In his heart, however, he knew it was he who had betrayed their childhood dream, hatched in the gloomy passageways of the fourflight walk-up tenement where their families lived, vowing to each other that life would be better for them—no bedbugs, no roaches, no shared hall toilet stinking of CN disinfectant, no El trains hammering past outside, drowning out their whispers, the flat, dead eyes of the passengers staring in on their wretched lives. And so it had proved, their first halting steps on the ladder of selfbetterment against the downdraft of the Depression years, ever upwards, until he had lost his footing, dragging her with him into the void.

At the age of twenty-nine, way before his time, Hollis had already faced the grinning demon all men must confront in their lives, the one who mocks you with the certain knowledge that you’ve climbed as high as you’re ever going to, that you’ve scaled the peak, that from here the only way is down.

They were doomed even before they moved out to Long Island, he knew that now. Life in East Hampton—the village, its people, the cloying parochialism—became just another rod to beat him with. Lydia waxed sentimental about the city they had been forced to leave behind them, the same city she had spent the past twenty years of her life lambasting. She dreamed of Manhattan stores she had never shown any inclination to visit when they lived there: Macy’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bonwit Teller. She subscribed to the New York Sunday Times, scouring its innumerable sections. Plaintively, she read aloud the reviews of Broadway plays as if theater were her greatest passion, and yet she showed no desire to attend the capable productions of the local Guild Hall Players.

Hollis had always tried to keep a wall between his work and his home life, to spare Lydia the daily round of depravity he witnessed as a detective. Since moving to East Hampton, he had maintained this wall, though for different reasons—to shield her from the banality of his work, to deny her the tools of further castigation.