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churchgoer, she neither drank nor smoked and was not supposed to dance but was sometimes prevailed upon to do so by Augie, not someplace in public where they might be seen, but in her own home, to radio music, when her parents were out. Even so, it bothered her conscience to be doing a sinful thing in their own domicile, behind their backs, and it took all the feeling she had for Augie to gratify him in this way, which aside from some closed-mouth kissing was the extent of their physical association. In the earliest phase of their friendship he once tried to touch her clothed breasts but had been so decisively rebuffed that he never even attempted anything below her waist.
    Here he was, more than forty, father of three, married to a whore, in love with a nineteen-year-old virgin with whom he had no fleshly connection. He sometimes thought about the possible absurdity of the situation but never questioned the rightness of it for his peculiar wants. Cassie was the perfect antidote to Esther. And beneath that truth was the more plangent reference to Gena. He could only pray that his daughter had not, wherever she was, come to grief, that she had a lover as kind and gentle and fatherly as Cassie’s.
    With great trepidation, he had, in the old-fashioned way that seemed appropriate, asked Cassie’s father for her hand before applying to the girl herself, and Mr. Pryor, a truck mechanic who had not gone to high school, assented eagerly, seeing Augie as a sound man and a step upward in culture, and asked no uncomfortable questions. When Augie did propose to Cassie, he was already furnished with a ring as well as a plan for their future together: using their combined nest eggs they would take a mortgage on a little house in the same neighborhood in which she had lived all her life, or as near as possible. Two bedrooms would do, one for them and the other as a nursery for the children. For his part, he would give up the drinking of any liquid containing alcohol, but (with a squeeze of the hand and a wink) he probably would like a slow waltz with his wife now and again, with the shades lowered if necessary.
    â€œWhy,” Cassie said in the accent that never failed to make him melt, “thin everbody’d know we were up to no good.” But her eyes were moist, and her betrothal kiss was the sweetest he had ever had.
    Not once did either she or, in his presence anyway, her parents refer to the marked difference in ages, though Augie himself was wont to mention it frequently, if only to be reassured, for he could count on Cassie’s absolute moral support. Never before had he known a woman he could rely on . He had had to live four decades to apprehend the basic truth that a man could not go it alone. Neither could he survive if he were in an alliance with a bitter enemy—as only now could he admit Esther had been for most of their marriage, and had he not finally proved man enough to leave, he would still be helplessly serving as the object of her scorn.
    Whenever he thought about that matter he sent home another bogus account of an exploit of his in combat, taken either from soldiers he met in a bar where he still drank an occasional beer when Cassie was otherwise occupied, or from a current movie, though he was careful not to plagiarize the latter too literally, should Esther have seen the same picture, especially if it starred one of her favorite actors in a characteristic role: the cocky near-rascal who begins, owing to his exaggerated self-regard, without the sympathy of much of the audience but claims more and more of it as the film proceeds and then finally conquers all resistance by a demonstration of his readiness to lay his life on the line for the very comrades he had earlier upstaged.
    The obvious problem was how to explain the domestic postmark and conventional three-cent stamp, on letters that were ostensibly mailed from foreign battlefields. At first this had appeared insuperable. To maintain such