Pam’s story started first, in the spring of 1944; Duane and his twin Diane didn’t make their appearance till late 1947. But by the time they came to our attention in the mid-1980s, their age difference was irrelevant. They’d both grown up and left their original families and New York. Each had succeeded to a better life than her or his parents and a more comfortable existence than the siblings. Carolyn says they had the same tragic flaw; Pam and Duane both refused to review the early childhood decision they must have made, the approach that enabled them to survive their first homes. But Carolyn may be trying to elevate their experiences from what seems mundane to us. Especially now, Carolyn sometimes talks about them like they’re doomed heroes.

Duane’s mother was a secretary before she advanced (in her opinion) to housewife. His father was a Navy pilot who probably would have made a career in the service if he hadn’t died in a horrendous crash two years after the birth of the twins. The widow remarried but for security and not love; that relationship endured with estrangement and bitterness many more years than Duane and Diane lived at home. The family was too poor to send both kids to college (even tuition-free CCNY); it was Duane’s privilege to receive advanced schooling, and he ran with it. He got out of the home apartment as soon as he could pay for a room, and he applied himself with strict unsmiling discipline. He acquired a PhD in literature and worked as a junior academic before attending law school and settling, dour as if doomed to the mood (per Carolyn’s litigator perspective), into the lucrative field of tax work and estate planning. He was heroic in his dedication to school. It was like he labored under some magic curse; he didn’t allow himself to laugh or love while he worked furiously at assigned tasks. And it was like he forgot how to love and laugh while he was conquering, for no one ever caught him in those activities. Although Duane eventually married the woman friend who selected him, although he and his wife became one another’s best friend and he truly mourned for her when he lost her to what started as treatable breast cancer, he always struck those who met him as a single man, a classic Britishy bachelor type of fellow: polite and polished, able to quote witticisms even though he couldn’t form one, asexual.

It was more of a challenge to find the heroism in Pam’s history, but Carolyn tried. Pam was the first-born of a depressed repressed mother; what the family then deemed vanity and fear of aging turned out to be a form of early dementia. Pam’s brother and sister were born two and three years after Pam, when the maternal condition was bad and probably spiked with post-partum depression, so Pam was barely beyond toddlerhood when she started caring for her sibs.

She never talked much about her childhood home. We didn’t learn about her mother’s mental problems until her own surfaced and her brother and sister met with some of us to discuss Pam’s move to a residential facility. A few of us, considered by Pam to be her closest friends (and close enough to know that Pam always confused friendly with friend, even about her clients), had heard reports about her father’s drinking rants and her mother’s somber silences, about how she had to use the livingroom couch as her bed (like Duane’s stepdad, but due to lack of space instead of spouse estrangement), about why she married so young (she had to get away from her parents, and Hunter College, the only free school a girl could attend, didn’t have dorms). Her marriage decision probably had something to do with sex, too. Pam was a stereotypical Catholic girl for her time and place, repressed but ready, and she said yes to Mark almost before he asked.

So she married at 19, had her first son at 20, and then two more boys while finishing her accounting degree and struggling in the frustrations of living with Mark (a nice horny ambitionless young man). Pam dedicated herself to improving her lot; she worked so diligently that she advanced quickly, first as an IRS employee and then in the private sector. She allowed herself almost no pleasure, filling her days with work, maternal, and spousal tasks (in that order of priority). When she finally blew off some of the gathering steam, it was in a tumultuous satisfying office affair that almost busted up her marriage.

Almost. But her lover (a guy she never forgot and sometimes mentioned, named Walt) decided not to leave his spouse, so Pam stayed with hers. But she’d gotten a taste of good sex and passive-aggressive husband-revenge (as she later described it). She continued to flirt at work and in a few years had a keeper relationship going. She divorced Mark.

(Decades later, Pam’s second son commented to Carolyn that, with regard to sex, his mother would follow any guy who offered her candy. Carolyn thought that was shockingly disloyal and probably true.)

Pam stayed with her second husband for almost 20 years. They tried just about everything to conceive a child (the daughter Pam thought was owed to her, the single child her Tom craved), and maybe they would have stayed together if they’d succeeded at that, but his sperm count was very low and her womb was exhausted. Eventually they tired of trying and Tom tired of Pam; he took up with his business partner, moved into her house and family, eventually divorced Pam and married Cindy, seemed happy ever after.

Pam wasn’t. She considered Tom the love of her life and resented his departure. She denied that she was bitter, although Carolyn and a few others saw a streak of anger in the way she tossed her blonde hair, a glint of mean in her pale blue eyes. Within a few months she was seeking a new beau with the dispassion of an executive recruiter. She enrolled in dating services. She got over her atheistic attitudes enough to frequent a Contra Costa church famed for its singles’ activities. And she found her third husband there, agnostic Jewish Al.

She was in her early 60s when they married. Al is almost 10 years older than Pam and was encouraging her to retire (or at least work less) so they could enjoy what time they had left. Soon after that, Pam began making so many mistakes at work that her partners noticed. One helped her with the long term disability claim while the others gently forced her out.