Mary held aloft the pup. “I already don’t believe this.”

  In the distance, the shift whistle started blowing. John turned and ran, waving over his shoulder, thinking that Mary’s words said one thing, but her tone something else—something she’d been saying one way or another since the moment they’d met: Go on, Sawtelle. Surprise me.

  john sawtelle and mary svoboda met, fell in love, and wed, all within a single astonishing season in 1918.

  John had moved to Hartford two years earlier, after he and his father had had their final, irrevocable falling-out. He didn’t need to take the train: he’d lucked into a deal on the Kissel, a two-year-old Hundred Point Six, the four-door model, whose previous owner, having found a ditch unavoidable, was spooked and eager to sell. For the better part of two months John and Elbow had spent their evenings hammering body panels into some approximation of their original shape, bending headlamp stanchions forward, and reattaching sundry other parts that had broken loose. By the time he met Mary, the vehicle was a conglomeration of parts cadged, cajoled, or bartered from his factorymates at the Kissel plant—an assemblage that spanned eight models and five production years, everything from the army ambulances Kissel Automotive churned out during the war to the Gold Bug speedsters that movie stars drove. Not the sportiest automobile on the road, but durable of chassis and reliable of engine.

  John had dreamt of owning a car since he was seven years old, poring over dispatches in the Sentinel recounting the progress of Horatio Nelson Jackson, an adventurer driving his Winton automobile from San Francisco to Burlington, Vermont. It was the dog that really hooked him, a bulldog named Bud, for John had always dreamt of having a dog as well. And there in the newspaper was an illustration of Bud in the front seat of the Winton with dog goggles over his eyes.

  Piloting his very own automobile down backcountry roads filled John Sawtelle with such tantalizing forebodings that afterward, at night, he lay in bed almost panicked. What such powerful sensations meant he couldn’t guess. They were possibilities, poised in the darkness beyond the soles of his feet, past whatever was about to occupy the next moment in his life. Something even beyond that.

  These laughably vague feelings made him happy. Also jumpy. He needed to move, change, leap toward the something beyond something.

  The first and most immediate something had been the Kissel, which, though operable, continued to need work—lots of work—and he was no mechanic. Sure, he could change a tire and, yes, he knew to keep an eye on the glass and steel lollypop of the Boyce MotoMeter on dirt roads or long uphill grades, where its glass column regularly went red. But he hadn’t clue one about how a person patched a leaky radiator or replaced a broken leaf spring, or what it meant that, at certain speeds, the rear wheels crawled to the left, as if the whole back end was trying to pass the front. None of which deterred him. Instead, he’d talked Elbow into coming with him to Hartford, and had very nearly convinced their other friend, Frank. He and Elbow heaved their duffels into the Kissel and rented rooms at a workman’s boardinghouse called the Prospect. Before the week was out, John had been hired in the shipping department at the Kissel factory. Elbow had gravitated toward the chill of the icehouse.

  “It’s begun,” John said to Elbow at dinner one night during those first weeks. Elbow’s hair was thick and black and curly, and his beard, as it grew out that spring, was shot with auburn whiskers that gave his round face a pleasing aspect. “Can you feel it?”

  “Boy can I,” Elbow replied. He’d been heaving blocks of ice around all day. “Mostly in my back.”

  days off, john and elbow got in the kissel and drove anywhere, any direction, with a B. F. Goodrich road map on the seat and the stated objective of getting lost, which wasn’t hard to do. Half the roads they came across weren’t on the map, and half the roads on the map didn’t appear when they should have. Whenever John was navigator, he’d shake his head in dismay at the inaccuracies.

  “B. F. Goodrich needs to hire someone to check these maps,” he’d say, penciling in a correction. “Don’t you agree, Elbow?”

  Whereas John thought talking ideas through was the best way to think, Elbow was about nine levels below taciturn. But quiet didn’t mean stupid or inarticulate; Elbow just believed most things spoke for themselves. Over the years John and Elbow had invented a mode of conversation useful for when there was nothing much to talk about but John’s endless supply of ideas. In it, Elbow became one of The Men Who. Protocol allowed John only to suggest such a transformation, through a certain expectant look, a pregnant pause, a challenging tone of voice—which he had just done, though no casual listener would have detected it.

