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to go to bed with men because she could think of no other reason for them to like her, Ruth neither snorted nor laughed, but instead managed to convince Sally of her beauty and desirability.
    It was through this relationship that Ruth and Harold Sellig came to know the Castles. They, the Selligs, lived in Riverside, a part of Greenwich that was a full five miles from the edge of the Back Country. Possibly no town in Connecticut was as sharply divided in attitude and political thinking as Greenwich, Connecticut. Nevertheless, Harold Sellig went willingly when invited to dinner at the Castles. As he put it, he knew only half a dozen millionaires, and since they had become a large and significant part of the American scene, they were worth observing.
    Sellig was ten years older than his wife’s forty-eight. But in mind and impulse, they were very much alike, perhaps as much alike as a Jew born in Brooklyn and a Presbyterian born in Greenwich could be. They had one son, Oscar, just turned eighteen, and now wandering around Europe before beginning his freshmen year at college.
    The day before, Ruth’s father, Dr. Seth Ferguson, a widower who was one of the few remaining independent family practitioners in Greenwich, had put himself into Greenwich Hospital with chest pains. Today, he was scheduled for a three-way bypass, and the morning of the dinner at the Castles’, Ruth informed her husband that she would spend most of the day and perhaps overnight as well with her father at the hospital.
    â€œSo you’ll have to go it alone at the Castles’.”
    â€œI could get out of it and be with you at the hospital.”
    â€œNo. Sally expects you, and they’ve invited Professor Greene because you always said you’d like to meet him—”
    â€œOf course! I feel rotten not being with you, but Greene. I always wanted to meet him, and you’re only a telephone call away. If you want me there, I’ll be there in a few minutes. Anyway, I sent Greene a copy of my manuscript. Maybe by now he’s read it.”
    She shook her head. “I have absolute confidence in the surgeon, and Pop says it’s a lark. I’d know if he were worried, and he’s not. It will be sitting there and waiting, and that can be a dreadful bore and worry, but I must be there.”
    â€œOf course.”
    â€œDo you have something for me to read?”
    â€œYes, the manuscript! I think I finished it. I was working on it until midnight.”
    â€œOh no.” Ruth sighed. “You mean ‘The Assassin.’ Hal, you’ve been manicuring that whatever-it-is for years. I’ve read it twice. It will never be published, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with Greenwich.”
    â€œI’ve had three best-sellers. They’ll publish the telephone directory with my name on it as long as they can charge enough. But it’s a hundred and twenty pages. It’s not a novel and it’s not an essay.”
    â€œExactly. And it has nothing to do with Greenwich.”
    â€œBut it has everything to do with Greenwich, with America—with where the hell we’ve been and where we’re going.”
    â€œIf you think so. I’ll read it again.”
    â€œI made changes. Read it, please—if only as an assault on boredom. Do it for me. I ask a small favor.”
    â€œAnd see myself as that skinny demented Wasp in your book?”
    Harold had begun his opus with a title: “The Assassin.” He had a sort of theory, which he took from a slogan of the National Rifle Association, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people,” and enlarged it to include assassins—assassins and guns are not separable; the two are one.
    His theory was that the killers who carried out the endless round of assassinations and murders which had marked his adulthood years, murders of obscure people who never entered the public mind until they had been killed, as well as the murders