Elizabeth von Vogt Knihy

It is the story of two women who happen to be mother and daughter. Dorothy is divorced and living in New York City with her teen-aged daughter and trying to make a life for herself in the 1950's. Marian is a career woman teaching in Chicago in the 1970'ssingle and 35. She is haunted by the memory of Dorothy's life, wondering if she is repeating it. But they diverge as they look for love and revelationone finding a lonely serenity and the other entering into a dangerous happiness.

At thirty nine Fran Lovell feels that his love life has been a series of absurd disasters. He is unable to commit himself and vows to give it up. So now he gives all this unused love and commitment to his old married friends--fellow college teachers at Chicago colleges. But he gets too involved and finds himself in ridiculous and finally dangerous positions. At last he is at the crux of love and sacrifice and makes his decision. Will he serve the future of marriage?

Mary Lou Liever is living on the Maine coast, has grieved obsessively over the death of her husband for almost two years. She is sixty-three now, but she retreats from most human contact-only a dinner here and there with her grown-up children. She is alone and begins to live through a newly awakened imagination. She is trying to escape the strange intimacy that had engulfed her thirty-two year marriage to a man twelve years older. She dreams of the lives she could have lived instead of the real one that is leaving so much misery in its wake. So many places she could have gone to and lived in, other men she could have married, even the divorce she could have had, the solitary life, the careers. But all fancied paths fail. How will she learn to live with the real, the loss?