In both 1946 and 1947, Margie Bixby was crowned Trout Queen of the Upper Delaware River, an honor she lost in 1948 only because it wouldn’t do for the daughter of the newspaper editor—the editor of the paper that sponsored the pageant—to win three times. Still, she was the undisputed local beauty, a striking girl with a stronger resemblance to the Modiglianis in the library art books than to a dish-soap model. She wasn’t even blond, to the annoyance of those who hopefully lemoned their hair each summer. She had hair like her late mother’s, like dark water you could drown in.

But by twenty-three she’d been noticed with only one boy. Vincent had returned from the European theatre with rashes all over his body, been sent to a sanatorium in Albany, and hadn’t been seen in Stickney since. Rumor had it that the syphilis had collapsed his nose. Another rumor was that Margie and Vincent wrote every day, still in love but destined, like Abelard and Heloise, for a life of longing correspondence. The bit about the nose: unfortunately correct. But they wrote only once a week, and while Margie relayed the town’s gossip, even jokingly began her letters “Dearest Abelard,” they’d never been in love—just fast friends since age five, when they’d built a circus for worms in Vincent’s back-yard mud. Margie had worn his class ring on a necklace to save him from whispers that he was inverted and wouldn’t look twice at a woman—again, true—their couplehood convincing enough that everyone believed he’d caught his disease from a French whore, not from a fellow-soldier.