In an entry dated August 23, 1912, in first-person narration, Madeleine addresses her son, Jakey, who is a newborn. It is four months after his father’s death, and Madeleine feels “both astonishment and despair to think that you will never know Jack, nor he you” (1). She says she is a waterfall of memories, and she will write them down and give them to Jakey so they might become his own. She says she won’t write of how her relationship ended, which everyone knows anyway. She’ll start with their beginning, which was theirs alone.

Madeleine tells Jakey of her family’s reactions to her being noticed by Colonel Jack Astor, the richest man in America. Jack is divorced and nearly 30 years older. The Forces summer in Bar Harbor, Maine, and Jack invites them to his summer cottage. Madeleine is in the library, which she describes as a brass and mahogany citadel. She is flipping through a volume of Greek poetry when Jack approaches her. He says she is opaque; she replies that she’s not very mysterious, and he laughs. Madeleine writes, “I felt the sudden spark of the power of that, of making a man like John Jacob Astor laugh […] It rushed like lightning through my veins, hellish and bright” (5).