  “Absolutely,” Elbow said. “Stupendous idea.”

  Ah, John thought: The Man Who Agrees With Everything. Protocol also required him to detect, without directly asking, which of The Men Who he was speaking with.

  The Man Who Agrees With Everything was in contrast to, among others, The Man Who Objects To Everything (who would have disagreed at once), The Man Who Is Always Confused (who might have asked, “What map?”), The Man Who Takes Things Extremely Literally, The Man Who Is Too Easily Insulted, and so on.

  It was a pointless but amusing way to get Elbow to talk, aloud, in human words, and also a contest which John won if he could catch The Man Who either contradicting his nature or saying something indefensibly stupid.

  This was not as easy as it sounded: Elbow was cagey.

  “Come to think of it,” John said, “they probably get corrections from the state highway department.”

  “That would be the simplest thing,” Elbow said—now unquestionably The Man Who Agrees With Everything.

  “Then again, who knows how often the highway department makes corrections?”

  “Who could know?” Agrees With Everything said.

  “Their records are probably in disarray.”

  “A shambles. Wholly unreliable.”

  “Still, it would be silly for B. F. Goodrich to hire people just to drive around checking their maps.”

  “I’d go so far as to say absurd,” said Agrees.

  “Hold it—you just said the idea was stupendous.”

  “True.”

  “So which is it: stupendous or absurd?”

  “Both,” said Agrees, after a moment’s consideration.

  “Doesn’t it have to be one or the other?”

  “Companies do absurd things all the time. That doesn’t mean those things aren’t also stupendous.”

  “Aha!” John cried. “You just disagreed with me!”

  “Can you disagree with a question?” said The Man Who Agrees With Everything, slyly avoiding a direct contradiction.

  “Good point. Still, wouldn’t that be the greatest job?”

  “Sure would,” agreed Agrees.

  on a warm saturday afternoon that first may in Hartford, John had walked over to the Woolworths on Main Street to buy socks. He’d lingered afterward, looking at shirts and suspenders, when an elderly farm woman, leaning heavily on a cane, went thumping past, up the central aisle. A young woman followed her, clasping in her arms two enormous bundles of yarn and fabric and pinching between her fingers a half dozen dress patterns and a bag of notions. The young woman was dressed in a neat, practical short-sleeved blouse and a blue skirt, and her dark hair was gathered atop her head in an offhand Gibson Girl bun, though a few sun-bronzed strands had escaped and loosely framed her face—her extraordinarily lovely face.

  As they passed, a skein of yellow yarn escaped from one of the bundles and fell silently to the floor. John snatched up the yarn and followed. Now that he was behind the young woman, her outfit looked less purely practical, and he regretted that the front door was only a few paces ahead. Even struggling to contain the bundles in her arms, the young woman’s stride was liquid and athletic. The air behind her smelled like cinnamon and roses, and when she spoke (they were discussing Pancho Villa’s recent raid in New Mexico) her voice was a serene contralto inflected with patience and irony in a way he’d never before heard.

  He waited until the last moment, then slipped ahead to hold the door for the women. Outside, he loaded the packages into the matron’s wagon, along with the rescued daffodil yarn, then presented a steadying arm as the old woman ascended to the buckboard. Only after she’d taken the reins did he understand that the young woman wasn’t joining her—wasn’t a granddaughter or grandniece, but a store employee.

  Here was tremendous news. She lived in town. He already knew he was in love. It would be years before he learned that the dropped yarn was no accident.

  It was astonishing how often a person needed to visit Woolworths. By the following Saturday, he’d learned her name: Mary Svoboda. By the Saturday after that, they’d gone walking. They were the same age; she’d grown up in Hartford. By June they’d kissed. He’d had sweethearts before, but compared to Mary Svoboda, they might as well have been goldfish.

