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The Summer Wives: Epic page-turning romance perfect for the beach
Beatriz Williams


Secrets and lies hold the island together. But this summer, everything will fall apart…A tight communityA forbidden loveA summer to change everything…It's 1951 and Miranda's mother has just married in to one of the wealthiest families on Winthrop Island, a glamorous haven set off the New England coast.But beneath the surface, the island is a delicate balance of tension between the wealthy summer families who holiday there and the Portuguese fishermen and domestic workers who keep the island going.As Miranda begins to fall for Joseph, the lighthouse keeper's handsome son, the tension rises inexorably to the surface and an explosive end to the summer will change everyone, forever…























Copyright (#ud797c697-ce90-5c4c-9fad-0137d083aa9a)


Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

First published in the UK by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © Beatriz Williams

Cover design by Ellie Game @HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Cover photographs © Ildiko Neer / Trevillion Images (woman); Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com) (landscape)

Beatriz Williams asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008219024

Ebook Edition © August 2018 ISBN: 9780008219031

Version: 2018-06-27




Dedication (#ud797c697-ce90-5c4c-9fad-0137d083aa9a)


To my husband and children and to my in-laws, those cultural tour guides


Contents

Cover (#u5d20c9e0-4357-5b5b-83d1-0835bc0cdc9b)

Title Page (#ubde600a5-1168-58ce-b3e4-051f17f28e0d)

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword: 1969

June

1930 (Bianca Medeiro) (#uc21a174e-a253-5219-b57e-3e0b04019298)

1951 (Miranda Schuyler) (#u781f31bd-f8bb-549f-ba49-a9d6927f587f)

1969 (Miranda Thomas) (#litres_trial_promo)

July

1930 (Bianca Medeiro) (#litres_trial_promo)

1951 (Miranda Schuyler) (#litres_trial_promo)

1969 (Miranda Thomas) (#litres_trial_promo)

August

1930 (Bianca Medeiro) (#litres_trial_promo)

1951 (Miranda Schuyler) (#litres_trial_promo)

1969 (Miranda Thomas) (#litres_trial_promo)

Afterword: 1931

Afterword: 1970

Author’s Note

Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author

Also by Beatriz Williams

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




FOREWORD: 1969 (#ud797c697-ce90-5c4c-9fad-0137d083aa9a)


I RETURNED TO Winthrop Island on an unseasonably cold day in early May, one week after my tenth wedding anniversary. I missed the last ferry from New London—the schedule, not surprisingly, had changed in the eighteen years since I last climbed aboard—and hired an old tub of a fishing boat to carry me across from Stonington. I don’t think the fellow recognized me, but I can’t be sure. Fishermen are a stoic lot, you know. They don’t emote. I paid him twenty dollars cash, and in return he didn’t ask me any awkward questions, like my name and my business on the Island, though I wonder if it would have made any difference. What was he going to do, call the newspapers? Probably he’d never heard of me. Lots of people had never heard of me.

Because it was May, the sky was still light as we bumped across the few miles of Long Island Sound that separate the Island from Connecticut. I wore my sunglasses, which were black and extremely large, giving me the appearance of an exotic bug, and the spray soon coated the lenses with a film of salt. When I couldn’t properly see any longer, I took them off, and the strength of the draft on my face surprised me, and the smell. I’d forgotten about the scent of the Sound, which had its own particular tang, different from anywhere else in the world, the English Channel or the Mediterranean or the South Pacific—or maybe it didn’t, and that was all in my imagination. Still, it seemed to me as I stood near the bow of the fishing boat, leaning against the deckhouse, that the brine on that wind reached deep inside the wrinkles of my brain, penetrating the furthest regions of the hippocampus to lay its fingertip on certain tender memories therein. Bending over the stern of a lobster boat, hauling cages from a buoy line. Sitting next to a girl at the end of a midnight dock, sharing a bottle of cold champagne. Lying on a beach while the rain coursed upon me and a boy, kissing each other for the last time.

Ahead of me, the Island made a dark, flattened parabola, growing larger by the second until it dominated the horizon and the specks on its surface took on the character of houses. I saw the cluster of buildings around the harbor, the scattering of estates along the shore. I couldn’t see Greyfriars from here—perched as it was on the southeastern corner of the Island—but I knew it still existed, overlooking Fleet Rock and its famous lighthouse. I knew this because of the letter in my pocketbook, which was written on Greyfriars notepaper and signed, in old-fashioned, reproachful copperplate, Your Mother. There was no mention of Isobel, but I knew she existed, too. There could be no Greyfriars without Isobel, could there?

Without thinking, I turned to address the fisherman, and his face went rigid with shock at the sight of me, now unhidden by sunglasses. “An accident,” I said, touching the bruised flesh around my left eye and my cheekbone. “An automobile accident,” remembering to use the American term—accident—instead of the British one, smash. A car smash, which is an interesting difference, you know. To call it an accident implies an absence of intent, nobody’s fault, a tragic mistake. A smash is just that. Makes no judgment on how the thing happened, or why.

“I’m sorry, ma’am.” He returned his attention to the direction of the boat. (Like I said, a stoic lot.)

“These things happen,” I said. “I was going to ask you a question, if you don’t mind.”

“Fire away.”

“Do you happen to know who keeps the Fleet Rock lighthouse, these days? I used to summer on the Island, many years ago, and I was just wondering.”

“The Fleet Rock lighthouse? Why, that would be old Mrs. Vargas,” said the fisherman, without changing expression, without turning his attention from the water before us.

“What about Mr. Vargas?”

“I’m afraid he’s passed on, ma’am. Just a few months ago. One winter too many, I guess.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“He was a good man. A good lobsterman.”

I laughed politely. “Isn’t that the same thing?”

He laughed too. “I guess it is, ma’am. I guess it is.”

We said nothing more, all the way into the harbor, and I gave him another five dollars to keep quiet about the woman with the black eye and the sunglasses who was asking questions about Fleet Rock lighthouse. He put the Lincoln in his pocket and asked if he could help me with my suitcase. I said no, I was just heading into the general store across the street from the marina. He wouldn’t take no for an answer, though, so I let him carry the suitcase anyway. Men sometimes like to make themselves useful that way, I’ve found, and you might as well humor them.

Inside the store, I absorbed the familiar, particular odor of dust and spices, and the scent gave me another jolt of exquisite pain to the solar plexus. There’s something about the smells of your childhood, isn’t there? Even when that childhood was short and flavored by bitterness and ended in catastrophe, in a disaster of devastating proportions, you still remember those small, sublime joys with an ache of longing. Because there’s no getting it back, is there? You can’t return to a state of innocence. So I waited patiently for the old woman behind the soda fountain to hustle and bustle her way around her shelves, her cabinets, her rows of merchandise, until at last she noticed my presence and apologized.

“It’s no trouble at all,” I said.

At the sound of my voice, her face changed, in much the same way as the fisherman’s had. Her mouth made a perfect hole of surprise. “Deus meu! Miranda Schuyler?” she said in wonder.

“The prodigal returns.” I removed my sunglasses.

“Oh dear! What is this thing that has happened to your face?”

“There was an accident. A car accident. I thought I might find someplace quiet to lick my wounds. I hope you don’t mind.”

Her voice was soft with pity. “No, of course. Of course not.” She paused delicately. “Do they know you are coming? At Greyfriars? Your mother, she was here yesterday, and she said nothing to me.”

“I thought I might surprise them. I don’t suppose your husband still drives his delivery van, does he?”

“Ah, poor Manuelo, he is gone now.”

“Oh! I’m so sorry. I didn’t think.”

“But I can drive you this far. My daughter Laura will keep the store for me. Laura! You remember Laura, don’t you?”

“Naturally I remember Laura. I remember everybody and everything. How could I forget?”

We exchanged a look of deep, futile understanding that lasted as long as it took for Mrs. Medeiro’s daughter, Miss Laura, scatter-haired and dumpy in a floral housedress, to emerge from some back room, clasp her hands, and express her absolute astonishment that the great Miranda Schuyler had returned to the Island at last, that she stood right here in the middle of their humble store.

“Or must we call you Miranda Thomas?” she asked, pretending not to eye the shiner that disfigured the left side of my face.

“Just Miranda will do. I’m here unofficially, you understand.”

“Ah, I see.” She smoothed her hair with one hand and looked at her mother, and some communication passed between them, to which Mrs. Medeiro replied with a small shrug. Miss Laura picked up a dishcloth and put it down again. I was opening my mouth to speak when she burst out, “What was it like to kiss Roger Moore?”

“Laura!” snapped her mother.

I slipped the sunglasses back over my eyes. “Just exactly as you might think,” I said.






We were halfway to Greyfriars before I asked Mrs. Medeiro about her grandson, and she took her time to answer me.

“He’s well,” she said, “the last I heard.”

“He never did answer any of my letters. I wrote and wrote.”

“He thought this was best. There was no hope, you see.”

I set my elbow on the edge of the window, which was rolled down all the way to allow the May breeze inside the fish-smelling cab. I might have looked out toward the sea, which was darkening into a purple twilight, but I didn’t. I knew what was out there, the cliffs dropping away into the water, and Fleet Rock like a dream against the horizon.

Mrs. Medeiro changed gears to thrust the old van up the slope. “You have heard the news, yes?”

“That he escaped from prison? Yes, I heard.”

“Is that—” She bit herself off and rattled her thumbs against the steering wheel.

“Is that why I’ve come back, you mean? Because of Joseph escaping from prison?”

“I’m sorry. It’s your business, why you’re here.”

“It’s a logical question. I don’t blame you for asking. I mean, he’s bolted from his prison, and now I’ve—well, here I am, fresh from London.”

“So you are here for him?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Oh.” Mrs. Medeiro glanced at me. “I just—well, the police already came, the detectives, the marshals. I mean, they searched everywhere. They could not find him.”

“I don’t suppose you happen to know where he went?”

She shrugged. “Who really knows about Joseph? He always keeps his own mind.”

“That’s not an answer, Mrs. Medeiro,” I said.

“No, I guess not.”

I took off the sunglasses and folded them into my pocketbook. We had nearly reached the Greyfriars drive, and my fingers were shaking, shaking, my heart was thundering. I had thought, after so many years, I should approach the house like an old friend with whom you had quarreled long ago and since forgiven so far as to forget what the quarrel was about. But now I glimpsed the stone wall, crumbling to bits, and the gap through which I had walked so often, and the mighty, unkempt rhododendrons, and I was eighteen again—exactly half as old as my current age, now there’s symmetry for you—and knew nothing about keeping your emotions in check, your spirit under exquisite control. I gripped the handles of my pocketbook and counted the pulse of my breathing, as my husband had once trained me to do, yet still the flutter remained and worsened into dizziness.

“Is everything okay, Miranda?” asked Mrs. Medeiro quietly. “Should I stop the car?”

“No, thank you. Drive right on up to the door, if you don’t mind.”

We turned down the drive and the tires crunched on the gravel, bounced over the ruts, dove into the potholes. In earlier days, the Greyfriars drive was an impeccable thing, almost as smooth as asphalt, and Mrs. Medeiro, after one particularly bone-crunching jolt, was moved to apologize for the fall in standards, almost as if she had some responsibility for them.

“Things aren’t the same at Greyfriars, you know,” she said.

“I don’t imagine they are.”

“I think there is not much money now. You know they take in boarders.”

“Do they? I didn’t know that. Mother never mentioned it in her letters.”

“She is proud. They don’t call them boarders. It is—oh, what is it called? An artist colony.”

“Oh, of course. How lovely. Artists. Shame they aren’t gardeners, as well.”

We passed the last, the largest rhododendron of all, from which I kept my eyes carefully averted. The sun was gone now anyway, and everything had disappeared into shadow. Even Greyfriars, as it slid into view, was an anticlimax: just a long, dark shape containing a few specks of light. I found I was able to breathe again. Mrs. Medeiro pulled around the semicircle and brought the van to a rusty stop.

“Should I wait?” she asked.

“There’s no need.” I plucked my suitcase from the back and waved her away. She must have understood me, because she obeyed, and I waited until the headlights had disappeared around the corner of the rhododendron before I turned to stand before the front step. The light was off, or else the bulb was gone, and I couldn’t see much, just that the paint seemed to be peeling from that large front door, and I could no longer tell if it was black or green.

Then it swung open.

“My goodness! Who—”

Because of the light from the doorway, I couldn’t see the face of the woman who stood before me. But I knew who it was. There could be no Greyfriars without her, after all.

“Isobel,” I said. “It’s Miranda.”




JUNE (#ud797c697-ce90-5c4c-9fad-0137d083aa9a)











1930 (BIANCA MEDEIRO) (#ulink_fb76b6d1-7478-5974-9ae5-e8aa339ff037)

1.


HE IS THE most beautiful boy she’s ever seen, more beautiful than Valentino or Errol Flynn or Lindbergh. She crosses herself when she sees him sailing his slim racing yacht up and down the Fleet Rock channel with Peter Dumont, because of the danger and because of the way the sun glints on his blond hair, an effect so brilliant she observes it all the way from the little bluff at the top of West Cliff Road, where she goes to watch them in the afternoon. In her imagination, the sun is anointing Mr. Fisher as its own, and only the devil himself could plant such a blasphemous thought in her head. So she crosses herself.

Today Tia Maria needs her in the store, however, so there is no need for guarding oneself against the devil. The Families have been arriving on Winthrop Island for the summer, one by one, by ferry and by private yacht, and so Bianca and her cousins must fill the shelves with the goods Tio Manuelo has ordered from the mainland: canned peas and canned peaches and canned sardines in olive oil, saltine crackers and Campbell’s tomato soup, Ivory soap and Clorox bleach, Ovaltine and Quaker oats and cornflakes, cantaloupe and pippin apples and bananas, Morton salt and Ceylon cinnamon, bags of flour and sugar and Calumet baking powder, Pond’s cold cream and Listerine and aspirin (lots of aspirin), gardening gloves and razor blades, distilled white vinegar that is really vinegar, distilled white vinegar that is not really vinegar but kept on a shelf behind the wooden counter for particular customers, whom Tio Manuelo serves himself.

The weather turned hot this week, the first week of June, and even though Tia Maria keeps the door wide open to usher in the salt breeze from the harbor, the atmosphere remains stuffy and smells of sawdust. Bianca stacks the soup cans in neat, long rows—tomato and vegetable and cream of mushroom—because canned soup is very popular with the Families, for some reason. She prefers the soups Tia Maria makes from scratch and simmers all day in an iron pot on the stove, full of herbs and vegetables and shellfish, whatever’s fresh from the sea, but the Families like their food bland, apparently. Bland and stale and rich, just like themselves. She crosses herself when she thinks this—the Families are the Island’s lifeblood, after all, and Tio Manuelo makes all his profit in the summer from cans of soup and boxes of saltine crackers—but it’s true.

Except for young Mr. Fisher, of course. There’s nothing bland or stale about him.

She knows all about him. He lives in a rambling house not far from the village, all by itself overlooking Fleet Rock, and so new that—in certain corners shielded from the weather, anyway—the cedar shingles haven’t yet faded to gray. The family is not quite so distinguished as those who live at the other end of the Island, the eastern end, where the Winthrop Island Club and its magnificent golf course stretch out over a hundred precious green acres. The Fisher money is too new, Tio Manuelo says sagely over dinner, but give it time. Money ages with remarkable speed. Already Mr. Fisher has been to Harvard, where he became friends with the sons of all the correct families, such as Peter Dumont. There’s even a rumor going about that Mr. Fisher became engaged over Easter to Peter’s sister, Abigail, but Bianca refuses to believe this. For one thing, Abigail Dumont is twenty-five, three years older than Mr. Fisher, and for another thing she’s tall and wide-shouldered and has no breasts, no feminine qualities at all, a loud, braying voice like a well-bred donkey. While the newspapers call Miss Dumont things like magnetic and incandescent, Bianca’s certain that Mr. Fisher has better taste than that. He spends his mornings on the cliffs between the village and Greyfriars—Greyfriars is the name given to the new Fisher house, for what reason nobody can imagine, other than the color of the cedar shingles as they fade—spends his mornings, that is, with his watercolors and his books, so beautiful that Bianca sometimes cannot even breathe when she sees him there, legs swinging dangerously over the cliff’s edge, his perfect brow compressed in concentration.

