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Always a flop? Was he forgetting the many outsiders who had successfully entered the inner circles of the society? Or was he speaking for himself? Had his own transition been a flop?

As all of Edward’s pretenses toppled before my eyes, he suddenly seemed small and pitiable.

Grace was in the room now, and he went on, “I guess I’m disappointed mainly in myself.” His head was turned aside, and the lamplight caught a watery sheen in his eye. “I know I can’t say someone else caused or manipulated me into doing it. That I have to place the blame on myself. I’m just”—his voice cracked—“upset with myself.”

A long stiff silence followed.

“I’ve been a bad example sometimes too,” I said meekly.

“No, no. I’m just upset with myself. I guess I should be thankful to have light shone on my weaknesses.”

Grace soothed him, “Now, now, we should all be thankful for as much.”

I began to blurt nervous filler words before I could stop myself. “Anything could have caused it. It might have been just a convergence of circumstances. I don’t know how many times I made a complete social idiot of myself, in front of lots of people, when the reasons for what I did seemed so unfair—five papers due that week. I was twisted out of shape in Boston—”

“Soooo. Now I’m a social idiot.”

Grace quickly soothed him again. “No, he’s just trying to say he felt like he was a social idiot when he was under pressure.”

“I wasn’t born yesterday.”

“No, he was just trying to say what he felt like, so you would feel better.”

But I could already see Edward had begun to take my faux pas in fun. There was a mischievous glint in his eyes. Warmth entered the room. We luxuriated in a long silence. Each of us rested in that warmth. No one wanted it to leave. No one dared move. There was at last, for busy Edward, an unscheduled pause. But there was a certain sense of incompletion too. None of us could think of the right comment or acknowledgment. The timing was off or something. I realized nature was calling me, so I excused myself and went to the outhouse.

The air outside was brisk and the sky above infinitely deep, black velvet swathed with celestial dust in layers folding forever back on themselves. It looked like a cosmic handkerchief after a divine sneeze. I halted in my steps. Weirdly, I began to feel myself drawn headfirst into the folds of the galaxy, passing through the heavenly orbs and merging with the velvet blackness. I was on my knees now, and my head was spinning as I dissolved into this beautiful cataclysm. For several minutes I swirled in ecstasy.

Something had come back to me, something that Grace had confided about their past. It hadn’t registered when she told me, or I hadn’t really cared to hear it because it didn’t fit in neatly with my theory, the stark psychological profile I had been forming of Edward. Before moving here the Pendletons had sold their farm in another state to neighbors who didn’t have enough income to qualify for a bank loan. So an agreement was reached for good-faith payments—which never came in. The Pendletons had no legal recourse and wouldn’t have pursued it if they had. They didn’t believe in suing. Their whole farm, everything they’d worked for, was gone.

What occurred to me now was that this explained much about Edward’s behavior. He and his wife had had to start all over again when they moved here. And even with that disadvantage, they had taken on the responsibility of adopting two small children with big medical problems. (One time in an ice storm four-year-old Amanda had gone into a grandmal seizure and had to be conveyed to a hospital twenty-five miles away, the medical care cost five thousand dollars.)

By leaving themselves so vulnerable, it appeared, yet again, that the Pendletons brought on their own suffering. But in doing so for the sake of others, however rashly, Edward and Grace appeared united in the choice that until now I had overlooked: Christian self-sacrifice. Of the two of us, Edward and me, it was not clear who had been harder