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so they didn’t interfere with his work. But he was having much more fun at school at night than at his father’s firm. By now he hated everything he did there. He had tried to question his brothers about it several times, but they both insisted they were satisfied and happy with what they did. They were both married, and their wives looked like all the girls they had grown up with. They were blond, blue-eyed debutantes, whose families had known their own for years. His older brother Tom’s mother-in-law had gone to Vassar with their mother. And neither of Bill’s sisters-in-law worked. And they’d each had two children. To Bill, they seemed like cookie-cutter lives, predictable from birth to the grave.
    Jenny was so much more interesting and came from a totally differentworld. Her early years in a mining town, with a coal miner father, only made her more intriguing to him, and he was impressed by her success. She had come a long way from Pittston, Pennsylvania. And he thought her mother and grandmother were lovely women who were dignified and brave. He had gone to Philadelphia with Jenny and met them both, and they had been warm and welcoming to him, unlike his own family, who couldn’t have been worse when they met Jenny. With considerable trepidation, he had taken Jenny to meet his parents at their Connecticut weekend home, over the Labor Day weekend, six months after they started dating.
    His father was jovial with her at first, but Bill knew him better and saw something cold in his eyes. And his mother conducted the interrogation about where she had grown up, where she had graduated from college, and if she’d gone to boarding school. Jenny was open and honest and ingenuous with them. She told them about her father, and moving to Philadelphia. She said she had gone to public school there, then to Parsons, and she told them about her job at Vogue . To anyone else, it would have been a success story, and they would have been impressed. To his parents, her entire history was a crime, and dating their son made it even worse. His brothers looked at her strangely, and their wives had been incredibly rude to her and ignored her completely. As far as they were concerned, a coal miner’s daughter did not belong in their midst. If they had thrown rocks at her, their message wouldn’t have been clearer. Bill was furious and humiliated by the time they left after dinner, and he apologized to Jenny profusely on the way back to New York.
    “Don’t be silly. They probably didn’t know what to expect, and they don’t meet people out of their own milieu very often. I dealwith people like that all the time.” Some of the socialites they shot for Vogue were truly nasty to her and treated her like a slave. Her feelings were a little hurt this time, but Bill was so upset about it that she felt sorry for him. Clearly, she was not welcome with his family—they had made that clear—which was embarrassing for him. “Don’t worry about it,” she reassured him as they drove home. “They were probably terrified you would say you’re going to marry me,” she laughed. Bill pulled the car over and turned to look at her.
    “Jenny, that’s exactly what I have in mind,” he said in a gentle voice. “I don’t deserve you, and my family sure as hell doesn’t. I don’t care what they think, I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I love you. Will you marry me?” Jenny stared at him with wide eyes. She knew they loved each other, but she had had no idea that that was what he was thinking. She knew the world he came from, and there was no way she could fit in. They would never accept her, and she was afraid that they would punish Bill if he married her.
    “What about your parents? They’d be heartbroken if you married me,” she said sincerely with sad eyes. She didn’t want to destroy his life, but she loved him just as much.
    “I’d be heartbroken if you didn’t marry me.” He was being honest. He had intended to