She knows many other things. She knows his exact height (five feet eleven and a half inches) and the color of his eyes (as blue as the Mediterranean Sea) and his prowess at sailing, of course, but also at hockey (he was the team captain at Harvard) and at golf, at which he won the Winthrop Island Club championship last summer, the first summer of the Fisher family’s membership. The Dumonts sponsored them. Bianca knows this because her cousin Laura happened to be stepping out with one of the Club caddies last year, at night and in secret, and he knew just about everything you ever wanted to know about the Families, because they, for some reason, thought the caddies had no ears in their heads except to receive commands. Or maybe they thought a ten-cent tip was enough to buy the loyalty of an impecunious college boy. (The Families were cheap tippers, it was part of their ethic.)

Not so Mr. Fisher. He once gave her cousin Manuelo a whole dollar for helping him push his Buick Battistini roadster back to Greyfriars from the village, where it broke down outside the ice cream parlor. How Bianca had envied Manuelo that magical day, as his manly shoulders strained side by side with Mr. Fisher’s shoulders, even though the road ascended some hundred feet in total before it reached the summit on which Greyfriars was built, and the effort must have been enormous. When Manuelo returned, flushed and sweating, she had asked him what they talked about, and his face went carefully blank and he said, Nothing. So she knew Mr. Fisher had confided some secret in Manuelo, and that made her doubly jealous.

In fact, Bianca’s thinking about that August afternoon right now, as she stacks her cans of soup in the hot, musty interior of the Medeiros’ general store on Hemlock Street, right at the harbor’s edge. She’s remembering how Mr. Fisher took off his linen jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, and how strong his back seemed as he bent himself over the graceful rump of the Buick, how his shoulders formed the broad side of a damp, neat triangle that narrowed and then disappeared down the slim waistband of his trousers. She sets down another can of soup and crosses herself, and at that exact instant, by some arrangement of the universe, she hears none other than Hugh Fisher’s young, enthusiastic, unmistakable voice calling out from the front of the store. The coincidence is so remarkable that at first she thinks she’s imagined it.

“Hullo!” he calls again. “Anybody there?”

Bianca waits behind the tall shelf while her heart pounds and pounds, not breathing, waiting for Tia Maria to reply, for one of her cousins to reply. But nobody does.

“Hullo? Francisca? Anybody?”

He’s going to leave. She lifts her hand to smooth her hair, but there’s a can of soup stuck between her fingers, and she bumps her head with it instead. She shoves the soup on the shelf and darts out into the open, just as Mr. Fisher’s turning to the open front door.

“Hello! Mr. Fisher!”

He swivels back, and all at once he’s looking at her, her, Bianca Medeiro and nobody else, and the whole world lights up under the color of his gaze, the wattage of his smile.

“Well, hello,” he says. “I was hoping to buy a bottle or two of vinegar.”




2.


ANOTHER THING SHE knows about Hugh Fisher: last summer, he fell in love with her cousin Francisca, the third and the oldest of Tia Maria and Tio Manuelo’s children, who’s engaged to marry Pascoal Vargas in the autumn. Francisca, who was perfectly aware of Bianca’s infatuation, tried to keep the affair secret for her sake, but Bianca knew almost from the first, when Francisca made some excuse about taking a walk one night last July, and came back flushed and bright-eyed an hour later, smelling of a particular kind of masculine soap that Tio Manuelo doesn’t stock in his store. In truth, Bianca hadn’t really minded. Francisca going to meet Hugh Fisher at night was almost as close as Bianca herself going to meet Hugh Fisher, and when she heard the back door open and squeakily close, she imagined Francisca running up the slope to the cliffs under the moonlight, Francisca embracing Hugh Fisher while the phosphorescent sea pounded beneath them, in a way she couldn’t imagine Mr. Fisher embracing so distant an object as Miss Dumont. By touching Francisca’s skin the next morning, Bianca felt she was somehow touching Mr. Fisher.

And another thing. Last summer Francisca was fully grown, nineteen years old, lush and beautiful, and Bianca was only sixteen, her period had just started the previous winter, and her face was round and spotty and childlike. As she lay throughout July and August in the little bedroom she shared with her cousins, listening to their clandestine comings and goings, she was happier imagining making love to Hugh Fisher as beautiful Francisca than she would have been to actually make love to him as herself. It was safer and infinitely more pleasant.

Then came the end of summer, when the Families all returned to their houses in New York and Boston and Providence and Philadelphia, including the Fishers. Francisca moped to devastating effect. She appeared at the dinner table tearstained and listless, eating nothing, and she completed her chores like one of those machines in a factory, without joy. When she accepted Pascoal Vargas’s proposal at Christmas, everybody thought she finally saw sense, because the color returned to her cheeks, and her hips reacquired their old sway, and she plunged herself into the assembling of her trousseau, the most elaborate and comprehensive trousseau in the history of the Medeiro women, because Pascoal Vargas had made a great deal of money in his lobster boat during the past few years, a great deal, and now he has just received the appointment to keep the Fleet Rock lighthouse come October. Francisca will live in luxury, almost, so what if her devoted husband-to-be is past forty years old and resembles nothing so much as a leathery, dark-haired gnome? Who cares about romance when you’ve got a fiancé with money in the bank and a steady, respectable job?

But Bianca’s not so sure.

Bianca hasn’t missed the new brightness of her cousin’s eyes, now that the Fishers have returned to Winthrop Island. She hasn’t missed the way Francisca makes excuses to go walking in the cliffs above the village, or offers to help her brother Manuelo make the rounds throughout the Island in their father’s old Model T delivery truck. And this summer is a whole new summer. Francisca’s engaged, she’s practically a matron, and Bianca has finally achieved that transformation of which young girls dream, from duckling into swan. Over the winter, her spots disappeared and her face became luminous and refined, her hair grew in thick and her small, dainty body rounded out in all those places men admire. As Easter passed and the blossoms came out and the harsh New England air turned soft and warm, as she prepared to graduate from the tiny Winthrop Island School and turn free, Bianca felt her hour had struck. Her blood sang in her veins, she woke restless every morning. She felt that something grand beckoned around the corner, the future for which she was destined.

All she needed was a sign.




3.


IS THIS THE sign? Hugh Fisher standing right there in the front of the store, a foot or two away from the wooden counter with the vinegar-not-vinegar hidden inside, wearing a blue seersucker suit that made his eyes even bluer than she remembered? Already his skin is golden with sunshine and pink with heat, and his shiny blond hair reminds her of the helmet of Apollo. (She will cross herself later.)

Bianca tucks a loose strand behind her ear. Tia Maria won’t let them bob their hair, she absolutely refuses to let her girls turn fast like all the others, so Bianca arranges hers in a loose knot at the back of her head and then pulls out the dark, curling locks at the sides, so that the silhouette approximates that of Clara Bow.

“What kind of vinegar do you need, sir?” she asks politely, though her heart knocks like crazy next to her lungs, making speech difficult.

His smile turns sheepish. “Well, now. I’ve heard you stock a special kind of vinegar here, and I’m all out. Fellow was supposed to make a delivery at the Greyfriars boathouse last night and he never turned up.”

Bianca glances anxiously at Tio Manuelo’s sacred counter and back to Hugh Fisher’s lips. (She can’t quite meet his gaze, not until her nerves stop jumping like this, not until she can keep her eyes from filling with tears at the perfection of his beauty, so close as to be within reach.) “I’m afraid I don’t know much about vinegar,” she says.

“No, of course not. A sweet young thing like you. Is your father here?”

“My uncle,” she says, hot with shame. A sweet young thing! Hasn’t he seen she’s a woman now, a swan? Hasn’t he noticed her luminous skin and her shining hair, the glorious new curves to her breasts and her hips? All the boys are noticing her now, the men too, but she hasn’t looked back at any of them, not one. This blossoming beauty of hers is meant for only one man in the world, and he stands before her now, and he won’t look, he won’t see.

“Your uncle. If he’s in the back, I can find him.”

“He’s away.”

“There’s nobody else here? Just you?”

“Yes,” Bianca says, though she’s not quite sure on this point. Laura and Tia Maria were both here a moment ago. Where have they gone? Into the back garden to sneak a cigarette or two?

“I see.” He looks at her kindly, as if she’s a simple child, as if she’s nothing more than the sweet young thing he called her, and reaches into the inside pocket of his seersucker jacket. “Then perhaps you can give him my card. Here, I’ll write my telephone number on the back. Can you give this to him for me?”

He sticks the pencil stub back in his pocket and holds out the card with his strong, smooth fingers. Bianca reaches out and takes it, and when her fingertips inevitably brush against his fingertips, the sensation travels all the way up her arm and down her ribs and her stomach to her legs. She breathes in deeply to smell Mr. Fisher’s particular shaving soap, which doesn’t belong to any of the soap Tio Manuelo stocks on his shelves. The scent is like magic to her. She even wavers on her feet, so intoxicating is this flavor.

“Are you all right?” Mr. Fisher asks, in a voice of true concern.

“Yes, I’m all right.” Fully drunk now, she opens her eyes, which were closed in appreciation of Mr. Fisher’s soap, and this time she meets his gaze, his dazzling blue eyes, and she watches in triumph as they widen, like the flare of a match.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t believe I know your name.”

“It’s Bianca. Bianca Medeiro.” She tucks the card into the pocket of her pinafore apron. “And I think I know where to find your vinegar, Mr. Fisher.”




4.


HUGH FISHER WALKS away with two bottles and an order for more, whatever Tio Manuelo’s got, and Bianca promises to deliver this merchandise herself. To the boathouse, he says. There’s a hatch door on the ceiling, you’ll find it. Before he leaves, he takes her hand and kisses it, first on the back and then—turning it reverently over—in the middle of her palm.

He curls her fist to trap the kiss inside, and he says, in a voice of deep sincerity, “It’s been a pleasure, Miss Medeiro. Until we meet again?”

“Yes,” she answers breathlessly, and for the rest of the day, at least six inches of air exist between Bianca’s feet and the ground beneath them. When she settles into bed that night, she cannot sleep. She presses her palm to her lips—she hasn’t washed that blessed hand, of course not—and thinks, At last, at last, it’s the sign that my life has truly begun.

This time, she does not cross herself.





1951 (MIRANDA SCHUYLER) (#ulink_e537fd03-8855-5d55-9caf-b5d2ce6b8251)

1.


ON THE MORNING of my mother’s wedding, I watched a pair of lobster boats crawl across the sea outside my bedroom window, setting their pots while the sun rose. They were some distance apart, one to the east of the Flood Rock lighthouse and one to the west, and I wouldn’t have known they were lobstermen—I knew nothing about fishing in those days—except that I had a pair of binoculars, and I saw them dropping the pots, one by one, from the sterns of their boats. Each pot was attached to a rope, and at the end of the rope was a colored buoy that bobbed cheerfully in the water as the vessel pulled away.

Behind me, my mother stirred. “Is that you, Miranda?” she asked, in a slurred, sleepy voice.

“Yes.”

“What time is it?”

“Only five thirty. Go back to sleep, Mama.”

“What”—mumbling—“so early?”

“Watching the lobster boats.”

She sighed and grunted, the way you do when you’re still half-asleep, and you settle yourself gratefully back on a pillow and close your eyes. “Strange girl, Miranda,” she muttered.

I wondered if she remembered she was getting married today. Sometimes when you sleep deeply enough, you forget everything you ever knew, even your own name, and Winthrop Island is possibly the quietest place in the world at night, except for the pulse of the ocean: so black and velvet that sleep comes as easy as that, as closing your eyes. You fall and fall, like an anchor that finds no bottom, and I don’t believe I have ever again slept as I slept throughout that summer of 1951, in my bedroom at my stepfather’s sprawling house on the Island.

Except, on that morning at the beginning of June, the morning of Mama’s wedding, Hugh Fisher wasn’t quite my stepfather. The fateful summer still lay before me, a reel of film waiting to unspool, and how could I know that I was right now witnessing its first momentous scene? I mean, you never do suspect what inconsequential event will change the course of your life. This particular morning, I only thought about the wedding to come. That was the affair of the day, wasn’t it? The great occasion? Instead of sleeping deeply, I’d woken at dawn after a restless night, and now I knelt by the window, holding the binoculars to my eyes as the lobstermen labored on the water, and the sun climbed drowsily above the ocean.

I watched the lighthouse change color, from violet to palest pink to gold, and the surrounding rocks emerge from shadow, and the little buoys multiply in long, bobbing lines behind the boats. I watched the lobstermen shift about. In the easternmost boat, there were two of them: one short and broad-shouldered, wearing a striped shirt and a knitted cap; the other taller and leaner and bareheaded, hauling the wooden cages into the water while his shipmate baited them.

In the second boat, the one to the west, there was only one old man. He moved slowly, dropping maybe one trap for every three from the other boat, and as the light grew I saw the bulge of his tattooed arms, the silvery beard that grizzled around his face. He was nearly bald and chewed a pipe, and in my head I named him Popeye. I thought there was something awful and tragic about the way he baited each pot, attached line and buoy, and dragged it over the edge of the boat. Or maybe I only endowed him with those qualities in retrospect. Memory’s funny that way. At any rate, the eastern boat ran out of pots or something, because it turned around and started back for the harbor, disappearing behind the Flood Rock lighthouse for an instant or two and then reappearing, its white sides brilliant in the glare of the sun. At the same time the boat flashed back into view, Popeye was swinging another lobster pot over the side of his boat, and maybe a wave jogged him, or maybe he lost his footing, I don’t know. I’d returned my gaze to the other boat by then, and the lithe, bareheaded, carefree man who now stood at the wheel—a young man, arms and face richly tanned, curled hair whipping in the draft—so I never knew why Popeye went flying into the sea. I just saw the young man jolt, saw him turn his head and yell at his shipmate, saw him bend and yank off his rubber boots, and the next thing I knew he was diving into the water in a long, clean arc.

Now, I’ve heard many times that most fishermen don’t know how to swim, as a matter of superstition or something. If that’s true, this particular fisherman wasn’t the superstitious kind. A hundred yards is a long way to swim, especially in the cold northern waters of early June, but he swam them just like he was stroking laps in the YMCA pool, regular and sure of arm, minding not the distance or the chill or the chop of waves. As I knelt there on the floorboards of my bedroom, frozen tight, following his progress through the glass of the binoculars, he made a final surge and dove under the surface, right where Popeye had just ceased to flail and resigned himself to sinking, and I thought, God save us, how is such a skinny fellow going to drag a stocky, solid artifact like Popeye back to fresh air?

I held my own breath in solidarity with the two of them. My arms began to shake, so I leaned forward and steadied my elbows on the window frame, keeping that patch of water in view, counting the giant thuds of my heart. When I reached too many, I abandoned numbers and started to whimper.

Please, please, please.

That carefree boy. That poor old man.

Please, Lord, please.

I still remember the silent glitter of the sun on that water. The particular musty-salty-linen smell of that bedroom, newly aired after the winter hibernation, a smell that still recalls the terror of that moment to my mind. And sometimes I think, well, what if they’d never come up again? What if he’d never come up again? What if those two lobstermen had drowned together on the morning of my mother’s wedding, young and old, a terrible tragedy overclouding a day of promise, and I never knew either of them?

I guess there’s no answer to that question. Because just as I started to panic, to lower the binoculars and rise from my knees and shout for help, they exploded together through the glittering waves like a single breaching whale. The younger man lunged for a rope hanging off near the stern of Popeye’s boat, hauled Popeye over the side, hauled himself. Thwacked Popeye a good one right on the back, so Popeye vomited up a few gallons of cold salt water.