  Her way of speaking was nonchalant, wry, serious without overearnestness or indifference. She was plainspoken about what she liked and disliked, what mystified her, what she hoped for in life. She had a nonchalant contempt for midwestern parochialism, which she did not believe was a particular specialty of small towns. At the scent of hypocrisy, which she considered a form of betrayal, she was capable of offhanded sarcastic coloratura that brought to mind a lioness licking her claws after a kill. She didn’t mind other people’s children but had no intention of bearing children of her own. She considered the war in Europe a travesty. She wasn’t afraid of hard work, and she didn’t think manual labor was ignoble. She was neither religious nor a freethinker—both poisoned by dogma. She thought Marriage was a dead institution, but marriage was not, if he knew what she meant. He wasn’t sure he did. A marriage license was hardly a ticket to lifelong romantic love, she clarified, but free love was at least as fraught and, generally speaking, impractical. Successful unions necessarily involved a facade of conventionality pitched like a painted tent over a granite outcrop of skeptical love—unconventional love—love that made real demands and welcomed the same in return. Nothing daunted her. She seemed calmly proficient at everything life called upon her to do. Though she didn’t easily laugh, she often looked amused. She walked with a lissome felinity. Her eyes were amber jewels. All of it was instantly engraved upon John. He wondered how powdered sugar would taste licked off the nape of her neck.

  Toward the end of June, the weather warm and the sun like syrup poured across a person’s shoulders, Mary invited him to come sit with her on the front porch of 736 Elm Street, where she lived with her stepfather, a man she referred to as “The Beast,” or sometimes “Beastie,” not a term of affection. She considered The Beast to be the earthly manifestation of bullshit, and though years would pass before John understood the deepest basis for her disdain, its range was quickly evident: at low ebb, a simple bored disfavor; at high tide, a contempt so razorous that just standing near its object shaved a layer off one’s skin.

  The Beast—known to the world as Alfons Svoboda—fancied himself a Colossus of the New World sort, Rooseveltian and bootstrappian. He spoke not to a person but to an audience of one, and his stories portrayed a man bestriding the vast agricultural-industrial Midwest, wholly self-made, worldly, canny, adventurous, capable of heights of idealism one instant and bare-knuckled negotiation the next—a human electromagnet reorienting the iron filings in the souls of his fellow men. Autobiography tended to erupt from The Beast in the evenings, when his constitutional bourbon was in full circulation, and thus evenings were when Mary was liable to point out to The Beast that his aspect was more Taftian than Rooseveltian, the likely source of any detectable awe among the populace. Also, that what he was was a cash register salesman.

  In his Roosevelt fetish, Alfons Svoboda had barbered his mustache down from the waxed handlebar of his youth (visible in photographic portraits hanging on the wall in oval frames) to a brushy walrus, and had taken to wearing an unnecessary pair of oval eyeglasses. He’d even purchased a slouch hat, so-called, the left side pinned up Rough Rider style, which he donned at an angle meant to convey rugged jauntiness.

  What Mary hadn’t told John, at least at first, was that to her, The Beast’s most distinguishing feature wasn’t his Jovian dimensions but the small white scar protruding from the hairline above his right ear—the brand he bore from his first and only attempt to lay a hand on her.

  when mary was four years old, her biological father died of sepsis, the result of a carelessly treated cut received while unloading sheets of corrugated roofing tin. Mary remembered him as a presence, a moment of safety with strong arms, a tenor voice, and bristly brown hair.

  After her father’s death, Mary and her mother boarded on the south side of Hartford with a woman named Mrs. Ada Green, herself a widow. Theirs wasn’t a luxurious life, but it wasn’t terrible. Mrs. Green was a kind of aunt to Mary, looking after her while her mother was at work. When her mother was home, the two of them got along fabulously, in part because her mother never condescended toward Mary or anyone else. She was forthright in her opinions—a quality Mary would adopt as she matured. Mary regularly forced back screams of laughter watching Mrs. Green blanch into Mrs. White at some matter-of-fact statement made by her mother.

