- Summer in Atlantic City. The family tries to enjoy themselves.
- After swimming, everyone retires to their rooms, and sometimes Father and Mother make love. Though she has lost faith in Father, there are moments when she loves him as she used to.
- Mother feels safe in Atlantic City. She also feels, for the first time, that Sarah's child is safe. Some nights Mother and Father take a ride in wicker chair pushed along by a porter or their son.
- One night the family hears a band playing Ragtime music. Mother thinks of her Younger Brother. She feels she has let him down, especially in the arguments between him and Father about Coalhouse. She sees Coalhouse in the faces of each band member.
- Mother starts to notice the way she attracts other men. The most interesting man to Mother is a flamboyant man who calls himself Baron Ashkenazy. He joins Father, Mother and the Boy one night for dinner and brings his daughter. The Baron explains she is quiet because she lost her mother when she was young. He tells them he makes movies.
- Across the table, Mother looks at her son and the Baron's daughter, and imagines them in a make-believe wedding.