Then he grabbed the wheel of the boat with his left hand and the throttle with his right hand, and he made not for the harbor, a mile away on the sheltered side of the island, but for the nearest dock, Hugh Fisher’s dock, my almost-stepfather’s dock, the dock directly in line from my bedroom window.

Boy, did I rise then. I jumped straight up and ran for the door, ran down the stairs, ran to the kitchen, shouted at the kitchen maid to call the doctor, call the doctor, boat coming in, a man near drowned. A lobsterman.

Her pink face went round with amazement. “Who?” she cried.

“Some old fellow, out by himself!”

“Golly, that’ll be Mr. Silva!” She spun for the telephone hanging on the wall, and I threw open the kitchen door and ran down the soft green lawn, past the swimming pool, past the big white tents awaiting the wedding, past the boathouse, and down the wooden dock, where the breeze blew on my cheeks and the sun drenched me, and the drone of the lobster boat’s engine filled my ears like the sound of a thousand approaching honeybees.




2.


MY FATHER NAMED me Miranda. He was a teacher at a pureblood girls’ boarding school in Virginia: not an English teacher, as you might expect from a name like that, but an art teacher. Painting, mostly, although he also taught sculpture, as the traffic allowed.

Still, he loved books, especially old ones. He taught me to read when I was very small, two or three years old, and by the time I was five we were decanting Shakespeare aloud to each other, each of us taking parts. We sat in his study, a fusty, tiny, comfortable room with large windows. I took the leather chesterfield sofa while he filled the armchair nearby. We drank cocoa and the air smelled of chocolate and leather and especially books—you know the smell I mean—I don’t know if it’s the ink or the paper or the glue in the bindings, but it’s a very particular odor. I still smell it, somewhere in my memory, and it carries me back to that room and the sound of my father’s voice as he began John of Gaunt’s dying speech—

Methinks I am a prophet new inspired

And thus expiring do foretell of him …

He had a beautiful round baritone, and as he sat there in his armchair and spoke, one leg crossed over the other, wearing his soft shirt and tweed jacket and woolen vest while his blue eyes fixed not on the page—he knew the words—but upon or rather through the opposite wall of the study, I might have thought he really was the Duke of Lancaster, the great Plantagenet prince, splendid in his despair. To my mind, there was no man more heroic than my father.

This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,

Dear for her reputation throughout the world,

Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it

(here his voice shook with agony)

Like to a tenement or pelting farm:

England, bound in with the triumphant sea

Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege

Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame …

And he named me Miranda. Prospero’s daughter, raised alone by her magician father on an uncharted island of fairies and strange creatures. I used to wonder why he chose that particular character, that particular daughter, that particular play. I think it had something to do with the sea, which he always loved, and with tempests, which also fascinated him. There may be more than that, but I’ll never know. He embarked for England—“This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this precious stone set in the silver sea”—on the second day of November 1943, when I was ten years old, and I last glimpsed him waving at the rail of a gray-painted troop ship, before it dissolved like a ghost into the dark mist of New York Harbor. That was all.

Still, I don’t think I’ve ever forgiven the sea for swallowing up my father like that. As I stood there at the end of the Greyfriars dock, watching the lobster boat tear toward me, the drone of its engine filled me with an unnamable thrill. Terror or joy, I couldn’t tell. It just seemed to me that watery Neptune, having swallowed my father, was now spitting something back eight years later.

Something in the shape of a stripling boy with dark, curling hair and tanned skin, who could rescue a man from drowning.




3.


NOW, I DIDN’T know much about boats in those days, but I knew enough to grab the rope the young man tossed me and loop it tight around one of the bollards. The tide was high and slack, and the boat rode only a foot or two beneath the wooden planks. Inside the boat lay Popeye, coughing and wheezing, bleeding all over the place from I don’t know where.

The young man lifted Popeye in his arms and hoisted him up toward the dock, where I hooked my arms around his shoulders and dragged him away from the edge. He was heavier than I thought, made of wet, compact bone and muscle, and my bare feet slipped against the wood. “Careful!” exclaimed the young man, leaping up beside me, and he tore open Popeye’s shirt and checked his heart, his breath, because he’d stopped wheezing and now lay limp in my arms.

“The doctor’s on his way!” I gasped out. “I saw you from the window.”

“Ah, Jesus Mary. His arm.”

I looked at Popeye’s left arm, which was bent horribly, leaking blood.

“Here,” said the youth, “hold it steady while I lift him. Can you do that? One, two, three.”

I scrambled to my feet and bent to cradle Popeye’s elbow while the young man scooped him carefully upward, lifting that weathered old fellow like—I don’t know—like a knight would lift a damsel. Now I could see the bone sticking through the skin, through the wet plaid shirt, but I wasn’t going to be sick, oh no. I thought, the nurses in the war saw far worse, didn’t they? Some nurse maybe tended my father. They hadn’t flinched, and neither would I. I laid Popeye’s arm across his middle as best I could, and we started down the dock to the lawn. Popeye remained still. I prayed he wasn’t dead. The sun hit the side of my face as we loped up the slope of the lawn, past the boathouse and the tents, up the steps of the terrace and around back to the kitchen, where the maid was waving for us.

“Put him right here, Joseph! I cleared the kitchen table. Doctor’ll be a minute. Oh Jesus Mary!” she cried. “Look at him! What happened?”

Down he went on the table. Joseph checked his chest again and swore. Bent over his face and pinched his nose and laid his mouth on Popeye’s mouth, breathed the air of his own lungs into Popeye’s lungs while the maid ran for kitchen towels or something. I just stood there, holding Popeye’s arm together, not knowing what else to do. After a breath or two, Popeye started to heave, and Joseph rolled him quick on his side. Out came another quart or so of water, more sputtering, a groan of misery, and the doctor burst through the door right that second, dressing gown flapping around his legs, thank God.




4.


THERE HAS NEVER been any such thing as a hospital on Winthrop Island, as I later learned. Either you were sick enough to head for the hospital on the mainland, or you made do in your bed at home. This doctor—Dr. Huxley—didn’t have a regular practice here. He was a summer resident who made himself available for emergencies on the understanding that he wasn’t to be disturbed during cocktail hour or golf.

Lucky for Popeye, the good doctor was an early riser who just happened to live half a mile up Winthrop Road from Greyfriars. He set Popeye’s broken arm and stitched up the holes in his hide, and Mr. Fisher had him put up in one of the guest bedrooms with strict instructions to watch for signs of pneumonia.

“What about his family?” I said. “Shouldn’t we telephone them or something?”

Joseph looked down at me kindly. “He hasn’t got any family. Wife died two years ago. Kids moved to the mainland.”

“Oh, that’s a shame.”

“That’s the way it is on the Island, I guess. Kids move away.”

He was blushing a little, looking down at me, and I realized I still wore my old green flannel nightgown, which was wet with seawater and blood and stuck to my skin. I crossed my arms over my chest. Mr. Fisher and Dr. Huxley were upstairs with the maid, settling the patient in some spare bedroom or other. The kitchen was growing warm as the sun penetrated the window glass, and I noticed the smell of something baking, something sugary and vanilla-scented, something for the wedding, so I supposed the oven was on, too, adding to the general heat. I stared at the kitchen table, which Joseph had helped me clean up just now, dishcloths and hot water and vinegar that still stained the air. All immaculate, erased, you’d never know what happened. Just any old big kitchen on any old big summer estate. Two people standing in awkward proximity, like a pair of actors who’ve lost their place in the script.

Joseph started to turn away, toward the door.

“Want some coffee?” I said.

“Have you got any made? I mean you needn’t make fresh.”

“I think so.” I went to the electric percolator on the counter and lifted it. Heavy. Behind me, there was a faint scrape of a chair leg on the linoleum. I opened up a few cabinets, looking for coffee cups.

Joseph cleared his throat. “You must be the daughter, then. Mrs. Schuyler’s daughter.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Well, I’m sure sorry I ruined the big day for you.”

“Oh gosh, that’s nothing. I mean, he’s alive, isn’t he? That’s got to be good luck. Thanks to you. The day’s not ruined at all. Do you want cream or anything?”

“I’ll get it.”

The chair scraped again, and from the corner of my eye I saw him step to the icebox and open the door. He stood about an inch under six feet, and he still wore his yellow oilskin overalls atop his wet shirt, though his hair was beginning to dry in soft little waves around his ears. I turned toward him and offered the coffee cup.

“Thanks,” he said, dribbling a bit of cream from a small blue pitcher. “You?”

“Yes, please.”

He moved the pitcher over my cup and tilted it so the narrowest possible rope of yellow-white cream fell inside. “Say when.”

“When.”

He moved away, putting the cream back in the icebox, and I turned to the window so he wouldn’t catch me looking at the place where his hair met the back of his neck. I didn’t know much about boys, had hardly spent any time around a boy, and I couldn’t tell how old he was. Twenty? Twenty-one? Older than me, for certain. Though his skin was fresh and unlined, there was something fully grown about his shoulders, something wide and weight-bearing. And his voice had an easy, mature timbre, not like a boy’s voice at all.

Older than me. Maybe not all that much, but enough. Not a boy, after all, but a grown-up, a man who worked for his bread, whereas I was still a child, only just graduated from school. Eighteen last February. Eighteen going on eight, as unworldly as a kitten in a basket.

I stirred my coffee and sucked the spoon. Joseph came up next to me, not too close, and said, “How do you like the Island? You came up the other night, didn’t you?”

“Oh, it’s beautiful.” I set the spoon on the saucer. “How did you know? When I came up, I mean.”

“Miss Schuyler, here’s the first thing you need to know about the Island. Everyone knows each other’s business. All of it, about five minutes after it happens, if not sooner. Spreads through the air or something.” He paused to sip his coffee. “Also, I saw Isobel driving you back from the ferry.”

“Oh, of course.”

The window overlooked the lawn and the tents. Sometime during the fuss of the past hour, an old rust-red Ford truck had driven onto the grass, and a couple of men were now unloading crates from the back. Crystal and china, I guessed. I could just see the edge of the dock, and the tip of Popeye’s boat tethered up on the other side against the pale blue sky.

“It’s got the whole island buzzing,” Joseph said.

“What has?”

“Why, the wedding. Mr. Fisher’s a big man around here.”

I shifted my feet and looked down at the still, muddy surface of my coffee. “I don’t really know him that well. He’s been awfully nice to Mama.”

“I hear they met at your school? Your mother and Mr. Fisher?”

“Yes. Last year.” I paused, and the silence seemed so heavy and almost rude, given the tender, friendly way he’d asked the question, I rushed on. “At Isobel’s graduation? One of the events. I don’t really know which one, there’s so many of them, ceremonies and parties and things. My mother was a secretary in the president’s office, you see, ever since my father—well, since my father …” I stuttered to a stop, brought up short in the middle of all that flustered babbling by the thought of my father.

“Killed in the war, wasn’t he?” Joseph said, without embarrassment.

“Why, how did you know?”

“Like I said, the Island’s been talking about this for weeks, Miss Schuyler. Not that I listen to gossip much. But you can’t help hearing a few things, even without trying. My grandmother, she runs the general store in town. There’s nothing she doesn’t know.”

I glanced at him, and though he stared straight ahead, holding the cup to his lips like he was fascinated by the unloading of crystal and china, I thought he was smiling a little.

“Is that so?” I said. “What else have you heard?”

“Oh, just this and that.”

You know, it’s a funny thing. I didn’t know this boy, this man. Just his name and face and approximate age, and the fact that he trapped lobsters for a living, that he could swim, that he was the kind of fellow who would jump in the sea to save another fellow from drowning. He was a stranger, but he wasn’t. We’d held a bleeding, broken man between the two of us; we’d watched the eternity of life pass before us. Now we shared a pot of coffee. Stared out the same window, breathed the same air. So he wasn’t a stranger, but he was.

I set down my cup and turned around to hop up and sit on the counter. The clock on the opposite wall pointed its sharp black hands to a quarter past seven. A quarter past seven! I thought I’d lived a lifetime. I crossed my arms over my disgraceful nightgown and said—not to Joseph but to the room at large—“He taught at Foxcroft for eleven years. My father. He took a leave of absence to join up, so when he was killed, Miss Charlotte gave Mama a job to make ends meet. She’s like that, Miss Charlotte. Sort of tough and horsey, if you know what I mean, but heart of gold.”

“What did he teach?”

“Art. That’s why he volunteered, because he heard about what the Nazis were doing, looting and destroying all those treasures, and he couldn’t just—couldn’t stand by, he said …”

“A good man, then.”

“He was. Oh, he was. Of course, I was only eleven years old when he died. So maybe I never saw him as a real person, as somebody ordinary and fallen.”

“No,” Joseph said. “He fought for something he believed in. That’s a hero in anyone’s book.”

“Everybody fought. Mr. Fisher fought.”

“Yes, he did. Lucky for your mother, he got out alive, though.”

“Yes, lucky for her.”

“They say she’s a real beauty, your mother.”

“Mama? Oh yes. Haven’t you seen her?”

“Not up close, no. Just the photograph in the local rag.”

“Sometimes I just stare at her, you know, thinking it’s not possible anyone could be that beautiful. She was so young when she married Daddy. Only just eighteen. Can you imagine being a widow at twenty-nine? But she loved him so much, she just couldn’t look at anyone else for ever so long.”

He moved a little, turning his head to look at me. “What about you? Happy about all this?”

“Me? Of course I am. Why shouldn’t I be?”

“No reason.”

“Mama’s happy, the happiest I’ve ever seen her, at least since Daddy died. You can’t mourn forever, can you?”

“That’s true.”

“And I guess Mr. Fisher loves her back, because he’s not marrying her for money, that’s for certain.”

“A real Cinderella story, then.” He finished his coffee and moved to the sink. Rinsed out his cup. “Best be off. Got to take Silva’s tub back to the harbor. And Pops’ll be wondering where I am.”

“Can’t you signal him in or something? There’s plenty of coffee left.”

He smiled. “Pops’d never come in here. Not Greyfriars.”

“Really? Why not? Mr. Fisher’s not some kind of snob, is he?”

“A snob? No, nothing like that. I’ll say this about the Island. The Families and the locals, they respect each other, which is more than you can say of a lot of places like this.”

“The Families?”

“Summer residents. Like you.” He wiped his fingers on a dishtowel and held his hand out to me. “Real nice to meet you, Miss Schuyler. Wish it could have been under friendlier circumstances, of course, but it’s been a pleasure all the same.”

I slid down from the counter and shook his hand. “It’s Miranda.”

“Miranda.” He smiled again. “Admired Miranda! Indeed the top of admiration! Worth what’s dearest to the world.”

I snatched at the edge of the counter behind me. I think my mouth made an amazed circle. Outside the window, which was cracked open an inch or two, the birds sang like mad, thrilled to pieces at the beauty of the morning, and Joseph just stared at me like we were sharing a secret, and he was waiting for me to find out what it was.

Finally I said, “Why, how do you know—”

“Joseph! My goodness, what’s going on?”

We turned to the doorway, where Isobel Fisher stood, long limbed and done up in curlers, her yellow dressing gown belted at the waist.




5.


I MET ISOBEL Fisher at the same instant I stepped onto Winthrop Island for the first time, two nights before the wedding. The morning storms had cleared away, and the breeze was cool and smelled of ozone, of the ocean. She had come to meet the ferry, and when I saw her, leaning against a massive, venerable Oldsmobile 98, wearing a checked shirt, rolled at the sleeves, and billowy white trousers, I waved from the railing. We might not have known each other, but I recognized her face and the pale, cornsilk shade of her hair. She wore no cosmetics that I could see, except for a swath of cherry-red lipstick, perfectly drawn. I remember she wasn’t wearing a hat.