  The men who visited Mary’s mother in the front room of Mrs. Green’s house—among them, Alfons Svoboda—were a curiosity to Mary, nothing more. So it came as an unhappy surprise to the ten-year-old Mary when her mother told her she had accepted His Rotundity’s proposal of marriage. In short order, their last names metamorphosed from DeVolta to Svoboda—a near-anagram that somehow made it all the more disturbing.

  And it was disturbing. Her mother seemed, if not exactly jubilant, at least happy, with her new husband and their new home. She claimed to be quite fond of Alfons, but from the outset Mary also noticed her mother noticing the blowhardiness emanating from the man. Worse, she’d overheard her mother telling Mrs. Green that Mary deserved to grow up in “a proper home”—meaning, Mary supposed, Alfons Svoboda’s house on Elm Street. For her mother’s sake, Mary tried to be happy—tried, in other words, not to smell a rat. And especially in the early days, Alfons had been kind to her mother. When he disembarked from the train after one of his weeks-long trips, he always carried a rose in his hand. At such moments, to the degree it was physically possible, Beastie looked almost dashing—glimpsed through her mother’s forgiving eyes, at least. But at night, when he launched into his third story about hectoring some small-town shopkeep into abandoning a perfectly adequate cash register for a newer model, a leaden shroud of disappointment settled over her mother, and the spell was broken.

  Mary never confronted her mother about any of it. She was too young at first, and by the time Mary was old enough to put her feeling into words, she also realized that her mother had genuine feelings for The Beast. But fondness was all those feelings amounted to, it seemed; her remarriage was a compromise, and one that hadn’t, in Mary’s opinion, been worth it—especially if done for her sake. The two of them had been happy enough at Mrs. Green’s.

  One thing that didn’t change after their move to Elm Street was her mother’s work as a hospital aide—and two or three times every season as midwife. She never took Mary with her to the hospital, but after settling into their new home, she did require Mary to accompany her at birthings. Not for assistance; she wanted Mary to understand sex, starting with its outcome. Along those lines no mystery ought to exist, she’d told Mary, and her lessons—delivered extemporaneously, using the available anatomy—were specific, cheerful, and memorably graphic. Her manner, composed and confident, impressed Mary and calmed the mothers. Mary’s mother had once commanded a woman to delay an impending contraction until she’d finished showing Mary where the woman’s ovaries were located relative to the birth canal. By the time Mary graduated from high school, she’d witnessed eighteen babies being pushed, pried, and palpated into the world, and had a thorough, if theoretical, understanding of the instigating act. As it turned out, when she and John met a few years later, she knew more about sex than he—and infinitely more about the terrifying hydraulics of birth.

  One morning, a year or so after Mary began having her period, Mary’s mother called her into the kitchen and asked her to sit at the table so they could talk. Her mother pointed out with her usual directness that Mary had long since grown out of whatever little-girl meekness she’d possessed (never much) and had lately been testing the waters of rebellion, both in word and deed. Word her mother didn’t mind. Deed, however, concerned her. Mary had turned into an articulate, poised, and often charming young woman, she said. But along with those qualities, or perhaps because of them, she had also developed an entirely unearned sense of courage. And while her mother didn’t know how interested Mary was in boys at that exact moment, she knew Mary would become interested soon enough.

  Mary suppressed the urge to interrupt, clarify, disavow. In her opinion, boys were extraneous—a word she’d been applying to all sorts of things lately. Homework. Attending church. Sleeping in specially designated clothes. Certain meals. Most of all, her stepfather: The Beast was extra-extraneous. But her mother seldom made speeches—which this clearly was—and she looked a little bit worried, or tired, so Mary held her tongue.

  Her mother was saying it wasn’t inconceivable that in a few years Mary herself would have a husband. (Yes, it was, Mary thought—inconceivable, that is.) And though her mother was quite certain that Mary understood the mechanics of the procreative act, as well as its eventual outcome, there was also the question of love. There was an art to marriage, she told Mary, involving many emotions and pleasurable obligations, but also certain practical responsibilities that had never been equally shared between husbands and wives—or, for that matter, between boys and girls with an unearned sense of courage.

  Then her mother began matter-of-factly laying out the mechanics of birth control.