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her retreat from the constraints of her other life, a secret from him. She might be a young Englishwoman, upper middle class, trapped by marriage and convention—and by two beautiful, loving children, a boy and a girl. The time would be the years between the two World Wars—D. H. Lawrence’s era. And the heroine, too, would be Lawrence’s: previously unawakened and incomplete, made whole by the erotic love she shared with this dark, intense, exciting man.
    His looks fitted the fantasy, and so did the family name, Giannini. And so did his ancestry: Southern Italian, and proud of it.
    “Whose is the Hour of Power?” he asked.
    “The Reverend Schuller’s, I think. He’s really a reverend, too. Ordained and everything. He started out in Los Angeles, giving services in drive-in movie theaters.”
    “At night?”
    “No,” she answered. “During the day. Sunday.”
    “Does his flock sit in their cars and eat popcorn and listen through loudspeakers hooked to the windows?”
    “That’s right.” She leafed through the California Living supplement, skimming a story on hang gliding. Suspended in the sky, with cliffs and hills for a background, the multicolored gliders were perfect: bright, adventurous shapes, man-made, each a brilliant geometric contrast to nature’s bright blue of the sky, and the soft, green growth of the seaside cliffs, and the rolling white of the surf breaking against the massive black rocks of the shore.
    “Drive-in movies, and drive-in banks, and drive-in, plug-in campgrounds. And now drive-in churches.” He shook his head, drank coffee, banged the mug down on the oak-slab table. “Taking communion in the family car, probably with the windows rolled up and the air conditioning on, is the perfect symbol of this society, you know that? And then there’s your father, who’s got the gall to think that a pop evangelist can teach the Chinese something. Someone should tell him that the Chinese had a culture and a religion while our forefathers were still scratching fleas.”
    She put the California Living section aside and helped herself to an English muffin. “I’d be interested to see you debate my father sometime.”
    He snorted. “To have a debate—an intelligent debate—you’ve got to have some common ground. And I doubt that we could find much common ground.”
    “You might be surprised. He’s a charlatan, but he’s no dummy. He’s no monster, either. He believes what he’s saying, I’ve decided.”
    “You didn’t always think so.”
    “I know,” she answered slowly. “People change, though.”
    “Is that why you’ve been tuning him in, the past few Sundays?”
    Spreading the muffin with strawberry jam, she considered. Then: “I’m not sure. Maybe it’s because I’m twenty-eight years old. I can’t stay mad at him forever. And, besides, I find myself thinking about my mother lately.”
    Across the table, his mouth came to a thoughtful set as he watched her for a moment before saying, “Worrying about her. Is that what you mean?”
    She shrugged. “I suppose it is. She’s fifty-six years old. She’s been drinking for a long, long time. I—” She hesitated, bit into the muffin, sipped her coffee, looked thoughtfully beyond him. Pepper, Peter’s dignified standard poodle, lying on the kitchen floor, caught her eye and amiably twitched his tail. “I think about her, that’s all. I wonder about her.”
    “You should call her, then. Or write her.”
    Still staring at Pepper, she didn’t reply. Peter was letting the silence lengthen, sharing it with her. It was characteristic of him. One minute he could be bombastic, the next minute pensive. And always, no matter how loudly he pounded the table, he was attuned to her mood.
    “How long has it been, since you’ve seen her?” he asked quietly.
    “Five years, at least.”
    “She calls you on your birthday and at Christmas.”
    “You said ‘seen.’” She realized that the correction had been sharper than she’d