The ferry’s engines ground and ground, shoving us alongside the dock in lazy, expert thrusts. Isobel’s gaze slid along the line of passengers at the rail, and when she found me at last, still waving, she straightened from the car and waved back. I don’t know if she actually recognized me. As the ferry knocked into place and the ferryman tossed the rope to the fellow on the dock, she swung her car keys from the index finger of her left hand, with no apparent regard for the monstrous diamond that perched a few digits down.

That was Thursday evening, and there weren’t many other passengers. I came last down the ramp, staggering a little under the burden of the two old leather portmanteaus that contained nearly all I owned. My pocketbook banged between my wrist and the handle of the right-hand suitcase. As I reached the bottom and stepped onto the dock, Isobel went around to open up the back. “Just a minute!” she called, thrusting her head and shoulders inside, rummaging around. “I picked up the flowers from Mrs. Beardsley along the way. Was your journey perfectly horrible? I can’t believe you made it all by yourself, you brave thing.”

Her torso emerged from the back of the Oldsmobile. She pushed back her pale hair and reached for one of the suitcases, and without any effort at all she lifted it up and heaved it inside. Even at school, her lean, straight-hipped athleticism had awed me. Nearly all the girls brought their own horses to Foxcroft, but Isobel had brought two—great, rangy, bloodthirsty beasts—and hunted them both all autumn. Once she’d broken her arm in a bad fall, and the sling had somehow suited her.

Not to be outdone, I hauled the second suitcase myself, only more awkwardly. Isobel made a few adjustments, satisfied herself to the security of Mrs. Beardsley’s flowers, and turned around at last. “Can you believe we’re sisters?” she said, in that drawly voice of hers, always faintly amused at something or other. She stood back and held me at the shoulders. “Miranda. Little sister. I simply can’t wait to show you Greyfriars. I can’t wait to show you Winthrop and everything in it.”

But that was two nights ago, and she hadn’t had much time to show me anything yet, because of the wedding and because her fiancé arrived the next afternoon. Clayton Monk. (Yes, those Monks, the department store fortune.) His parents’ house lay at the northeastern end of the Island, four miles away, and we’d all met for dinner at the Winthrop Island Club last night. Sort of a celebration. Mama’s wedding and Isobel’s betrothal, because they’d only just gotten engaged in May, when Clayton graduated from Harvard Law—Hahvahd, the Monks called it, short a, they’re a Boston family—and this was the Club’s first chance to properly congratulate the happy couple.

Well, it was a grand night, all right. Clay Monk was a clean, handsome, well-tailored fellow, you know the type, and Isobel wore a dress of such shimmery pale yellow satin, it looked gold and matched her hair. If I didn’t know any better, I’d have said she was trying to outshine my mother—the actual bride, you’ll recall—but then you haven’t seen my mother, have you? I mean, not up close. Even at thirty-six she was more beautiful than Isobel. I say that without prejudice. Raven hair clean of even a single gray strand, eyes the color of twilight. Picture Elizabeth Taylor, I guess, and you’re not far off. Isobel didn’t stand a chance, even in her golden dress, and maybe she knew it. She laid low, stealing off with Clayton after dinner, and he must have driven her home afterward because when she walked into the Greyfriars kitchen at twenty minutes past seven o’clock on the morning of Mama’s wedding, wearing her curlers and her yellow dressing gown, that was the first I’d seen of her since Clayton wiped a smear of crème anglaise from her chin the night before and led her out on the terrace, where the orchestra played “Sentimental Me.”

Joseph greeted her with a smile you might call familiar. “Morning, Isobel. Nothing much. Just old Silva fell in the drink, and I had to haul him back out.”

“Well, they’re putting him to bed upstairs, awful fuss. I’ve got a terrible hung head. Is that coffee?” She yawned.

“Yes, ma’am.”

She moved to the Welsh dresser that held all the everyday porcelain, planting a kiss on my cheek along the way. “Morning, sister dear. Did he wake you up too?”

I lifted my hand to return the caress, but she’d already slipped away. “I was already awake.”

“Too excited to sleep, were you? What about your mother? I hope she got her beauty sleep, all right. Her wedding day!” Another yawn, and a wince. “I’m sure I’ll be able to appreciate all that sunshine in an hour or two. Hit me, will you?”

She held out her cup to me and smiled. She wasn’t wearing her lipstick yet, but her mouth was still pink. I took the cup and filled it with coffee from the percolator, added cream and sugar from the tin on the counter.

“Thanks, darling,” Isobel said, taking the cup. “Shouldn’t you be heading back to your boat now, Joseph? I’m sure you have plenty of lobsters left to catch this morning. Or maybe college boys are above that kind of thing?”

“College?” I said.

“Joseph’s at Brown.” Isobel looked over the rim of her cup, not at me but at Joseph, who stood before the icebox with his arms crossed. In her drawling, intimate voice, she said, “He’s a rising junior. Isn’t that right, Joseph?”

“Two years to go.” He returned to her some kind of look, I didn’t know what it was. Something warm and knowledgeable, something that connected the two of them, something that made me feel like an absolute stranger in that room, an intruder, an innocent. Which I was, of course. Still, whatever the frisson between them, it lasted only a second or two. Joseph uncrossed his arms and said cheerfully, “Like you said, best be heading back out on the water now. Nice to meet you, Miss Schuyler. Isobel.”

He made a little salute with the first two fingers of his right hand and walked out the kitchen door, whistling a snatch of something, taking all the conversation with him inside a swirl of fresh June air. I watched the window until he came into view. Quick, jaunty stride. Sun striking his head. Isobel turned away.

“Oh, not you too.”

“Me too what?”

She angled her head to the window. “That. Joseph. All the girls on the Island are crazy about him. He lives on the Rock, you know. Flood Rock.”

I turned to her. “The lighthouse? Really? I can see it from my window!”

“His father’s the lightkeeper. Of course, his wife does the actual work, so he can keep on lobstering. Nice little arrangement.” She nodded again to the window, even though you couldn’t see the lighthouse from this angle, tucked away at the side of the house, and I followed the gesture. Joseph was no bigger than a lobster himself by now, although considerably more graceful and less red, striding down the curve of the lawn toward the dock.

“It’s nice they can afford the college tuition,” I said.

“Well, why not? He hasn’t got any siblings. And I guess old Vargas doesn’t think so much of the lobster trade that he wants his son to follow in his footsteps. What about breakfast, do you think? Where’s Esther?”

“Helping them put Mr. Silva to bed, I think.”

She joined me at the window, cradling her coffee in her palms. She smelled of some kind of flower, maybe gardenias, and I thought it must be her soap or shampoo, because who wore perfume at this hour? Joseph had reached the dock. The tide had gone out a little, so the boat kicked against the pilings. He reached down and unwound the rope. Leapt nimbly from the dock to the boat and bent over the wheel, on the other side of the deckhouse, so we couldn’t see him.

I had a thousand questions I wanted to ask Isobel. I wanted to ask about the Island, about her father, about Joseph. About college, about her own mother. Things I’d wanted to ask in the car from the ferry but couldn’t, because Isobel gleamed like sunshine, because Isobel had graduated the year before me at Foxcroft and was therefore so untouchable as to be divine.

Yet there was something a little softer about Isobel this morning, as if her sleek, athletic edges had blurred with sleep in the night, as if the curlers in her hair had made her mortal. She leaned her elbows on the counter and sipped her coffee, staring, like me, at the lobster boat curving its way westward toward the harbor.

“Go ahead and look,” she said. “Just don’t touch.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Isobel lifted herself back up and turned to me. She wore a wry little smile on her pink lips. “You and all the other girls. You can look all you like, I don’t care. Just remember one thing, though.” She leaned forward and spoke softly. “He’s mine.”

“Who’s yours, darling?”

I spun toward the door, where Hugh Fisher stood in a dressing gown of his own—paisley, satin, blue, immaculate—and a helmet of gold hair the same shade as his daughter’s, just slightly the worse for tarnish. For an instant, just that first flash of impression, I thought he looked a little like Clayton Monk.

Isobel went to him and set a kiss into the hollow beneath his cheekbone. “You are, Daddy, and you always will be. But thank God you’ve found a dear, lovely woman to marry this morning, and not some gimlet society goddess from the Club.”

He chuckled and patted her back. “You know I’ve got better sense than that. Has young Vargas left already?”

“Yes, Daddy.” Isobel moved to the Welsh dresser and rummaged for another cup and saucer. “Some poor fellows do have to work for a living, you know. Coffee?”

“Yes, please.” He pulled a cigarette case from the pocket of his dressing gown. “Well, that’s a shame. I wanted to shake his hand, after what he did this morning. He’s a damned fine young man, that Vargas. A credit to the Island.” He lit the cigarette, drew in a long, luxurious breath, and looked at me, smiling vaguely, as if he’d just perceived my existence in the corner by the window. “Ah, there you are, princess. Good morning. I believe you’re wanted upstairs.”

I started forward. “Mr. Silva?”

“Silva? What, what? You don’t mean to say you’ve forgotten the main event of the day, have you?” He laughed, took his cup from Isobel, and beckoned me over. He’d already shaved, and his pink skin smelled of that masculine, expensive soap men use for the purpose, a scent that jolted me because it was exactly the same as my father’s.

I stopped and stared at his left hand, holding the saucer, holding also the cigarette between the first and second fingers. His right hand curled in the air, motioning me closer.

I leaned my head toward him, trying not to breathe. I told myself it was the nearby smoke from his cigarette that repelled me, because I had always liked Mr. Fisher. He was so kind, always so perfectly courteous. He adored my mother, and he had charmed our lives over the course of the past year.

I don’t know if he noticed my hesitation. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, in a confidential voice, “A certain blushing bride has need of her bridesmaid.”




6.


I REMEMBER HOW Daddy used to describe the Foxcroft commencement ceremony. He liked to play this little game. As each girl’s name was called, and she went forward in her white dress to claim her diploma, he would name the product from which her family had achieved its wealth. Miss Ames walked forward, and he thought, Shovels. Then Miss Kellogg—Corn flakes. Miss Vanderbilt, of course, recalled Railroads.

Now, no Fisher girls graduated from Foxcroft while my father taught there, so far as I know, but if they had, he would have said to himself, Toilets. It’s true. Look closely at the throne in your bathroom, and you’ll maybe see the Fisher logo, a stylized F bracketed by the word FINE on the left side and FIXTURES on the other. The company had been founded a hundred years earlier by Hugh Fisher’s great-grandfather, expanded into kitchen and bathroom fixtures generally, and soon straddled the entire Western world by taking keen-eyed advantage of the Victorian hygiene craze. Of course, the Fishers themselves gave up management of the company some time ago—on the death of Hugh Fisher’s father, I believe—and to save the blushes of later generations, the Fisher logo had diminished into that single, magnificent F I just mentioned. But still. Never forget where you came from, I always say.

Anyway, I don’t know if Mama knew much about the source of the Fisher riches. To do her credit, I don’t think she even thought about them, at first. She never did lust for wealth. After all, she’d married my father, hadn’t she, when she could have married for money instead, and you just show me any other woman with her beauty who wasn’t married to a rich man.

As I told Joseph, I don’t remember exactly which tasteful affair on the commencement week calendar threw her together with Hugh Fisher, but I do remember the look on her face when she arrived home afterward. Dazed, smitten. Nothing came of it right away—summer intruded between them, summer and Winthrop Island—but come September, when school resumed again without Isobel Fisher, and Hugh Fisher should have no possible reason to visit Foxcroft Academy, visit he did. Drove right up to our small, shabby house in his graceful silver roadster, top down to reveal the sunshine of his hair, and off they went on a drive somewhere, laughing and gleaming. He stayed discreetly in a hotel nearby, but he took her out to dinner, and he took us both to lunch, and four months later, New Year’s Eve, he asked her to marry him at some gala party in New York, while I stayed home in Virginia and heated up a can of split pea soup for dinner.

And now? Now June had arrived, that month of weddings and roses, and I was buttoning the back of Mama’s tea-length lavender tulle dress, fixing the jaunty birdcage veil that just reached the bottom of her jaw. Downstairs, the guests were assembling in the drawing room, where the French doors had been thrown open to the salt breeze so you might almost be outside. There were only thirty of these guests, because Mr. Fisher’s ex-wife apparently belonged to one of the other Families—as Joseph Vargas called them—and while the Island air wasn’t exactly poisoned by ill will, there still persisted a sense of civilized discretion, without which these clubs and islands couldn’t exist from generation to generation. The Dumonts and their allies, who mostly clustered on the northeastern end of the Island, pretended nothing was going on down along the southeastern end, and on the table in the foyer a few dozen wedding announcements lay stamped and addressed in a beautiful copperplate hand, which would, sometime during the course of tomorrow morning, delicately inform the absentees of today’s doings. You see how it works?

“Dearest Mama,” I said, stepping back. “You’re the most beautiful bride. Mr. Fisher’s just the luckiest fellow in the world.”

“Oh, don’t.” She glanced in the mirror and hastily away. “I still can’t believe it. I woke up pinching myself. I keep thinking it’s all going to disappear. He’s going to disappear.”

“He’s not going to disappear. He’s waiting downstairs for you this minute to make you his wife. It’s all real. This is your life, Mama. A whole new wonderful life for you.”

“For us both, darling.” She laid her hand on my arm, so fiercely I could feel the ridge of her engagement ring as it pressed against my skin. I could smell the powdery, flowery, new-bride smell of her. She whispered, “Do you mind?”

“Mind? Mind what?”

“You know what I mean. We were just two, snug as could be, and now suddenly there’s Hugh and—and Isobel, and everything else. Tell me the truth. If you mind at all, even the smallest bit …”

She left the sentence dangling, of course. No possible way she could articulate that terrible alternative.

I opened my mouth to tell her what I ought to tell her. What I meant to tell her, what I thought I felt, true and deep, bottom of my heart and all that. What a good daughter should say at a moment like this, as her mother stands before a shimmering dreamworld, waiting to enter. What Mama’s violet eyes implored me to say.

I thought of something, just then, as my mouth hung open and the words formed in my throat. I thought of the moment I crawled into her bed after we learned about Daddy, into her hot, tiny bedroom that stank of July, and how bleak those violet eyes had seemed to me then. How wet and curling the lashes around them. She was hardly more than a child herself then; not just physically young at twenty-nine, but childlike. That’s the word. In those days, Mama was one of God’s childlike people, and I offer that as a compliment. Oh, she was clever, there was nothing diminished about her intellect. I guess I mean she was childlike in spirit, the way we’re supposed to be and never really are, lamblike in her innocence, and my father’s death was probably the first time this faith had betrayed her. I remember thinking I’d heard the cracking of her heart in the way her voice cracked and broke as she whispered to me in that terrible moment, and when I embraced her soft, small body, I embraced her more as a sister than a daughter. When we slept at last, we curled around each other for comfort. So it had gone on for seven more years. We had read each other’s thoughts and dreamed often in each other’s beds. We’d laughed and wept, we’d shared books and clothes. When we went to the seaside for a week each summer, everybody just assumed we were sisters, the especially close kind of sisters, by the way we giggled and ate ice cream and gamboled hand in hand in the surf.

So as the old lie formed in my throat, I recognized its untruth by the sting of bile, by the stiffness of my vocal cords as they labored and labored to give birth to the words. And then this gust of fury blew through my chest, stealing even the breath I needed to say them. I thought wildly, like a premonition, This is the end, not the beginning. We’ll never stand like this again, we two.

But my God, I couldn’t actually say such a thing! Not while her enormous violet eyes begged me to say something else. But I couldn’t say those words either, so I just placed my two hands on her cheeks, atop the veil, and kissed her, and in that instant the right words came to me.

I said, “Daddy wouldn’t have wanted you to pine away the rest of your life.”

She nodded frantically. “He was so good.”

“Don’t cry, Mama. Here, have some champagne.” I turned for the silver tray on the dresser, loaded down with bucket and champagne coupes of crystal etched in trailing leaves, and I refilled my glass and Mama’s. Before I handed hers over, while I stood there holding them both in my fingers, fizzing sweetly between us, I said, “You really love him, don’t you?”

