In the morning she asked me to put her car in the barn; it looked as if it was going to rain. Looking through her bag for the car keys, I found a little notebook. Across the cover, she’d written “Mr. and Mrs. Elia Kazan.” It contained her plans for the decoration of the house we’d bought. On one page, the parlor curtains; on another, the furniture she intended to re-cover, and so on, even the dishes and towels, and opposite each, in the kids’ watercolors, the colors she wanted.

Molly looked in pieces when I left. “Ask yourself if you meant anything of what you said,” she said. Then: “Do you mind putting up a couple of towel racks before you go?” Right in the middle of breaking up her marriage, this girl thinks of towel racks! Is that what they call the “Eternal Feminine”?