“Were you very sad to lose him, Papa?” I whispered.

He took one more stroke and then straightened up to look at me. “I was very sad, yes, Maisie.”

“What age were you?”

“Nearly thirty, my girl. But I had spent a long time away from my own family—on business for the line—and when I returned at last, he was already gone, already buried—and but a grave.” He splashed the water with one oar, lightly. “There was much I never told him.”

I watched as one of the lobstermen maneuvered heavily toward us, his stern weighed down with catch.

“Papa, when you were my age, what did you wish for?”

His mood had shifted. He crinkled up his face. “Wish for? Why, I wished one day I’d be in a rowboat with a girl like you—mind, I did not say little—looking at me out of my own brown eyes and asking me what I wished for.”

“Papa, I am serious.”

“Serious, my own girl?”

“Yes, Papa. Answer me.” I looked down at the water skimming beside us. “Please.”

He took a few strokes without answering.

“Papa?”

“Ho! Maisie I had great visions for myself.” He smiled at me, and choosing not to see the smile as a warning, I persisted.

“And what did they consist of?”

His voice when he answered was so sorrowful, I looked up in surprise.

“Of quiet conversation with great men—”

“And did you not fulfill your wishes?”

He shook his head.

“What stood in your way?”

“There came a time”—he paused—“when I no longer considered myself fit to stand beside the great.”

We were silent for a bit. The low shadows stretched longer along the water. Papa began to row again, slowly guiding us back around toward Grange House. It was a high tide and the harbor seemed a bowl brimful with its waters.

“And Papa, what should I wish for?”

He looked directly at me then. “Maisie, my girl, do not ask anyone else what to wish for. What is it you see when you close your eyes?”

How could I answer such a question? The longing in me had no form. I saw shapes and movements, patterns without whole cloth, scraps of a history; my wishes like harbor markers anchored and voiceless save to those who knew how they might be read. Without thinking, the words tumbled out: “Quiet conversation with great men.”

My father looked at me sharply then and turned his face away, beginning to row again with great concentration. Nettled, I added in a whisper, “Like you, Papa.”