“I do, Miranda. I truly love him.”

I gave her the glass and clinked it with mine. “To true love.”

Before I could sip, a soft knock sounded on the door, and Isobel slipped inside the room without waiting for an answer. She wore an identical dress to mine, pale blue and full-skirted to just below the knees, off-shoulder sleeves overlaid by sheer organza. Sweet floral cap nestled in her hair. “Everybody ready in here? Your groom awaits impatiently. Oh my! Don’t you both look lovely. And champagne! Wait! Don’t start without me!”

She rushed to the dresser and poured herself a glass, which finished off the bottle and nearly overflowed the wide, shallow bowl of the coupe. She smelled of cigarettes and flowers and champagne, and when she raised her glass, her eyes glinted with either mischief or wine, I wasn’t sure. “What are we toasting, girls?” she said.

“To true love,” I said.

“Oh yes. To love!”

We clinked and drank, giggling a little, and through the crack in the door came the sound of violins and a dignified cello. Isobel put her arm around Mama’s shoulder and whispered something in her ear, and there was something so intimate about this gesture that I turned my head and stared through the window at the sea, at the Flood Rock lighthouse erupting in the exact center of the frame. A sailboat beat lazily across the channel behind, and in the violent sunshine, the whiteness of its canvas hurt my eyes.




7.


A CERTAIN NUMBNESS gripped me as I followed Isobel down the aisle between the rows of white chairs. I fixed my eyes on Mr. Fisher’s shiny gold head, his hands twisting behind his back, and when a gasp seized the air behind me, as everybody caught sight of my mother in her lavender wedding dress, I heard it down the same narrow tunnel as I heard the Figaro wedding march, rendered delicately by a string quartet in the corner of the room.

Mr. Fisher shared no such reserve. Unable to stop himself, he turned to watch his bride approach, and you should have seen the way his face lit up when he glimpsed her. Oh, they were most certainly in love, the two of them. Even the minister couldn’t help but grin. Mama’s own parents were dead, there was no one to give her away, so she just put her own hand into Mr. Fisher’s hand when she reached him, an act of flagrant self-determination, while I stood to her left and watched the minister’s mouth move. Took Mama’s bouquet of small pink roses when Mr. Fisher required her other hand as well. I don’t remember a single thing anyone actually said. When I think about that wedding today, I remember the pastel colors, the smell of all those flowers, the scrape of impatient chairs, and the dampness of the minister’s lips as he married my mother to Hugh Fisher, amen.




8.


MANY HOURS AFTERWARD—I won’t bore you with the details, I mean a wedding’s a wedding, right?—afterward we slouched on the edge of the dock, Isobel and I, swinging our legs above the twitching sea. A bottle of champagne sat between us, mostly finished. Overhead, a high and brilliant moon illuminated our identical pale blue dresses, illuminated the water and the line of the horizon, illuminated Flood Rock and the stocky lighthouse that thrust from its center.

“The way he carried her aboard.” Isobel shook her head slowly, drunkenly, because she had swallowed twice as much champagne as I had, and I’d swallowed a great deal, I’m afraid. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything half so romantic as that.”

“Isn’t it traditional?”

“Across the threshold of a house, Peaches. Not a yacht.” She had a little trouble with the word threshold, but it came out all right in the end. Peaches had first appeared sometime around sunset, as we started the second bottle of vintage Pol Roger that someone had carelessly left out after the last guest had departed. You’re just as sweet as peaches, Miranda, she told me, filling my unsteady glass, and I guess that’s how nicknames happen, isn’t it? In a strange new world like this, you need a new name, and someone gives you one. Peaches. Because she thinks you’re sweet.

“Well, it was an awfully big yacht,” I said. “Almost as big as a house.”

“Yes. Almost as big as Vanderbilt’s.” She paused solemnly. “Do you know how he used to describe a yacht?”

“No.”

“A hole in the water, into which you pour money.”

“You’ve got to pour it somewhere, don’t you? Otherwise it just sits there in the bank, getting bored and reproducing.”

“Money’s such a lovely thing to have. I don’t know what I’d do without it. Work or something, I guess.” She yawned. “Except what? I’m just like Daddy, no good for anything except decoration and conversation. And dancing. I’m a terrific dancer.”

“Horses,” I suggested.

“But I only know how to ride them. Not to care for them or feed them or anything useful.” She lifted her left hand and admired the diamond on her finger, which glittered in the moonlight. “Can I confess something awful to you?”

I didn’t think there was any need to reply—either way, she was going to tell me—but I said, Of course, just to fill the air.

Isobel wriggled the ring from her finger and held it out before us both. I hadn’t seen it this close until now; I didn’t want to be caught staring at such a thing, like a poor country cousin. Now it was a relief to indulge my curiosity. I saw the central diamond was round, or else slightly oval, about the size of an especially plump raisin and surrounded by smaller dark stones that must have been sapphires.

“I came out here last night, by myself,” Isobel said. “Right on this very spot. Clay and I had a fight after dinner.”

“Oh, I didn’t know that.”

“It was after you left. He drove me home from the Club, and we fought in the car. I can’t remember what it was about. We were both rather drunk.” She laughed. “Surely you noticed today?”

“Didn’t you make up or something?”

“No, of course not. You’ve got to make them stew, Peaches, you’ve got to make them suffer for their sins. Anyway, I came out here last night, all drunk and wretched, and sat on this exact spot on the dock. I took off my ring just like this, and I held it above the water, just like this …”

In the instant before her fingers opened, I saw what she was going to do. I flung out my hand desperately, almost pitching myself into the water, just as her own left hand darted forward to catch the heavy, glittering fall of the ring. Our two hands bumped and the ring bounced from one of those eight outstretched fingers—I’m not sure which—and Isobel gasped. Together we fumbled, and for a terrible, infinite second, the ring crashed crazily between us like some kind of ping-pong ball, off my knuckle and her thumb, the round bone of my wrist, spinning in a strange, weightless midair suspension.

Then somehow, miraculously, Isobel’s hand closed around it.

We both slumped forward over our knees, panting.

“Jesus Christ, Peaches! What the hell were you doing?”

“I thought—”

“For God’s sake, I wasn’t going to drop it!”

“But you did. You did drop it.”

“Not for real.” She straightened and opened her hand to reveal the panes of the diamond, sheltered from the moon by her curled fingers. “I was only imagining, Peaches. You know, picturing what it would be like. I’d never do it for real. What do you take me for? Some kind of dope?”

“Of course not. We’re just—we’re awfully drunk, aren’t we?”

“Awfully. But not that drunk.” She shoved the ring back on her finger. “Listen, Peaches. You mustn’t ever try to save me, all right? I like to sail close to the wind, as close as I can, but I won’t capsize. You know what that means, capsize?”

“Of course I do.”

She laughed. “Don’t be sore. I know you’re not a sailor, that’s all. Capsize means to flip the boat over, Peaches, to land yourself in the drink because you weren’t careful enough. You didn’t know how to save yourself. But I know how to save myself, never fear. I know what I’m doing.”

“All right, then.”

“Don’t be sore,” she said again. She placed her hands on the dock and hoisted herself up to her feet, wavering so deeply I thought she might topple, in the same way her engagement ring had hung above the brink of disaster. But she didn’t. She just yawned. “I’m so dreadfully bored, now that it’s all over. Aren’t you bored, Peaches?”

“Not really. It’s a beautiful night.”

“Well, I haven’t got your brains, I’m afraid. I need a little action to keep me happy.” She turned and started down the dock.

“Where are you going?”

“To the boathouse,” she called back. “For a flashlight.”

She returned in a moment holding this flashlight, which she aimed out to sea in the direction of Flood Rock, switching it off and on in an irregular rhythm. The air was still warm, and a slight salt-laden breeze came off the water, lifting the edges of our dresses.

“Is that Morse code?” I asked.

“Silly. It’s just a private signal.” She lowered the flashlight and stared across the channel. The moon was not quite full, but the sky was so clear that the whole world seemed gilded in silver, and the rocks of the lighthouse etched by so fine a line, I couldn’t breathe for the beauty of it. The light revolved slowly from the top of the building, streaking across our quadrant every ten or fifteen seconds. It arrived twice before Isobel lifted the flashlight and sent another signal.

“Maybe he’s asleep,” I said.

“No, he’s not. He stays up late, reading Portuguese novels to his mother.”

“That’s nice of him.”

“It’s the only thing that puts her to sleep, apparently.” She flashed the signal again and checked her watch. “She’s a queer old bag. But I guess anyone would go a little nuts, living out there on a rock.”

I cupped my elbows with my hands and watched the lighthouse. For what, I wasn’t sure. Some kind of answering signal, I guessed. For some reason, the whole exercise came as not the slightest surprise, as if I’d been expecting some communication of this nature between Isobel and the vital young inhabitant of Fleet Rock, after all that had been said and not said in the kitchen that morning. My dress was damp and dirty and stained by the grass, thanks to a game of croquet that Isobel started up right after Mama and Mr. Fisher had disappeared in their yacht around the tip of Long Island. Headed all the way to Europe together, just the two of them and a silent, devoted crew. Mama wore a beautiful suit of sky-blue summer tweed, and as she’d waved goodbye from the railing, she looked almost too perfect, like somebody had painted her there as a kind of ideal, a magazine advertisement or something, sky-blue dress matching the sky-blue sky, while the deeper hue of the sea cast them in relief. The clean white railing. I imagined I presented a wholly different image, so stained and ragged as I had made myself during the course of the ensuing hours. Now it was almost midnight, and surely we were flashing our torch into a void. Surely the whole Island had gone to sleep, and Joseph Vargas too.

A tiny light flickered from the side of the lighthouse.

Isobel made a triumphant noise and grabbed my hand. “Quick,” she said. “Before he says no.”




9.


JOSEPH VARGAS STOOD on the edge of the small wooden platform that served as the Flood Rock quay. I couldn’t see his face very well because the lighthouse blocked the moon, but I thought he was furious. His voice confirmed this. He called out, not loudly—I guess he didn’t want to wake anyone—but with terrible force.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Isobel? At this hour?”

“Hour, schmour. I’ve brought champagne!” She stood in the bow and held up two bottles, one in each hand.

“You don’t need any more champagne.”

“Maybe not, but I’ll bet you do. Look, I’ve brought my new sister. You remember Peaches, don’t you? From this morning?”

There was a little pause. “Of course I remember Peaches.”

“Well, it turns out she can row. Lucky for me, because I do believe I’d have just gone round in circles, in my ineb—ineeber—in my condition.”

During the course of this speech, I managed to maneuver the boat up to the quay, despite the swift, angry current that wanted to yank us in the opposite direction. Joseph reached in and grabbed the rope next to Isobel’s feet, and with his other hand he lifted her safely to the dock.

“Well, you’re a fool, that’s all. Why’d you do such a crazy thing? Might’ve drowned you both.”

“I’m bored,” Isobel said simply, removing her shoes. She turned and started to scale the steps cut into the rock. The shoes dangled from her left hand. Joseph made a noise of frustration, torn between helping me out of the boat and helping Isobel mount the stairs. He must have figured I stood in greater danger, because he swiftly wound the rope around the bollard and held out his arms to me. I rose to my feet and did my best to appear steady and sober. I don’t think he was fooled. He put his hands on either side of my waist and hauled me through the air to solid ground. I felt a brief sensation of weightlessness, of the world disappearing around me, and then his hands were gone and I stared at the ghostliness of his shirt as he went after Isobel. When he caught her, she laughed, as quicksilver as the moonshine around us.

“What a naughty pair we are,” she said. “Don’t send us back, though. Can’t we just stay a little while?”

Joseph groaned in such a way that I knew this wasn’t the first time they’d enacted this scene. I stood there on the dock and looked up at the pair of them. Took note of the stocky line of his shoulders, covered by the white T-shirt, while the darker color of his arms sort of melted into the rocks. Both hands sat on his hips. Isobel stood a step or two above him, her blond hair made white by the moon. On her face sat an expression of triumph, even though Joseph hadn’t yet capitulated.

He lifted his right hand and dragged it through his hair. “Just a minute or two, all right? Then I’m rowing you back myself.”

“Yes, do. I love watching you row.”

Isobel turned and picked her way through the rocks around the other side of the lighthouse. Joseph turned to me and held out his hand. “Hold on. It’s kind of tricky, if you don’t know where you’re going.”

I slipped off my shoes and gathered them in my hand. “Where are we going?”

“The beach, it looks like.”

“Beach?”

“It’s not much, but it’s ours.”

I reached him on the steps and put my hand in his palm. His fingers closed around mine and he started through the rocks, the same way Isobel had gone. They were damp and slippery—the tide was on its way out—and I couldn’t see the holes and gaps between them. Couldn’t judge my steps so well. I didn’t want to rely on Joseph’s hand, but I had no choice. His palm was rough and strong, a fisherman’s palm, and he kept a solid grip as we clambered through the silvery darkness to the other side of the lighthouse. Once my foot slipped, and he caught me by the elbow. “All right?” he asked, and I was surprised by the closeness of his face, the scent of his breath that suggested toothpaste.

“Yes,” I gasped back.

He turned and led me forward, and over the corner of his shoulder the beach appeared. Beach. Just a scrap of pebble and sand, really, at the bottom of a sac formed by two outcroppings of rock, maybe fifteen feet apart. Isobel lay there, surrounded by the pale tulle waves of her bridesmaid gown, and her shoes in a small pile near her hip. As we drew near, I saw that her stocking feet pointed out to sea, and her head rested on her folded hands.

“She’s not asleep, is she?” I whispered.

“No, she’s not,” Isobel called out. “Just resting my eyes. Did you know your beach moves, Joseph?”

He released my hand and dropped into the sand beside her, propping himself up on his elbows. “I had no idea,” he said.

“Well, it does. Sort of sways back and forth. Up and down. Baby in a cradle.”

“Izzy—”

“No! That’s not it. Not a cradle.” Her voice had begun to slow and slur. “A magic carpet. That’s it. I’m flying, Joseph, flying. Don’t you feel it?”

“’Fraid not. Just good old solid ground for me.”

“Oh, that—that’s—such a shame …”

“Izzy.”

No answer.

Joseph peered briefly over her face and laughed. “Out cold. How much booze’ve you two sucked inside today?”

“Just wedding champagne. A bottle or two.”

“Between you? Then I guess Izzy must’ve taken more than her fair share.” He patted the ground beside him. “Sit down. Let her sleep it off a bit. Come on, I don’t bite.”

I sank into the coarse sand and wrapped my arms around my legs. My stockings were wet, and the grit now stuck to them like a crust. I wished I had the nerve to take them off. Along the sea before us, the moon cast a wide, phosphorescent path that disappeared mysteriously over the edge of the horizon. I said, “You’ve known each other forever, haven’t you? You and Isobel.”

“Ever since I can remember. Born a few months apart.”

“Who’s older?”

Another soft chuckle. “Me. So how did everything go today?”

“Oh, the wedding? Fine. Just fine.”

“Lobster all right?”

“Sure.”

“Caught fresh just this morning. Your stepfather bought the whole catch from me and Pops.”

“Oh, did he?” I cried. “That was your lobster?”

“Caught fresh,” he said again.

“Oh. I wish I’d known.” I paused. “It was wonderful. Best lobster I ever had.”

“Aw, you’re a good sport. Don’t tell me it’s the only lobster you’ve ever had?”

“Of course not! I’ve had lobster before.” Honesty compelled me to add, in a grudging voice, “Not often, though.”

“I guess we’ll have to do a clambake for you, this summer. Like a baptism. Make a genuine New Englander out of you.”

“I’d like that very much.”

Joseph lifted himself upright from his elbows, so we sat side by side. His arm brushed against mine, warmer than I expected. “What’s with Peaches?” he said.

“Oh gosh. Nothing, really. Isobel started calling me that today, just for fun.”

“But why Peaches?”

