The protagonist is born into an -Our Crowd- family of New York merchants, artists and bankers at the very end of World War II, which has already claimed the life of his natural father. His widowed mother flees the claustrophobic public mourning expected of her in Manhattan and escapes to a small town in Northern Vermont. Her son is raised from the age of two in this small, French-Canadian, Catholic step-family and remote farming community. By prior agreement with his grandmother, a steam train shuttles him annually between his visceral life in Vermont working for a neighboring farmer and,...