Kath said when she invited us to a Derby party at her house that spring, just the Wednesday Sisters and our husbands for some good ol’ Kentucky fun, “are that you wear a hat, and you tuck a little money in your pocketbook, to wager, like. Study well on that hat, too, ladies, because sure ’nough it will give you luck with your bets!” No, Lee had not left Kath yet. And yes, Kath was still clinging to the illusion that nothing was wrong, as if the whole Gatsby car-bashing fiasco had never occurred. Kath and Lee lived in Old Palo Alto, which was—then even more than now—the most exclusive neighborhood in town (and I mean that in a good way, although a neighbor who was one of the first engineers at Hewlett-Packard did once tell me he moved into the Community Center neighborhood in the 1940s because even Stanford-educated kind-as-anyone-you’ve-ever-met Asians weren’t welcome in the Old Palo Alto, Crescent Park, or Professorville neighborhoods back then). Still, I’d been surprised the first time I saw Kath’s house, a great big old thing that looked like a miniature version of the Museum of Science and Industry back in Chicago.