“Ask Isobel, why don’t you. She’s the one who made it up.”

He pointed his thumb. “Her? She’s not going to remember a thing tomorrow.”

“Then I guess you’re just dumb out of luck, aren’t you?”

He flung himself back on the sand, folding his hands behind his head, and for an instant I thought I’d angered him. Then I glanced over my shoulder and saw his chest was shaking, and a grin split his face from cheekbone to cheekbone.

“You’re a peach, Peaches,” he said. “A real peach.”

“I don’t see what’s wrong with Miranda.”

“Nothing’s wrong with Miranda. It’s a heck of a name. Suits you just fine in the winter months, I’ll bet, sitting indoors with your books and your cocoa. Or dressing up for some party in your gown and long gloves. Miranda.” He said it slowly, stretching out the vowels. “In Latin, it means ‘worthy of admiration.’ That’s what Shakespeare was talking about, in that line I threw at you this morning.”

“I know.”

“Aw, of course you do. Sorry.”

“My father used to tell me things like that, when I was little.”

“Did he? I like your dad. In my head, I’ve been calling him Prospero. But I guess that’s not his real name, is it?”

“No. It was Thomas. Thomas Schuyler.”

“Thomas Schuyler. Warrior, teacher of art, father of Miranda. And maybe a bit of a Shakespeare nut, too. Right?”

I stretched out my legs and listened carefully to the rhythmic wash of the waves as they uncurled onto the beach. The air was so warm and so silvery, like a primordial dream, like we sat on a beach at the beginning of the world, and we were the only people in it. I said, out to sea: “We used to read plays out loud to each other.”

“Did you? Now that’s grand. Do you remember any of it?”

“Of course I do.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. A lot of things.”

“Can you do Once more unto the breach?”

“That’s a man’s part.”

“So what? You’ve got it in you, I’ll bet. Thomas Schuyler didn’t raise a sissy.”

I straightened and crossed my legs, Indian-style. The tulle floated out over my knees, and as I gazed out over the gilded water, I thought, if I strained my eyes, I might actually see all the way to France. Harfleur. Did it still exist? Had anything happened there in the last five hundred years since the siege, or had it fallen into obscurity? Had my father maybe glimpsed it, in his last days? We’d received no letters from France. Any messages, any postcards he’d had time to write had disappeared along with his body, and yet I felt sure that if my father had seen Harfleur with his own eyes, he would have written to tell me.

“It’s been a while,” I said. “Since he left for the war.”

“Say, you don’t have to if you don’t want to. I mean, if it hurts too much or something.”

“No. It doesn’t hurt anymore.”

“All right. Whatever you want. I’m listening, that’s all.”

I lowered my voice and said,

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,

Or close the wall up with our English dead!

In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man

As modest stillness and humility,

But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

Then imitate the actions of the tiger:

Stiffen the sinews, conjure up the blood,

Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage.

“Go on,” said Joseph softly, from the sand.

I scrambled to my feet and shook out the grit from my dress. I had told Joseph the truth; I hadn’t spoken those words since childhood, and yet—in the way of certain memories—they rose passionately from my throat. They burst from my mouth in my father’s hard, warlike delivery. The blood hurtled into my fingers to grip an imaginary sword.

On, on, you noblest English,

Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof,

Fathers that, like so many Alexanders,

Have in these parts from morn till even fought

And sheathed their swords for lack of argument:

Dishonor not your mothers. Now attest

That those whom you called fathers did beget you.

Be copy now to men of grosser blood,

And teach them how to war …

I didn’t recognize myself. I was not Miranda but someone else, a man, a king, a warrior, a voice roaring. I heard its faint echo from the rocks.

The game’s afoot.

Follow your spirit, and upon this charge

Cry “God for Harry, England, and Saint George!”

And there was silence, and my original soul sank back into my skin. Miranda resumed herself. My arm dropped to my side. I went down on my knees, one by one, shaking a little. Against my hot skin, the sand felt cool. Each grain made its individual impression on my nerves.

“That was something,” said Joseph.

I shook my head and laughed.

“I mean it. You’re something, you know that? You’re something else.”

I felt as if I’d just stepped off some boardwalk roller coaster. Been spat back ashore by some monstrous wave. Shaken and changed, muscles stiffened from the shock of metamorphosis. Joseph’s gaze lay on my shoulders, on the back of my neck. I thought, If I turn, if I look at him looking at me, I’ll die.

“Here, lie down,” he said. “You can see the stars real good from here.”

So I settled myself back in the sand, rigid, arms straight against my sides. Wanting and not wanting to come into contact with Joseph’s shoulder, Joseph’s arm, bare above the elbow in his white T-shirt. From this small distance, I could smell his soap. He must have been getting ready for bed when he saw our signal. That would explain the toothpaste, the soap, the T-shirt. I should have felt overdressed in my blue tulle, but I didn’t. Maybe it was my stocking feet, crusted with sand, or the democratizing effect of moonlight and salt water.

“How well do you know your constellations?” Joseph asked.

“Pretty well.” I was surprised to hear that my voice had returned to its ordinary timbre, not quivering at all. “But you must be an expert.”

“Why’s that?”

“Aren’t sailors supposed to be experts on the stars?”

“Not anymore. The old explorers were, I guess. Back before we had clocks and instruments, and you only had the sky to tell you where you were. Skies and lighthouses. The old days.” He made some movement with his hand, sliding it out from beneath his head to rub his brow. “Anyway, lobstermen fish by day, mostly.”

“So what does that mean? Are you an astronomer, or not?”

“The answer to that, Peaches, is yes. I can map the night sky pretty well.”

“Peaches,” I said.

“It’s your Island name. Don’t you like it?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet. It’s too new.”

“Well, let me know what you decide.” He lifted his hand and pointed. “There’s Hercules. I’ve always liked him. Had to earn his place there in the sky. He wasn’t just born with it, like the others.”

“Me too. Makes me feel safer, somehow, knowing he’s hanging there with his sword raised. Why don’t you have an Island nickname?”

“Me? I don’t know. Nobody ever gave me one.”

“Maybe nobody ever dared.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I turned on my side to face his profile. His nose was too big, his brow too ridged. His lips were full, though, which softened him a little. I wondered if the moonlight gilded my skin in the same way; whether his cheeks, if I were so unfathomably brave as to touch them, would feel as cool and smooth as they looked from here, a foot or two away. “That was something, this morning,” I said. “What you did. Diving into the water and saving Popeye. You might have been killed.”

He didn’t turn toward me or anything. Just shrugged his shoulders a little, against the sand. “Popeye?” he said.

“That’s what I called him, in my head. Watching you from the window. He had that shirt on, and he was chewing on a pipe—”

“Wait a second.” He turned his head and squinted at me. “You saw his pipe?”

“I—well—”

“You were watching us with binoculars, weren’t you?”

“Well—”

“Miranda! For how long?”

I rolled back to face the sky. “Just a minute or two. I was curious. Never saw anybody fishing for lobsters before.”

“Aw, you’re blushing.”

“No I’m not. Anyway, how could you tell if I was?”

“I just can. I can feel your cheeks getting warm.”

“No you can’t. Not from over there.”

“Yes I can.”

I made to rise, and he caught my hand, and for a second or two we didn’t move. The air grew heavy between us. His hand was calloused and hot, larger than I thought, so rough it seemed to scratch my skin. The hand of a lobsterman. I looked away, because I didn’t know what was happening, because I’d never held a boy’s hand before, certainly not a tough hand like that. The sea slapped against the rocks, the lighthouse beam swept above our heads. A fierce voice called out.

“Joseph! What’s going on out there?”

Joseph turned toward the sound, but he didn’t drop my hand. Instead his grip tightened, not uncomfortable, just snug. I looked, too, and saw a dark silhouette in the middle of a glowing rectangle, painted on the side of a squat, square building attached to the lighthouse.

Joseph called back to this apparition. “Nothing much, Mama. Izzy rowed over with a friend.”

She said something back, something I couldn’t understand, and Joseph replied in the same language, which I figured was Portuguese. Sounded a little like Spanish, but it went by too fast for me to pick out any words. The exchange ended with a noise of exasperation from the other side, the maternal kind of noise that means the same thing in any language, I guess, and the silhouette stepped forward from the doorway and became a woman, monochrome in the moonlight. She was small and sharp and graceful, and her dark hair was gathered in an old-fashioned bun at the nape of her neck. She made me think of a ballerina, only shorter. She was examining me, I knew. I felt the impact of her dislike like a blow. I shifted my feet and straightened my back, and when I realized Joseph still held my hand, I pulled it free and tucked my fingers deep into the folds of tulle that hung around my legs.

She turned her head to Joseph and said something in Portuguese.

He answered in English. “Don’t worry. I’ll row them back myself.”

“You don’t need to do that,” I said. “I can row.”

“Not on your life. That current’s a killer when the tide’s going out, and you’ll be rowing against it.” He bent over Isobel and shook her shoulder. “Izzy! Izzy, wake up!”

She moved her head, groaned, and went still.

“She’s drunk,” said Mrs. Vargas.

Joseph didn’t reply to that. He didn’t even sigh, as he might have done, annoyed as he must have been. Just lifted Isobel in his arms and said to me, “Can you make it across the rocks all right?”

“Sure I can.”

He went ahead of me, carrying Isobel, and I followed his white T-shirt, phosphorescent as the ocean in the moonlight. My feet were steadier now. I wrapped my toes around the sharp, wet edges of the rocks and didn’t slip once. When we reached the dock, I held the boat steady while Joseph bore Isobel aboard. “You better hold her while I row,” he said, so I stepped inside and made my way to the bow seat and took Isobel’s slack body against mine.

I don’t think we said a word, the two of us, the entire distance from Flood Rock to the Fisher dock. I sat on the bench and held Isobel between my legs while she slumped against my left side. Joseph just rowed, steady and efficient, like a fellow who’d been rowing boats since he could walk, which was probably the case. He wasn’t lying about the current. I watched as he fought the strength of the outgoing tide, hurtling through the narrow channel and out into the broad Atlantic; I watched the strain of his muscles, the movement of his shoulders, the pop of his biceps, and my bones filled with terror as I realized I couldn’t have done this by myself, Isobel unconscious at my feet, however hard I pulled. The boat would have borne out past the Island to the open sea.

At one point, near the dock and the shelter of the small Fisher cove, our eyes met. I’d been looking over his shoulder and so had he, judging the distance to shore, and when he turned back his gaze made right for my face and stayed there, so that I couldn’t help but succumb to its human gravitation. Instead of looking away, he smiled, as if we’d just shared a secret, the nature of which I couldn’t have guessed, so young as I was in the early days of that summer. I only thought that he had a warm, beautiful smile, the most beautiful smile I’d ever seen, and in the instant before I ducked my head, I knew I was in love with him. Just imagine. As innocent, as uncomplicated as that. I still remember that moment, that sweet, shy revelation, remember it fondly, because it only comes once in your life, and then it’s gone. You can’t have it back. And it’s only a second! Isn’t that capricious? One measly instant of clarity, tucked inside the reach of your livelong days. And then the boat touches the shore, and the moment flies, and your life—your real, murky, messy, incalculable life—your life resumes.




10.


AT EIGHT O’CLOCK the next morning, the morning after our parents’ wedding, Isobel came into my room, dressed and fragrant, and told me we were going to church.

I hadn’t exactly expected her, as you might imagine. I lay curled on the armchair in my dressing gown, comfortable as could be, staring through the window at the young, watery sunshine that drenched the Flood Rock lighthouse. A book spread open in my lap, unread. Last night, I’d fallen into bed, slept a sound, soundless six hours, and woken more refreshed than I ought, filled with an anticipation I couldn’t yet name, and unable to concentrate on any words written on any page. I blinked at the shadows under Isobel’s eyes and said, “Church?”

“Darling, it’s Sunday,” she said, as if the two ideas couldn’t possibly exist without each other.

My father came from an old, intellectual family, and Mama from a young bohemian one. Neither viewed organized religion with uncritical awe; it was one of the few common territories between them. After my birth, nobody thought of baptizing me. When I asked about God—aged eight, mind you—Daddy told me solemnly that I should believe whatever my conscience held to be true. I asked him, what was a conscience? He said it was my inner voice that told me right from wrong, and from then on, when I thought of God at all, I thought of old Grandmama Schuyler, because for some reason her voice shrilled inside my head whenever I faced any kind of moral crisis. Don’t you take that second cookie! or Let the adults speak for a change! and that kind of thing.

At the moment, and in her present condition, Isobel Fisher did bear an uncommon resemblance to Grandmama Schuyler, who was also longboned and lean, and whose hair had been blond before it turned a rusty, streaked silver. I hadn’t seen my stepsister since the previous night, when she’d stumbled onto dry land, vomited over the grass, and staggered into the house under Joseph’s protection. His arm had held her shoulder, and his face wore an expression of stern pity, mixed with maybe a little remorse. He must have cleaned her up and put her to bed, but you could still read the history of the night before in that wan, tanned skin, in that dull hair, in those lavender half-moons beneath her eyes, which squinted against the sunshine. She wore an immaculate suit of dandelion yellow and a pair of matching shoes, and one hand rested against the doorframe to hold the whole act upright. The other hand contained her white gloves and pocketbook.

“What time does it start?” I asked feebly.

“Eight thirty.” She glanced at her watch. “You’d better hurry. I’ll get the car.”




11.


“THE THING IS, everybody goes,” Isobel called, above the roar of the engine, as we hurtled down the road toward St. Ann’s Episcopal Church at the eastern end of the Island. “If you don’t turn up, they’ll wonder why.”

“I don’t care about that!” I called back.

“You will, believe me.”

She drove wantonly, wastefully, rushing down the straight stretches and then slamming the brakes into the curves, so that the tires of her father’s sleek Plymouth convertible whined and slid against the faded asphalt. All the while, she clutched a cigarette between the first two fingers of her right hand, and along the straightaways she sucked long currents of smoke between her clenched, red lips.

I kept my hands fixed in my lap. The sun packed its heat into the car’s interior—Isobel had put the top up, in order to save our good hats from the draft—and my flesh still glowed from the haste of getting dressed. Underneath the suit and blouse, a trickle of perspiration ran down my left armpit and along my side. The smell of hot leather and cigarettes made me want to vomit. By the time we reached the neat white church, sitting against a field of green and surrounded by cars, I’d begun to feel faint for the first time since that terrible flu in my freshman year at Foxcroft. Isobel slammed to a stop in the grass and I threw open the door to inhale the clean, green-smelling air. The swollen chords of an organ billowed past.

“Damn it all to hell and back again.” Isobel threw her cigarette into the grass and stomped it with her toe. “We’re late.”

We ran across the meadow, holding hands, weaving between cars until we reached the wooden steps of the church and slowed to a reverent pace. Isobel turned in the vestibule and ripped off her glove to fix my hat. By some strange trick of the sunlight, her engagement ring threw a shower of glitter on the wall just above the altar, and all the inhabitants of the packed pews started and turned, searching for the source of this otherworldly fireworks. They found us soon enough.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience, a churchful of well-dressed strangers all staring at you in astonished disapproval. I don’t recommend it. Sometimes, in my nightmares, the image of those faces still returns to me, except I’m naked and grossly pregnant, and Isobel’s left me to face them all alone, instead of clutching my hand in a firm grip—as she did then—and leading me to a pew in the last row, wedged up against the side aisle. The organ tootled on from above, oblivious, and the faces turned away, one by one, because the singing was about to start and none of those great ladies wanted to miss her cue. On Winthrop Island, as I learned, the singing of hymns was a competitive exercise, preferably in a high, godly soprano to reach Heaven itself and—coincidentally—drown out the efforts of both your neighbor and the choir in the small balcony above. (The choir, you understand, had room for just ten members, filled by a ritual of cordial, bitterly contested auditions at the beginning of each summer season.)

