Yet the world had grown insubstantial. I crossed the front hall soundlessly and entered Papa’s library. The smell of leather mixed with the chalky scent of old paper and the deep-laid whiff of his cigars. But the wide desk had been cleared of his daily business, and the human stuff of the man had disappeared into the horror of this final tidiness. He was gone. There was his desk.

What am I to do? I asked the mute books lining Papa’s study walls. But they spoke no more to me; their work was done, it seemed. I had lost my passport into that country; the avenues I had strolled along beside Papa were grown over with disuse.

Indeed, I had lost the capacity to recall a time before this time. Once this room had been filled with the warm hubbub of the many interlacing voices in the books upon the shelves, and just last summer Grange House had thronged with strange beginnings and I had glimpsed an opening and danced with Bart Hunnowell upon the very ridge of the world, extravagantly glad. But now the room before me was a cold cathedral of bleak spines, and Grange House—a place to which we would never return—closed up in my mind to become nowhere other than the place where Papa had died. And Bart Hunnowell? I could not summon any other image but that of his hurt and angry figure departing wordlessly from the breakfast table.

And so the winter days descended and swept by, each as mutely unchanging as the last, my mother’s black-clad form stretched on the sitting room sofa, and I seated in the corner by the window, my head bent over a piece of fancywork, turning the stitches up to the weak sun. One bleak day in late January, I sat as the wind hurtled against the panes, the glass shuddering at my shoulder. Outside, passersby were bent against the driving weather, their hats and bonnets but frail shells around their heads and shoulders. I watched as the schooners behind them sailed slowly down the East River, their masts dwarfing the snow-covered city buildings of Manhattan across the water. A woman laughed, and the sound was caught up into the carriage jingle and carried past my window in the horse’s hooves passing by on the pavement below. The world came to me now in meaningless pieces. And I had lost the beat of Papa’s fingers upon my hand, tapping out the underlying song. The song that bound it all as one.