime of dutifully telling the truth to a demanding mother could not be reversed in one evening.
    “I love him, all right?” she said, the words tumbling out.
    “Well then, learn to
unlove
him, Claire,” her mother said. “There would be too many problems; it would be awkward. Everyone would be so unhappy about it, and you’d only end up terribly hurt.”
    Claire angrily dried a plate with the thin checkered rag in her hand. “Love doesn’t work like that,” she said to her mother.
    “I’m well aware of how love works,” said Maureen quietly. “Young people always think they’re the first ones to discover love, but believe me, it’s been around before you and it will be around long after you’re gone from the earth.” She paused. “But when it takes placebetween two people who have no business being together, then it will always make their lives miserable.”
    “It’s not love that’s doing that,” Claire said. “It’s
you
.” And with that she flung down the dishrag and stormed off to her bedroom.
    Meanwhile, up on the Crest that same evening, Martin was told in no uncertain terms that he was never to see “that girl” again, whom his parents had learned about through a vulgar and wealthy widow at Longwood Golf and Country named Velma Cornby—a woman, Martin had always thought, who because she had no life of her own feverishly gossiped about everyone else’s.
    “Let me spell it out for you, nice and clear. Your mother and I forbid you to continue seeing that girl,” said Ash Rayfiel after calling Martin into his study.
    Martin faced his father across the big desk with its oxblood blotter, surrounded by books Ash Rayfiel had never made the time to read. Books that, by their sheer number, were designed to impress visitors, and that was all. “You
forbid
me to see her?” Martin said, and Ash Rayfiel nodded. “Sorry,” said Martin,“but I thought we were past the `forbidding’ period of my life. I thought I got to make my own choices by now.”
    His father stared at him, unblinking, then poured himself a drink from a cut–glass decanter shaped like a pear. “All right, Martin,” he said. “Then sit down for a moment, and we’ll talk.” He poured his son a big glass of bourbon and handed it to him. Martin had never had a drink with his father before. They sat on the stiff leather couch, and Ash finally said to him, “If you insist on seeing her despite our protests, I suppose I should be relieved, in a way.”
    “How so?” Martin asked.
    “Because it shows me you’re normal,” said Ash. “Your mother and I were a bit worried about your development, what with that cooking you like to do.” He took a long drink of bourbon.