As for the men? I don’t know. I don’t think they cared as much. Even so innocent as I then was, I noticed how they kept slipping impious glances at Isobel and me, young and animal, glowing with perspiration in our shapely pastel suits. That space of ours at the end of the pew had lain empty for a good reason, because it stood square in the path of a block of sunlight, and as Isobel flipped hastily through the hymnal I found myself gasping for air once more. The notes and words swam before me. The hymn ended, the blessing began, the congregational responses, and at last—at last—we lowered ourselves to the hard wooden bench and allowed the service to swallow us.




12.


AFTERWARD, THE CONGREGATION gathered in the churchyard and greeted each other in the hot sun. Everybody was so nice. Said such pleasant, vague things about my mother and the wedding yesterday, how they wished Mr. and Mrs. Fisher all the happiness in the world, such a beautiful couple. I realized I must have been entirely mistaken about those hostile expressions at the beginning of the service.

Mrs. Monk invited us over for bridge. “Of course,” said Isobel, kissing her cheek. “I’ll drive Miranda.”

Clay regarded Isobel with a slight frown. “I’d be happy to drive.”

“But we’ll be all squished in front, and I won’t have Miranda in back all by herself.”

“She wouldn’t mind. Would you, Miranda?”

A word or two about Clayton Monk, as he aimed a respectful pair of eyes at me and awaited my reply. At the time, I thought he was too good for Isobel. Not too handsome and dashing and rich, I mean, but too good. She was probably going to ruin him. I thought he had no natural defense against her, no edge at all. I mean, just look at him as he then was, made of pleasant, bland good looks that would inevitably grow red and jowly in middle age, but not before he’d passed them on to a pair of sons, whom he taught to sail. (I could picture them all, father and sons and sailboat.) He wore a double-breasted navy jacket and tan slacks, a white shirt with a crisp collar, a sedate silk tie the color of hydrangeas. Looking at him, you wouldn’t imagine that he’d once spent his days crisscrossing Europe in a B-17 Flying Fortress, dropping bombs all over the place, and that on a nice summer midnight in 1944 he’d crashed said Flying Fortress into a French field, so expertly that only one man was killed, and Clay himself had gotten away with a broken arm and a concussion. Afterward, as I said, he went to Harvard and then Harvard Law School, and he now occupied an office in some blueblood law firm or another, working his way toward the partnership, one dry, passive sentence at a time. Which might sound boring to you and me, but at least he was doing something, wasn’t he? Earning his own living, instead of idling his days atop the Monk department store fortune. Anyway, in the summer of 1951, Clayton Monk was all that was pink and well-scrubbed. Just looking at him made you feel clean, inside and out, like a wholesome breakfast cereal.

I smiled back and said, “I don’t mind a little squishing. My skirt’s all creased anyway.”




13.


ON THE WAY to the Monk estate, which was perched near the eastern tip of the Island, right next to the Winthrop Island Club and exactly opposite to Greyfriars, I asked Isobel whether she’d seen Joseph at church, because I hadn’t.

There was a little silence. “Joseph?” said Clayton, who was driving. “Joseph who?”

Isobel said quickly, “Don’t be silly, Peaches. Of course not.”

“Didn’t you say everybody goes to church on the Island?”

She started to laugh. “Darling, he goes to St. Mary’s, in the village. The Catholic church.”

“Oh, Joseph Vargas,” said Clayton. “I didn’t realize you’d met the locals yet.”

“Yesterday morning. He brought in another lobsterman who’d fallen overboard. And then last night—”

Isobel’s elbow met my ribs.

“What about last night?” asked Clay.

“Nothing.” I looked out the window, toward the sea. “Of course, the Catholic church. I didn’t think.”

Isobel sat between us on the front seat, tilting her long legs at an acute angle to fit them under the dashboard. Clayton, a tall man, had taken down the top, and the draft blew warmly over our hats and ears. Isobel rummaged in her pocketbook for a cigarette and lit it clumsily. “Here’s a funny thing about the Island, Peaches,” she said, as she tried to get the lighter going in the middle of the crosswind. “I think it’s telling. The Episcopal church only opens during the summer season, see, May to September, while the Catholic church runs all year round. Don’t you think that’s telling, Clay?”

“Telling what, darling?”

“I mean, the way things work around the Island. Who does what, and where, and when.”

Clay propped his elbow on the doorframe and tilted his head to one side, so he could rub his left eyebrow. His right hand gripped the wheel at twelve o’clock. “I don’t know what you’re trying to say, Izzy. Sure, most of the fishermen happen to be Portuguese around here. Portuguese folks happen to be mostly Catholic.”

“Exactly.”

“Well, you’re trying to make out like it’s some kind of crime, that’s all.”

“It’s not a crime,” she said. She’d finally succeeded in lighting her cigarette, and she now smoked it with a peculiar ferocity.

“Well, we all get along, don’t we? They’ve got their religion, and we’ve got ours—”

“And never the twain shall meet,” Isobel said softly.

“—and everybody respects each other. Nobody’s got a thing against Catholics, around here.”

I spoke up timidly. “I think what Isobel’s trying to say is that the summer residents, the ones with all the power and the money—”

“All right,” Clay said. “All right. Fine. Look, it’s a Sunday. Let’s stay away from politics for one day, okay?” He straightened and reached for the radio dial.

Isobel, looking out the side, past my nose toward the blurry meadows, the occasional house, said, “Have you noticed there aren’t any trees, Peaches? Old, native ones, I mean.”

“Now that you mention it.”

“It’s because of some hurricane.” She sucked on her cigarette. “Some hurricane, over a hundred years ago, that flattened everything. Now the Island’s like a Scottish moor or something. Or Ireland. One of those. Isn’t that right, Clay?”

“I guess so.” He was still working the radio dial.

“Do you get any stations out here?” I asked.

“We get a couple out of Providence, when the wind’s right. Sometimes Boston.” He turned the dial millimeter by millimeter, listening carefully to the pattern of static.

“Oh, why bother?” said Isobel. “Honestly. We’re almost there.”

I waved away a stream of smoke. “This might be a good time to mention that I don’t play bridge.”

“What’s that?” said Clay.

“She doesn’t play bridge!” Isobel shouted in his ear.

“Not play bridge? But I thought all you girls played bridge.”

“Miranda doesn’t. She’s an intellectual. Did you know she was named after a girl in Shakespeare?”

“Is that so? Now that’s grand. Which one? Which play, I mean?”

Isobel turned to me. “Which one, Peaches?”

“The Tempest,” I said, just as the car slowed and began its turn down a long, slender, curving drive toward a house plucked right out of the half-timbered Elizabethan countryside and onto a cliff overlooking the entrance to Long Island Sound. At that instant, whether by design or coincidence, a bank of black clouds swallowed up the sun.




14.


WHEN IT COMES to bridge, the punishment for ignorance is apparently banishment, which suited me well enough. For a short while, I hung around the well-appointed drawing room, holding my iced tea, watching the rain shatter violently against the French windows while the Monks, unconcerned, set up the bridge table. Lucky for them—or again, maybe by design—there were two other guests, a mother and daughter, who made up the other sides. They were the Huxleys, Mrs. Huxley and her daughter, Livy, and Isobel explained that it was Dr. Huxley, husband and father of same, who had come to Popeye’s rescue in the Fisher kitchen yesterday. We exchanged the usual bland pleasantries. Livy and her mother were perfectly nice, perfectly pretty, like two round, full scoops of vanilla ice cream, the younger one wearing a dress like a lemon meringue. I remember thinking, at the time, how utterly harmless they seemed, how absent of tooth and claw. Clay had disappeared somewhere with his father. Isobel had mixed herself a drink from the liquor cabinet and now sat in her bridge chair, next to Mrs. Monk, wearing an expression of sharklike intensity.

When the rain died away to a drizzle, I called over my shoulder that I was going for a walk to see the cliffs and I slipped through one of the French doors to the bluestone terrace and the lawn beyond. The wet grass soaked my shoes and stockings. When I reached the cliff’s edge, I took them off and laid the stockings to dry across a large, white rock, and then I sat down on a neighboring rock and watched the clouds storm angrily away to the northeast. The cliffs weren’t especially high, maybe forty or fifty feet, but they were steep and rugged, and the path snaked carefully down the least forbidding side to end in a pale beach. Out to sea, a lone sailboat picked its way along the coast, about a hundred yards from shore.

Now that the sun shone unobstructed, the heat built once more, sinking into my skin and bones and the rough surface of the rock beneath me. I removed my jacket—I’d left my hat and gloves indoors—and thought I should really find some shade, before I burned. But I didn’t want to move. There was just enough breeze to make it bearable. The air was rich and damp with the smell of the sea, and there was something hypnotic about the movements of that lone, brave sailboat, something graceful and eternal. I could just make out the man who sat in the stern, next to the tiller. He had dark hair that flashed from time to time against the white of the triangular sail, and at some point, as I watched, I began to realize that the sailor was Joseph. Or maybe I was only hoping it was Joseph? Maybe it was just longing.

I straightened and squinted, and as if he felt my scrutiny, the sailor turned his head toward shore.

Joseph.

I raised my hand and waved, even though he couldn’t possibly recognize me from there, not sitting as I was on the opposite corner of the Island from the house where I was supposed to be sitting. Up went Joseph’s arm, returning the wave, and then he rose from his seat at the tiller and reached for a rope. A sheet—wasn’t that what they called ropes on boats? Sort of confusing, if you asked me, because something you called a sheet ought logically to be a sail. Whatever it was, Joseph did something to it, adjusting its pitch against the wind. When he turned back, his arm lifted again, in such a way that he seemed to be beckoning me toward the water.

I stood and glanced at my shoes and stockings, drying on the nearby rock. I glanced at the path, snaking its way to the beach below. My skin was flushed and damp, my skirt creased, my blouse stained with perspiration. The salt breeze tumbled my hair.

“Miranda. There you are.”

I pitched forward. Clayton’s arm shot out to catch me.

“Careful!” he said.

“Sorry! I didn’t hear you come up.”

“No need to apologize. Shouldn’t have snuck up like that. Gosh, who’s that crazy fellow out there?”

“Just some sailboat,” I said.

“He’s not afraid of a little squall, I guess.” Clay stuck his hands in his trouser pockets. He’d taken off his jacket and stood there in his shirtsleeves, rolled halfway up his forearms. A considerable concession to the heat, for a man like him. He rolled onto his toes and back down again. “Say. Do you have a moment, Miranda?” he asked.

“Sure I do.”

“Can we sit?”

I took the larger rock, next to my shoes and stockings, while Clay propped himself on the smaller one and crossed his legs at the ankles. His feet looked hot and uncomfortable, encased in brown argyle socks and leather shoes. I tucked my bare white toes against the rock and said, “Anything in particular?”

“Actually,” he said, as if the idea had just occurred to him, “I wanted to ask you about Izzy.”

“What about Izzy?”

He uncrossed his ankles and crossed them again, putting the other foot on top. His hands twiddled together against his thighs. “That was some party, yesterday, wasn’t it? A big day for you both. A happy day. We’re all—well, we couldn’t be happier for Mr. Fisher. Your mother’s everything we might have hoped for in a—a new mother for Izzy.”

“She’s already got a mother, hasn’t she?”

“Well, of course that depends on whom you ask. I don’t like to speak ill of people. You haven’t met her, have you? The ex Mrs. Fisher?”

“No.”

“I don’t suppose there’s any reason you should. She lives in … is it Nice? Somewhere in the south of France, I understand. She remarried a few years ago, some old French aristocrat she met during the war. Lost all his dough, I guess, and wanted hers. They say he’s a—well …”

“A what?”

“Nothing. Nothing you need to know about. Let’s just say they both go their own ways, the two of them. That’s what I hear, anyway.”

“Then why did they marry?”

“People marry for all kinds of reasons, Miranda. I don’t know, maybe she wanted the title. She’s a funny old bird. Always was. Restless, you know, wanted to go abroad all the time, spend her time with that international set—you know who I mean—instead of summering on the Island.”

At the time, I didn’t know whom he meant. Clay pronounced the words international set with distaste, as if it were some disease that had no cure, but to me it sounded exotic and wonderful. So I said innocently, “What’s wrong with that? I’d like to go abroad.”

“I mean make a habit of it. Socialize with those people, artists and aristocrats and hangers-on, new money, all the time having affairs and divorcing and God knows what else. Anyway, she’s never shown much interest in poor Izzy, even when she was a baby. So I think we were all hoping—when we heard the news—and then we met you and your mother—”

“Maybe she’d be an improvement?”

He nodded vigorously. “Oh, she is. I mean, you’ve got to be careful what you say, because Mrs. Fisher—the former Mrs. Fisher, I mean, the Countess whatever she is now—her family still summers here. The Dumonts?” The end of the sentence turned up inquisitively, as if there were some kind of chance I knew the Dumonts personally.

“I’ve heard about them,” I said. Before us, the sailboat had started another tack. The sun caught the brilliant white of the canvas, so sharp against the dark blue sea that I had to look away.

“Anyway, that’s all behind us now,” said Clay. “What’s important is that Izzy has someone to look out for her now.”

“You’re her fiancé. Aren’t you supposed to be doing that?”

“But we won’t be married until next June.” He sprang from the rock and stepped forward, right to the edge of the cliff. He had a nice trim backside, a narrow waist. A pair of old-fashioned braces held up his trousers. “Last night …,” he said.

I waited a moment and said, “What about last night?”

“I don’t know what happened with you two. Maybe I don’t want to know. She had a little too much to drink, didn’t she? She gets carried away, you see.”

He seemed to be starting another sentence, which he bit off. I had the feeling he was struggling with something, groping, juggling words in his head. He fiddled with his sleeves, took out his handkerchief, wiped away the perspiration on his temples.

“For what it’s worth, I like that about her,” I said. “I like her high spirits.”

“Yes. Of course. Look. I don’t know—I don’t usually—Miranda—you don’t mind me calling you that?”

“Of course not.”

“Do you mind if I tell you something private? Just between you and me, Miranda, because I can tell you aren’t the gossiping type.”

“You can tell me whatever you like, Mr. Monk.”

“Clay. Look. The truth is, the night before last, the night before the wedding, we’d had a bit of a—a—I don’t know what to call it …”

“Clay, you don’t—”

“—a lovers’ quarrel.”

The words burst out almost in a shout—lovers’ quarrel!—followed by a delicate silence, expecting my reply. When I didn’t say anything, Clay looked down and toed the dirt.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I haven’t told anyone, not even Mother.”

“You’ve got to talk to someone, don’t you? You can’t keep everything bottled inside.”

Clay made a dry noise. “Can’t I? That’s what we do, Miranda. Keep it all bottled. Don’t burden anybody with your private troubles. We don’t talk, certainly not to strangers. I sometimes wish …”

He let the sentence dangle, the wish unexpressed. I tucked my legs against my chest and wrapped my arms around them. A few feet away, Clayton shifted his feet and noticed the handkerchief in his hand. He shoved it back in his pocket.

I said, “If there’s anything I can do to help—”

It was as if I’d pulled the cork from his mouth. Clayton started to burble. “She’s a terrific girl, Izzy. She’s the one, I mean there’s never been anyone else. But she’s got a restless streak, always has, all this bottled-up energy like some kind of Fourth of July firework. Don’t get me wrong, it’s one of the things I love about her. Maybe she gets it from her mother, I don’t know. You just can’t take your eyes off her, wondering what crazy, wonderful thing she’s going to do next.”

I pressed my thumbs together. I think I was trying not to say something rash, trying to hold back this immense surge of pity I felt for Clayton Monk in that moment. He leaned down and picked up a rock from the dirt near his feet. Turned that rock around again and again between his fingers, examining every last ridge, every facet, each tiny grain that made up the whole.

He went on in a quiet voice, talking not to me, but to the rock in his hand. “The trouble is, she gets temperamental, she gets in these moods sometimes, and I just can’t—I can’t—I don’t know what to do. Honestly, I don’t know what I said the other night, I mean I don’t have the slightest clue what upset her so much.”

