In this house, I now glimpsed the problem with upper-middle-classness: It isn’t really a class. It’s a space between classes. The space may once have been bridgeable, but lately it’s become a chasm. Middle-class people fantasize about travel upgrades; upper-class people can’t imagine life without a jet. Middle-class people help their children with their homework so they’ll have a chance of getting into Princeton; upper-class people buy Princeton a new building. Middle-class people have homes; upper-class people have monuments. A man struggling to hold on to the illusion that he is upper middle class has become like a character in a cartoon earthquake: He looks down and sees his feet being dragged ever farther apart by a quickly widening fissure. His legs stretch, then splay, and finally he plunges into the abyss.

This house, and everything it represents, stands on the more appealing side of the chasm. “It’s perfect,” I said.

Every few days, I googled the house and stared at it. Then a funny thing happened: It began to shrink. Sure it’s big, I told myself, but houses come bigger. The White House, for instance. I told my wife and children only that I’d found a house with a swimming pool and enough bathrooms for everyone to have his or her own. Which is to say, they really had no idea what they were getting into. How could they? It didn’t occur to them that not only would they have their own bathrooms, they’d need to decide before dinner which of the two dining rooms to eat in—and afterward, which of the three dishwashers to not put their dishes in. To believe it, and to grasp its full upper-class implications, they’d need to see it.

On the day we move in, we’re all stuffed together, Beverly Hillbillies- style, in a rented, dirty, gold Hyundai Sonata. For fun, as I drive up and down St. Charles Avenue, I ask them to guess which of these improbably large houses is ours.

“That one?”

“No.”

“That one!”

The exercise turns giddy. Each house is bigger than the last. The girls squeal in the backseat and press their noses against the windows, while their mother, in the front, does her best to remain calm. We pass in front of the mansion and they look right past it. The thing takes up an entire city block, and somehow they can’t see it. It’s too implausible. It’s not a home. It’s a mint.

We circle around the block and approach from the rear, the Sonata rolling up the long driveway and coming to a stop beneath the grand stone porte cochere. “This is our new house?” asks Quinn, age eight.

“This is our new house,” I say.

She begins to hyperventilate.

“Omigodomigodomigod!”

My small children plunge from the rental car into the driveway. They leap up and down as if they’ve just won an N.B.A. championship. By the time we get inside, they’re gasping. They sprint off to inspect their new home.

“There’s another floor!”

“Daddy! There’s an elevator!”

My children love me. They have a house with an elevator.