Thirty years after his stint as a student at the University of Wisconsin in the late sixties, a series of events forces Dubuque stockbroker Brace Abbott to confront his past and the act of civil disobedience that changes his life forever. When his mentor and former professor Jesse Roeder Moran becomes terminally ill, Brace finds himself caught up in a web of conflicting loyalties, among them friendship and the claims to his affections by three generations of Roeder women.
The would-be terrorist Lekowski–Abbott’s college roommate–holds out a moral high-road of confrontation and violence; Jesse Moran, the life of the mind. Her daughter, Aggie, chooses independence from conventional attachments. For Brace, salvation lies in work, or so he believes until an act of what was intended as belated retribution frees him to question the sterile existence he has carved out for himself. It is in facing the reality of death–not in control or ideology--that life becomes truest for these characters who have spent their lives making sense of the Vietnam era experiences that shaped them all.
The novel raises powerful issues of guilt and redemption, of meaning and responsibility, and of the transforming power of relationships and forgiveness: laying to rest the sins of omission–or things left undone–which make life less than intended. "The characters sizzle with life," one reviewer says. "I couldn’t put it down."
Aggie. Her hair a white blond halo under the street lamp. His last semester of grad school. February 18, 1970.
This was one date conspicuously missing an entry in Brace’s journals. He hadn’t remembered the omission. But this night didn’t need one.
Brace had finished work in the library around ten-thirty, drained and edgy, looking to postpone the inevitable all-nighter with a quick beer at the Rathskeller. The large vaulted room was deserted, almost eerily so. Anti-war and anti-administration protests had taken an ugly turn. It was no time to be out on the streets around fraternity row and the library alone.
Too damned quiet. He walked briskly across the library quad, uneasy at what appeared to be a haze of tear gas off in the distance. Several of the storefronts along State Street near the library were boarded up with plywood in the aftermath of last night's rioting. Brace toyed with the idea of cutting directly across to Johnson Street, figuring it would safer. But then he saw her.
Coming toward him half-way down the block, transfixed by the diffuse glow of a street lamp, was a woman--more a girl really, with hair almost too white to be blond, pulled to the side in a braid that hung halfway down to her waist. Her navy pea coat was unbuttoned, and her white turtle neck and clinging bellbottoms left little to the imagination.
Bra-less, Brace noted appreciatively as the distance closed between them. She looked at him. Smiled. That was all it took. What happened next came so fast, Brace at first could not believe what he was seeing. A hulk of a sheriff's deputy--alone and apparently off duty--had lunged out of the shadows, slamming the girl against the doorway. A large American flag was sewn on his departmental-issue jacket, and judging by the slurred outpouring of obscenities, he was drunk. Very drunk.
"Miserable hippie. . .bitch!"
By now the man was conducting his own version of a body search, groping for weapons where there could be none. Not with the skin-tight fabric of her shirt.
"No. . .," a voice gasped, high-pitched. Terrified. "Don't. Please. . .!"
Brace felt a wave of rage and nausea like nothing he had ever experienced. Although a corner of his brain registered the cold awareness he could wind up in jail, or worse, he no longer cared.
"Bastard!" he snarled.
The man half turned, loosening his grip. All it took was three quick strides to grab at the stiff leather of that jacket front. A split-second later Brace struck--hard, connecting with the fleshy mass of the stranger's face. With a gasp of surprise, the man blinked, went down.
"Oh, God--quick!" Eyes flashed wide in Brace's direction, and her hand snatched at his. "Run. . .!"
They did. Dodging traffic and parked cars was a treacherous business on the slick pavement. Two-thirds of the way down an alley, his lungs aching and his breathing reduced to shuddering gasps, Brace pulled his companion back into the blackness of an archway, alert for telltale signs of pursuit. Around them in the darkness, the only sound was the muffled drip of thawing drain spouts.
"Are you okay?" he managed in a hoarse whisper, only now realizing how tightly his hands had been gripping the woman's shoulders.
Her face caught what light there was, ghostly-white like the trail of her breath in the shadows. Brace brushed clumsily with the edge of his thumb at what he perceived as moisture gleaming along the curve of her cheek. Innocent enough. But then he had not reckoned with either the unexpected intimacy or the raw hunger that a simple gesture of concern would trigger in him--primal, shutting out everything but that face turned upward toward his.
