Eventually, maybe a quarter of a mile out from the beach, my father caught sight of a little head bobbing in the water. By all accounts the baby was still swimming, or making his best attempt at it. When Atva felt his father's hands around him he began to bawl and squirm. But my father caught firm hold of him. He set the baby on his shoulders, and swam back to the shore.

Cesaria told Marietta how the baby had laughed once he was back in her arms, laughed until the tears ran, he was so amused by what he'd done.

But when I think of this episode, especially in the context of what I'm about to tell you, it's not the child laughing that I picture. No, it's the image of little Atva, barely a day old, squirming from the hands of those who created him, and then, ignoring their cries and their demands, simply swimming away, swimming away, as though the first thing on his mind was escape.

You remember Rachel Pallenberg? I spoke about her briefly several chapters back, when I was figuratively wringing my hands about whose story I was first going to tell. I described her driving around her hometown of Dansky, Ohio-which lies between Marion and Shanck, close to Mount Gilead. Unpretentious would be a kind description of the town; banal perhaps truer. If it once had some particular charm, that charm's gone, demolished to make room for the great American ubiquities: cheap hamburger places, cheap liquor places, a market for soda that impersonates more expensive soda and cheese that impersonates milk product. By night the gas station's the brightest spot in town.

Here, Rachel was raised until she was seventeen. The streets should be familiar to her. But she's lost. Though she recognizes much of what she sees-the school where she passed several miserable years still stands, as does the church, where her father Hank (who was always more devout than her mother) brought her every Sunday, the bank where Hank Pallenberg worked until his sickness and early demise-all of these she sees and recognizes; and still she's lost. This isn't home. But then neither is the place she left to drive here; the exquisite apartment overlooking Central Park where she's lived in the bosom of wealth and luxury, married to the man of countless women's dreams: Mitchell Geary.

Rachel doesn't regret leaving Dansky. It was a claustrophobic life she lived here: dull and repetitive. And the future had looked grim. Single women in Dansky didn't break their hearts trying for very much. Marriage was what they wanted, and if their husbands were reasonably sober two or three nights a week and their children were bom with all their limbs, then they counted themselves lucky, and dug in for a long decline.

That was not what Rachel had in mind for herself. She'd left Dansky two days after her seventeenth birthday without giving it so much as a backward glance. There was another life out there, which she'd seen in magazines and on the television screen: a life of possibilities, a movie-star life, a life she was determined to have for herself. She wasn't the only seventeen-year-old girl in America who nurtures such hopes, of course. Nor am I the first person to be recounting in print how she made that dream a reality. I have here beside me four books and a stack of magazines-the contents of most of which don't merit the word reportage-all of which talk in often unruly metaphor about the rise and rise of Rachel Pallenberg. I will do my best here to avoid the excess and stick to the facts, but the story-which is so very much like a fairy tale-would tempt a literary ascetic, as you'll see. The beautiful, dark-eyed girl from Dansky, with nothing to distinguish her from the common herd but her dazzling smile and her easy charm, finds herself, by chance, in the company of the most eligible bachelor in America, and catches his eye. The rest is not yet history; history requires a certain closure, and this story's still in motion. But it is certainly something remarkable.

How did it come about? That part, at least, is very simple to tell.

Rachel left Dansky planning to begin her new life in Cincinnati, where her mother's sister lived. There she went, and there, for about two years, she stayed. She had a brief but inglorious stint training to be a dental technician, then spent several months working as a waitress. She was liked, though not loved. Some of her fellow workers apparently considered her a little too ambitious for her own good; she was one of those people who didn't mind voicing their aspirations, and that irritated those who were too afraid to do so for themselves, or simply had none. The manager of the restaurant, a fellow called Herbert Finney, remembers her differently from one interview to the next. Was she "a hardworking, rather quiet girl?" as he says to one interviewer, or "a bit of a troublemaker, fluting with the male customers, always looking to get something for herself?" as he tells another. Perhaps the truth is somewhere in between. Certainly waitressing didn't suit her for very long; nor did Cincinnati. Twenty-one months after arriving there, in late August, she took a train east, to Boston. When she was later asked by some idiot magazine why she'd chosen that city, she'd replied that she'd heard the autumn months were pretty there. She found another waitressing job, and shared an apartment with two girls who were, like her, hew to the city. After two weeks she was taken on by an upscale jewelry store on Newbury Street, and there she worked through the fall-which was indeed beautiful, crisp and clean-until, on December 23rd, late in the afternoon, Christmas came visiting in the form of Mitchell Geary.

It began to snow that afternoon, somewhere around two, the first flurry coming as Rachel returned from lunch. The prediction for the rest of the day, and into the night, was worsening by the hour: a blizzard was on its way.

Business was slow; people were getting out of the city early, despite the fact that they could calculate the shopping hours left to Christmas morning on their fingers and toes. The manager of the store, a Mr. Erickson (a forty-year-old with the wan, weary elegance of a man half his age), was on the phone in the back office discussing with his boss the idea of closing up early, when a limo drew up outside and a young dark-haired man in a heavy coat, his collar pulled up, his eyes downcast as though he feared being recognized in the ten-yard journey from limo to store, strode to the door, stamped off the snow on the threshold and came in. Erickson was still in the back office, negotiating closing times. The other assistant, Noelle, was out fetching coffee. It fell to Rachel to serve the customer in the coat.

She knew who he was, of course. Who didn't? The classically handsome features-the chiseled cheekbones, the soulful eyes, the strong,.sensual mouth, the unruly hair-appeared on some magazine or other every month: Mitchell Monroe Geary was one of the most watched, debated, swooned-over men in America. And here he was, standing in front of Rachel with flakes of snow melting on his dark eyelashes.

What had happened then? Well, it had been a simple enough exchange. He'd come in, he explained, to look for a Christmas gift for his grandfather's wife, Loretta. Something with diamonds, he'd said. Then, with a little shake of his head: "She loves diamonds." Rachel showed him a selection of diamond pin brooches, hoping to God Erickson didn't come off the phone too soon, and that the line at the coffee shop was long enough to delay Noelle's return for a few minutes longer. Just to have the Geary prince to herself for a little while was all she asked.

He declared that he liked both the butterfly and the star. She took them from their black velvet pillows for him to examine more closely. What was her opinion, he asked. Mine? she said. Yes, yours. Well, she said, surprised at how easy she found it to talk to him: if it's for your grandmother, then I think the butterfly's probably too romantic.