As World War II sweeps the children of the prominent Schofield family of Washburn, Ohio, into adulthood, their mother, Agnes, discovers that she is a tourist in her own life. Widowed years before by her husband Warren's mysterious death in an icy morning car crash, Agnes no longer knows how to define herself. She is a wife with no husband, and a mother whose children no longer need her. But the war is ending, and the dispersed members of the clan make their way home: the beautiful Betts, the long-inseparable Dwight and Claytor, and Agnes's youngest child, Howard. Now grown up, they have all returned full of their own lives. Agnes's unspoken feelings of devotion as well as resentment - toward her children, toward her dead husband - create a palpable tension as she struggles to find the truth among the competing histories.