Owen's earliest memories were of flying in the airplane, of his father piloting and Owen riding in the other seat and craning his head so he could see out. He remembered the clouds, the bumpy ride, the worn upholstery, his father's hands on the controls. Marshall had married late and Owen had been a trailer, born long after his sister and brother, so Marshall was old for a man with such a young son, and his hands had ropy veins and swollen knuckles, although he had never done manual labor; he had been a lawyer all his life. Owen was the last child, and when he arrived the old man cut back on his work and started to take time off. He hadn't done that with the first two children, who were twelve and thirteen and already becoming alienated from their father when Owen's arrival surprised them all. When the older children went off to college Marshall started combining his great pleasures: being with his young son, and being in his aircraft. They'd fly off somewhere on Saturday, in any direction, as far as they could go, camp out at a little airstrip, and come back the next day. He knew it worried Nina, but he got such pleasure from it that he did it regardless. He wondered what was becoming of him to be so irresponsible late in life, after always planning everything with exacting care, and then executing those plans with careful precision. But there was a grace and finality about flying that was missing from the law, and the weekend adventures with his son were more than he was willing to give up.

Marshall was proud of the boy, who had an energy and liveliness and especially a determination the two older children lacked. Though the older ones were probably more intelligent, and Marshall had always valued intelligence, Owen showed from the start an attitude Marshall admired even more - daring: a willingness to risk himself. Owen was a gifted athlete, too, and the old man spent time playing catch and shooting baskets with him. He taught him to play golf, and paid for tennis and swimming lessons. What interested Owen most was karate, but Marshall was strangely reluctant to allow it. Finally, when Owen was thirteen, Marshall let the boy sign up. The lessons only lasted a few months. The instructor called Marshall to explain that he wanted Owen to leave. He was talented, but brutal. He enjoyed hurting the other students.

Marshall explained to Owen why he couldn't continue the lessons, but Owen thought that giving and taking punishment was the reason for practicing a martial art. Marshall knew the boy had a high tolerance for pain, but he was shocked at his attitude. He told Owen he wouldn't be taking any more lessons until he grew up a little.

Besides this callousness to other people's suffering, the boy's impatience disturbed him. He suffered many broken bones, and responded to them only with irritation. On several occasions Marshall found him hammering at casts, trying to break them so he could be free. Marshall discussed all this with Nina, as he discussed everything; he hoped that the fears he felt for the boy's future were illusory, but she had no comfort for him. She worried that the boy would come to a bad end.

Owen never learned any of this. His self-regard was unmarred by doubt. He took for granted a firmly fixed place in the world, and that nothing would ever dislodge him from that place. He was attached to his family, his possessions, his friends. He assumed that all these attachments would grow and deepen with time, and that others would be added. Everything would come to him, if he was patient and followed the rules and was shrewd and hard-working. But beyond these conventions, all was permitted. He never realized that his ruthlessness broke the ethics his parents tried to teach him. Born into another caste, he would have become a criminal: he believed that the world owed him what he desired. There were practices to be honored, but if you followed them in public, then you were entitled to break them in private. The forms were what mattered - that, and the opinion of other people. No one existed alone, everyone existed in the eyes of those around him. You had to please them. Then they would give you what you wanted. What you could get away with in private was another matter, as long as you managed to keep it secret.

"He wants to be a good son," Nina said to her husband. "He wants your approval. But I don't understand him. He does things on impulse. Pain doesn't bother him. Breaking things doesn't bother him. He wants to feel things, even painful things. It doesn't matter who he hurts. I don't know what to do. The other children weren't that way."

"Yes," Marshall said, and nodded, although he hadn't understood. Silence fell, and in a few minutes he heard her steady breathing. He was awake late, turning over what she'd said. He finally concluded that the boy was young and that there was plenty of time for him to grow out of it (whatever "it" was) given proper guidance and attention. He was confident that he and Nina were up to the job. There was plenty of time. The boy was only thirteen.

