Neil Hovey came for me wearing a good suit. He parked his father’s blue Chrysler on the dirt ramp by our barn and got out and stood by the open car door in a double-breasted tan gabardine suit, his hands in his pockets and his hair combed with water, squinting up at a lightning-rod an old hurricane had knocked crooked.

We were driving to Chicago, so I had dressed in worn-out slacks and an outgrown corduroy shirt. But Neil was the friend I had always been most relaxed with, so I wasn’t very disturbed. My parents and I walked out from the house, across the low stretch of lawn that was mostly mud after the thaw that had come on Christmas Day, and my grand-mother, though I had kissed her good-bye inside the house, came out on to the porch, stooped and rather angry-looking, her head haloed by wild old woman’s white hair and the hand more severely afflicted by arthritis waggling at her breast in a worried way. It was growing dark and my grandfather had gone to bed. ‘Nev-er trust the man who wears the red necktie and parts his hair in the middle,’ had been his final advice to me.

We had expected Neil since middle afternoon. Nineteen, almost twenty, I was a college sophomore home on vacation; that fall I had met in a fine arts course a girl I had fallen in love with, and she had invited me to the New Year’s party her parents always gave and to stay at her house a few nights. She lived in Chicago and so did Neil now, though he had gone to our high school.