Clay dropped the rock suddenly and put his hand to the back of his neck. His fingers were long, his nails well-trimmed, his forearm dusted with light hair. His other hand sat on his hip. I looked past him toward the sea, but his body now blocked my view of Joseph in his sailboat, and I didn’t want to rise and startle him, so close as he stood to the edge of the cliff.

I said, “It was probably just the excitement of the day. She loves you very much.”

“Does she? Did she say that?”

“Well … not in so many words.”

He made a mournful laugh. “Thanks for the honesty.”

I didn’t know what to say. I hardly knew him at all, him or Isobel. I had the feeling I’d walked onto the stage of a play, sometime in the middle of the second act, and assumed a leading role. And I had no script, no story. I didn’t even know the name of this play. Was probably wearing the wrong costume. I leaned back on my hands and stared at the long, vertical creases down the back of Clay’s shirt. The sun burned the top of my head, my hands, the back of my neck. A gull screamed from the rocks down below.

“Vargas!” Clay exclaimed.

I startled up. “What? Where?”

“The lighthouse keeper’s son. Fellow who was with you last night. Don’t deny it. Vargas?”

“Joseph. Yes.”

“I think he’s in love with her.”

The sentence struck in the middle of my chest. I stepped to one side, in order to find Joseph’s sailboat on the stretch of empty sea before us. For a second or two, I thought he’d been swallowed by the water, but when I shielded my eyes and looked farther, I saw he had only angled around the eastern tip of the Island to tack down the other side. The boat was smaller now. You couldn’t make out Joseph himself, just the white, triangular sail against the navy water, as it began to disappear behind the land’s edge. I caught my breath again and said, “How do you know?”

“Oh, he’s always been crazy about her. Used to hang around the house when they were small. Take the dinghy back and forth. They had some kind of signal they used to send each other, through the windows.”

“But she doesn’t feel the same way. She’s engaged to you, not to him.”

“Another man’s ring isn’t going to stop a fellow like that.”

“I don’t think—” I checked myself.

“Don’t think what?”

“I just think he’s more honorable than that.”

“Do you? Well, I’ve known him all my life, and I wouldn’t put it past him. Not the way he’s been pining for her all these years. Sitting there in his lighthouse, watching her from the window, beckoning her over to see him.”

The tip of the sail winked out past the edge of the cliff.

“Then Isobel should put a stop to it,” I said. “Especially if it hurts you.”

“Oh, it doesn’t hurt me. Not a bit. A fellow like that …” Clay turned to face me, and his expression was so haggard, the lines so deep and painful in his fresh, young face, I forgot my anger. He took my shoulder under his hand. “It’s Izzy I’m worried about. She’s impulsive, she’s—she trusts him, God knows why. It’s because he’s not one of us. He’s—well, she knows she can’t marry him, and you know how it is with girls—” He broke off and—perhaps realizing how tightly he was gripping my shoulder—let his hand drop to his side, where he shoved it into his pocket. “And he loves her. He’s crazy about her. Last night. I should’ve—man, I should’ve gone over there myself, I should’ve socked him. If I’d known, I would have.”

“I’m glad you didn’t. Nothing happened, Clay, nothing at all. She was—we were both a little tipsy, from the champagne and all, and he was worried about us and rowed us back home. That’s all. Joseph did a good thing.”

“He could have telephoned me. I would’ve fetched her back.”

“Do they have a telephone out there?”

“Sure they do. Underground cable.”

“I didn’t realize.”

“There’s a lot you don’t realize.” He swiveled back to the sea. Ran a hand through his hair and shoved it in his pocket, like the other hand, good and deep. “Mr. Fisher—God bless him—he’s indulged her all these years. I don’t blame him. She’s had it tough, with that mother of hers, and—well and everything else. But he’s not here to protect her just now, and I hope—I don’t mean to ask you to sneak around for me, nothing like that, but I just—If you could let me know if she’s in trouble, that’s all. If she’s about to do something stupid.”

I pictured that engagement ring, three or four carats dangling above the sapphire water. “She’s not going to do anything stupid,” I said. “And if she is, I don’t think I could stop her.”

“I could. I could stop her. If you just let me know how she’s doing, what she’s doing.” He pulled his left hand out of the pocket and checked his watch. “I’ve got to be back at the firm tomorrow, but I’ll be back up here as often as I can, believe me. I’ll give you my number in the city. Call me at any time. Collect, if you need to.”

“I’m sure that won’t be necessary.”

Clay reached out and took my hand, very gently, the way he’d been taught.

“I’m just grateful you’re here, Miranda. I’m just grateful Izzy’s got someone like you around at last, a proper female influence, someone steady and sensible.”

“Thank you,” I said dryly.

Clay leaned forward and pressed my hand hard and kissed my cheek, cutting me off. He smelled of sunshine and perspiration, and his cheek, brushing mine, was hot and damp.

“Just keep her busy, all right?” he said. “For God’s sake, just keep her away from that Vargas.”




15.


ISOBEL DROVE HOME from the Monks’ house at a crawl, because she’d drunk so much gin and tonic over bridge, and the road, I think, was playing tricks on her. Overhead, the sky was gray and troubled, and a few fat drops of rain smacked against the windshield. Isobel switched the wipers on and off and peered up to check the state of the clouds.

“Peaches, darling,” she said. “Do you know what I hate most about the Island and everybody in it? Except you, I suppose.”

“What’s that?”

“Nobody ever says what they really mean. There is this vast fabric of tender little lies, and all the important things are unspoken. Boiling there underneath. We only bother telling the truth when it’s too small to count.”

“I don’t think that’s true at all.”

“You haven’t been here long enough. It’s like a sport, it’s the only real sport they know, and because I love sports I play them at their game, but I hate it. If I had my horses, now …”

“Why don’t you?”

“There isn’t room. Poor dears, they’re on Long Island, getting fat.” She paused to negotiate a sharp curve, surging and slowing the Plymouth as if she couldn’t decide her approach. She was a wholly different driver when drunk, I thought, and as I watched the bony grip of her hands on the wheel, fighting the turn, I wondered if I should offer to take over. Before I could work up the nerve, she straightened out the car and said, “Don’t you ever miss Foxcroft?”

I turned my head to stare out the window at the meadow passing by, the occasional driveway marked by stone pillars. The air was growing purple with some impending downpour, and I felt its approach in my gut. “I haven’t been gone long enough.”

“I do. When I was there, I couldn’t wait to leave. All those books and rules and studying. But now I think, at least there was something new every day. Here, everything’s the same. The same damned summer, over and over, the same day, the same people, the same small talk, the same small sports and parlor games and lies, of course. There’s no escape.”

“It’s only a few months. Sometimes it’s nice to spend a few months doing nothing.”

“But then in September we go back to the city and do nothing there. What hope is there? Tell me, Miranda. I really want to know.”

I turned to stare at her sharp profile, and for the first time I noticed a tiny bump along the bridge of her nose, as if she’d broken it some time ago. “You might have gone to college,” I said.

“That’s just putting off the inevitable. Beside, I’m not like you. Books bore me. All your Shakespeare and Dickens and old men like that. Marriage is going to bore me even more.” She opened the window a few inches and tossed her spent cigarette into the draft. “My God, I should’ve been born ten years earlier.”

“Why?”

“Why, because of the war. I’d have trained as a nurse or a Resistance agent, I’d have been splendid at that. I’d have made some use of myself, some purpose. It would have transformed me. I’d never have been the same, I would have had no tolerance at all for this.” She waved her hand at the Island. “I don’t understand how everybody could come back from the war and just sit there with a gin and tonic and play bridge. God, what a drag. It’s like they’ve all gone to sleep.”

“Because it wasn’t an adventure, Isobel. It was hell. People died.”

“Oh, that’s right. I’m sorry. Your father.” She paused respectfully. We had reached the Greyfriars drive, and she began to slow in preparation for the turn. Another handful of raindrops smacked the windshield. The drive was bordered with giant, mature rhododendrons, transported at great cost from the mainland—Isobel had told me how much as we drove away this morning—so that you couldn’t see the house until you rounded the last curve, so that you found yourself straining and straining as you approached your destination. Now Isobel drove even more slowly, a walking pace, while I checked the sky and the windshield and clenched the muscles of my abdomen.

Isobel waited until she began the last turn before she continued. “Still. You’d think they couldn’t stand all this shallow hypocrisy, after what they’d been through. And yet they embrace it. They want it to stretch on into infinity, never changing, never deviating one square inch from the old, dull, habitual ways. Marrying suitable boys you don’t really love, having children you don’t really want. I tell you, I can’t stand it any longer. I’m about to explode, Miranda, but nobody knows it yet. Nobody but you. Just watch. I’m going to …”

Her sentence drifted off, as if she’d lost her train of thought. I looked up and followed her gaze, and at first I saw nothing amiss, nothing out of order. Greyfriars rambled before us in its immaculate, elegant way, not a window out of place, gray shingle meeting white trim and green lawn. The grass, the young trees, the rosebushes, the neatly fenced kitchen garden, the tall boxwoods guarding the swimming pool—all these features as tidy as money could make them. Only the gathering rhythm of the rain disturbed the expensive Fisher tranquillity.

Then I noticed the front door, which was open, and the person leaning against the doorway, smoking a cigarette attached to a long black holder. A woman wearing a magenta dress, a towering hairdo, and a large white flower pinned above her right ear.

“My God. Who’s that?” I asked.

Isobel switched off the ignition and rested her arms on the top of the steering wheel. A prolonged rumble of thunder shook the windows. The woman straightened from the doorway and beckoned us with her cigarette in its holder.

In a voice of wonder, Isobel said, “It’s my mother.”




16.


“CALL ME ABIGAIL,” the Countess said, as I stumbled over her foreign title, which I couldn’t quite remember. “Everybody else does. Even my children.”

“Do they really?”

“Just watch.” She turned to Isobel, who had hung behind me as we raced across the gravel and ascended the steps in the gathering deluge, and now rolled her eyes as her mother embraced her dripping body. “Hello, darling. You look as beautiful as ever, of course. Except you really must eat more. People who don’t eat are simply boring, and it’s far better to be fat than boring, believe me.”

“Hello, Abigail,” Isobel said. “What a delightful surprise.”

Up close, the Countess was even more extraordinary than from across the driveway. There was nothing dainty about her. She was tall and broad-shouldered, and her dress of magenta silk billowed down her heavy bones to sweep the ground, interrupted only by a sash at her waist, which—somewhat contradicting her earlier injunction—was not fat but certainly sturdy. She wore several glittering necklaces and her hair, swept up in a pompadour, had already turned silver, though her face was still smooth. I think it hardly needs saying that her lipstick was the same color as her dress, and that a glass of gin and tonic rested in her other hand—the one not occupied with cigarettes—bearing a neat half-crescent of said lipstick on its rim. When she turned, as she did now, leading us from the foyer and down the hall, she revealed a narrow, gathered cape of magenta silk that drifted from the swooping neck of her gown to form a train behind her.

“I’ve taken the liberty of reserving a table at the Club for dinner,” she said, over her shoulder, “but that’s not for ages, so I’ve ordered tea on the terrace.”

“I expected nothing less.”

“I’ve taken my old room, of course, which doesn’t seem to be occupied. Where has all the staff gone, darling? We used to have three times as many housemaids running around. I had to shout for help, and I dislike shouting. It’s barbaric.”

“Housemaids don’t grow on trees anymore, Abigail,” Isobel said, walking past her mother to burst through the doors to the terrace, where a table and chairs had been arranged under the shelter of the porch while the rain poured beyond. A newspaper and a jeweled cigarette case lay next to the tea tray, and Isobel snatched up the case and flipped it open. “You can’t imagine how much servants cost. Especially on the Island.”

“In France, they’re dirt cheap. Everything’s dirt cheap. You ought to move there with me, as I’ve told you a thousand times.”

Isobel lit her cigarette and turned. “My French is terrible, Abigail.”

The Countess snorted and turned to me. “Tell me about yourself, dear. You’re Francine’s daughter, of course. Lovely Francine, I couldn’t ask for a better wife for Hugh.”

“She’s a dear,” Isobel said.

The Countess waved her hand at Isobel. “No. I want to hear from Miranda. You and me, we have a way of drowning out other women who aren’t as self-absorbed. And Miranda’s not self-absorbed, are you, darling?”

“She is,” Isobel said, “just in a different way. But everybody’s self-absorbed in his own way. Being charitable is just its own form of self-absorption.”

“Quiet!” thundered her mother, and Isobel plopped onto a wicker chair and gave me a droll look.

“I don’t know what to say, actually,” I said. “What do you want to know?”

“What do you like to do, child? What do you like to read?”

“Shakespeare,” supplied Isobel.

The Countess whipped around. “Go inside. Just go inside. Or else remain absolutely, positively silent.”

Isobel lifted her hand, zipped her lips, and stuck a cigarette between them.

The Countess turned back to me. “I apologize. I’m afraid I had very little to do with her upbringing, which was not my choice. Now it’s too late. And you’re laughing at us, how despicable. Not that I blame you.”

I collapsed on another of the wicker chairs. “I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t apologize. You must never apologize unless absolutely necessary, although if you must apologize, do it properly. You like Shakespeare, do you?”

“Among other things.”

“What other things? Speak up, I can’t hear you above all that deluge.”

I raised my voice. “Books. Art.”

“Yes, but which books? Which art? This is terribly important. Do you prefer the Greeks or the Romans?”

“The Greeks.”

“Middle Ages or Renaissance?”

“Renaissance, but I like some bits of the Middle Ages. The Plantagenets.”

“Yes! Brutal but decisive, most of them. Chock full of sex appeal. I approve. Trollope or Dickens?”

“Trollope.”

“Chinese art or Japanese?”

“Japanese.”

“Verdi or Wagner?”

“Verdi. I can’t bear Wagner’s women. He doesn’t understand them.”

“What about Isolde?”

“She’s only there to exalt Tristan.”

“Brünnhilde?”

“That’s the exception. The only woman he actually makes wiser than the men. Except she ends up dead like the others. At least the music is revolutionary.”

The Countess turned to Isobel. “There, you see? I’ll bet I’ve found out more about her in two minutes than you’ve discovered in all those years at school.”

Isobel gestured to her lips.

“You may speak.”

“I was just going to say that I don’t give a damn about any of those things.”

The Countess frowned. “Why are you wearing that awful suit?”

“This? Because we went to church this morning, Peaches and I.”

“Peaches?”

“That’s her nickname. I gave it to her.”

“But why ever?”

“Because she’s sweet and round and delicious, of course. Just look at her.”

The Countess spun back to study me. She gave the business her whole attention, crossing her left arm under her breasts and propping her right elbow on the knuckles while she sucked thoughtfully on her cigarette. I tried to decide whether she was beautiful or not—certainly her face had the symmetry of beauty, the shapely eyes—but really she was something else. Not handsome or pretty or attractive, something beyond description, so that she held your attention, your dumbstruck admiration, without the slightest effort. Striking, that’s the closest word. You could say she was striking.

As she studied me studying her, she didn’t give any sign of what she was thinking, or what conclusions she drew from whatever figure I presented to her, in my ragged hair and ill-tailored suit and sunburnt face. The cigarette languished and died. She plucked the stub from the holder and tossed it into the ashtray and said to her daughter, “Whatever she is, she’s certainly not Peaches. Are we absolutely certain you’re mine, darling? It’s impossible to believe I’ve borne a daughter with so little penetration.”

Isobel sprang from her chair and stalked to the French doors. “I’m going to take a shower and change clothes. Are you coming, Peaches?”

“She’s not answering to Peaches anymore,” called back the Countess. “I forbid it.”

Isobel didn’t pause, and I rose and followed her, because I did need to bathe and change before dinner, there was no question of that. As I passed the Countess, she took me gently by the elbow.

“Before dinner,” she whispered, “we’ve got to talk.”




17.





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