Isaiah Sommers escorted me to the door, but before he could close it I heard Margaret Sommers say, “I just hope you don’t come to me when you’ve found yourself throwing good money after bad.”

I turned down the walk on his angry response. I’d had my fill of bitterness lately, what with Lotty’s arguing with Max, and now the Sommerses taking each other on. Their snarling seemed endemic to the relationship; it would be difficult to be around them often. I wondered if they had friends and what the friends did when faced with this sniping. If Max and Lotty’s quarrel hardened into the same kind of misery I would find it intolerable.

Ms. Sommers’s gratuitous remark about the mean old Jew she worked for also hit me hard. I don’t like mean-spirited remarks of any kind, but this one jarred me, especially after listening to Max and Lotty go ten rounds on whether he should speak at today’s conference. What would Margaret Sommers say if she heard Max detail his life when the Nazis came to power-forced to leave school, seeing his father compelled to kneel naked in the street? Was Lotty right, was his speaking a demeaning exposure that would do no good? Would it teach the Margaret Sommerses of the world to curb their careless prejudices?

I’d grown up a few blocks south of here, among people who would have used worse epithets than Margaret Sommers’s if she’d moved next door. If she sat on a stage rehearsing the racial slurs that she probably grew up hearing, I doubted that my old neighbors would change their thinking much.

I stood on the curb, trying to stretch out the knife points in my trapezius before starting the long drive north. The curtains in the Sommerses’ front window twitched. I got into my car. The September nights were drawing in; only the faintest wisp of light still stained the horizon as I turned north onto Route 41.

Why did people stay together to be unhappy? My own parents hadn’t shown me a Harlequin picture of true love, but at least my mother struggled to create domestic harmony.