ABSTRACT
When I was seven, I met a woman named Folly. She was a widow of sixty something. When she was forty, her husband died of cardiac failure. She never remarried and every year, on the anniversary of her husband’s death, I would find Folly quietly weeping in her sunroom. She never got over that death. Apart from me, the only other people who mattered in her life were her two sons. One later died of a heart attack, and his son, Folly’s grandson, was killed in the Vietnam war. Each one of these deaths was a sword into her heart. She cried terrible tears.