Six months later, on his way home from the office, Marshall was broadsided by a tow truck at a red light. He died the next day. Everyone of any importance in local society came to the funeral. The cortege of cars stretched for a mile. Admiring words were spoken. The man had been an example to everyone, in his honesty and hard work and generosity and concern for others. Perhaps he had lacked imagination, though no one said this, perhaps he had been the soul of convention, though no one said this either, but that scarcely mattered in the balance. Everyone had admired him, and many had loved him. The older children, still alienated from him but now feeling guilty, had flown in from Denver and Chicago. They tried to comfort their mother. She was incapacitated. Her family, especially her husband, had been her life. She wondered vaguely what she was to do with this youngest child, outwardly so tractable, but inwardly anarchic. She was in too much pain to do anything. The boy was suffering as much as she was, and she tried to comfort him. She told him that his father was in heaven. He looked at her blankly.

In the next week the house emptied as the older children, who were children no more, went back to graduate school and to work - back to their homes, she thought with a pang - and as the relatives left, and the flowers wilted and were thrown out. She woke up one morning alone, in the bed she had shared for thirty years of her life with a man who now existed only as a yearning in her empty heart, and she went downstairs and saw Owen off to school, and then she lingered in the kitchen for an hour talking to the maid. It occurred to her that she didn't know this person, who had been with the family for nearly ten years. When Nina stepped through the dining room into the front hall, it was strangely empty, and she noticed the squeak of her shoes on the tile. In the library, Marshall's correspondence was neatly lined up on the side table.

There were many things she had to do. She would have to sell the airplane. She would have to find someone who wanted the bird dogs. She would have to manage the family money alone. It wasn't that she felt unprepared. She had always done what needed to be done, or Marshall had done it after discussing it with her. But it would be such a lonely, unrewarding job without him. She had expected to live a long life together. She had expected him to live to a great age, like his parents; she had expected him even to outlive her: though she was younger, her parents and grandparents had been short-lived.

She looked at the unopened mail sitting on the table, at the leaded glass windows and the built-in bookshelves with the glass covers to keep the dust off the books, at the family portrait above the mantel, at the old rolltop desk Marshall had inherited from his grandfather the judge, the vases, the heavy furniture and Oriental rugs, the diplomas on the wall, the gun case with the engraved shotguns, the golf trophies, his Boy Scout memorabilia, the photographs of friends and ski trips to Europe... The house, the house she had always loved, had turned into nothing but a thing, a thing wrapped around her, a thing enclosing her, a thing full of other things that now meant nothing to her. The beautiful place they had made together was gone, replaced by this facsimile. The light in the window, on the walls, everywhere, was cold, the interiors vacant, the space too large.

She changed from her good clothes, intending to work in the garden. When she had pulled the few weeds, she remained on her knees, crumbling the dirt between her fingers and weeping. Her tears stained the bare brown ground. She turned her back to the house so the maid wouldn't see her loss of self-control.

In the year it took her to wake from her dream of grief, her care for Owen was punctilious, but distracted. He began to spend his time at his friends' houses. Their mothers, to help Nina, were glad to take him in. A split between his inner and outer self emerged, a new kind of self-awareness, a self-watching. It had always been there, and now claimed its place as primary. He lived neither inside nor outside himself, but on the cusp, between. He began to indulge himself in destructive tantrums, glorying in the sensation of letting go, of summoning up a flood of rage and unleashing it and watching himself get caught up in the tide. When the police caught him smashing windows at a school and called his mother, he knew he'd gone too far. The split he felt remained, but became a master instead of an observer. He would be more careful. In later years, on the occasions he found himself carried away, he would be embarrassed at his lack of self-control. But the impulsiveness continued to plague him occasionally. It was the shame he never told anyone about, the secret at his center.

One night he was in the back seat, headed north with two friends to a party in the country. Owen had pulled a beer from the sack on the floor and was about to open it. He saw an old man walking along the side of the road and threw the bottle. It struck the back of the man's head and he toppled as if his muscles and nerves had stopped working. Owen's friends in the front seat were preoccupied talking to each other and appeared not to have noticed. Owen said nothing. He read the newspaper the next day. The man was in a coma, something about being hit in exactly the wrong place on his head. Owen was surprised, but felt no guilt. It was too late now. He didn't tell anyone - what would have been the point? He watched the newspaper, and the TV news, but he never found out whether the man recovered or died.

From then he was even more determined to discipline himself. He would be perfect; his mother would have every reason to to be proud of him. He excelled in study and sports. His senior year he applied to the University of Chicago, his father's school, and was accepted. He attended for three years, until he decided to change his major from engineering to urban planning and business. He transferred to Lawrence, to enter the program there, and to be closer to home and the contacts he wanted to make.