An unremarkable couple. Whenever someone suggested otherwise they raised four protesting palms in negation as if they were under arrest. They lived in a small weathered house halfway up Calderstone Lane, the street that winds from Jefferson Boulevard to the top of Godolphin Hill and rewards the climber with a view of the Boston skyline. Clara and Valerie frequently climbed their hill; also they worked, gardened, paid taxes, got together with their many friends. Most summers they traveled to a village in Spain they’d discovered just after the War, when they were first in love. Then Valerie had seemed to Clara as beautiful as a sculpted boy—taut as a boy, bold as a boy, eyes swiveling like a fascinated boy’s, and occasionally possessed of a boy’s slingshot-straight power to wound. Then square-faced Clara had seemed to Valerie as authoritative as a Roman aedile. Val remembered the pictures of aediles, or at least of their busts, in her Latin Grammar—municipal grandees who supervised the building of sewers and roads in the ancient City.
