“Really, Ludlow,” Mama interposed. “Forgive him, Miss Grange. You look wonderfully well, as always,” and she drew her hand beneath Papa’s arm, turning him as the dinner bell sounded. Gallantly, he offered his other arm to Miss Grange, who did not take it but walked at his side into the dining room.

That night, several of the other guests had gone to a supper party being held in a neighboring hotel, so the dining room was laid with quite diminished table settings, and our little group joined the two solitary diners already seated at our customary table: Mr. Cutting—the illustrious and tiresome schoolmaster, whose head gleamed in the gaslight like a polished knob where he sat, starched napkin at the ready, his spoon poised in his hand, awaiting his soup—and the large and definitively unaccompanied Mrs. Hunnowell. It would seem, she informed us without prelude, that she was utterly abandoned. Her husband had returned to Boston for the week’s business, and where Bartholomew might be, she really couldn’t say, her eyes rolling indulgently at the empty chair beside her. I smiled. Year after year, Mrs. Hunnowell did not disappoint, remaining the kind of woman whose conversation consisted mainly of melodramas she concocted, her head tilted upward, as if the endings hovered just above us in the painted heavens of the room.

I took the abandoned chair beside her, knowing full well that Bartholomew, her son, could never be depended upon to be in the ordinary place at the ordinary time. Having penned a series of very successful travel books for those on their grand tour, Mr. Hunnowell proceeded through life, appearing and disappearing very much like the kind of train he advised young men to catch—off schedule and bound for unknown parts. Mama entirely disapproved of his unsettled behavior—a man of thirty, after all! Even as I could not dismiss him so entirely, I did find him disquieting. One never knew with him precisely where one stood—or rather, where he stood. For every summer he appeared among us, breezy and refined, playing a wide array of roles—brave gallant, avid sportsman, irreverent parlor man—and then a sometimes Bedouin intensity would flash out amongst the parts, making him unreadable, provokingly so.

“After all,” Mr. Cutting’s musing broke in, “the day turned out to be fine.”

Mama nodded politely at him, and as Mrs. Hunnowell motioned the serving girl forward to begin, I put aside all thoughts of Bart Hunnowell and his character.