Edmund and Rita were given the rooms next to and across from Polly’s. Merle and Jane had the big room at the top of the stairs, and Dee and Papa owned the end of the hall, a bedroom and study and a private bathroom. The house in Stony Brook had been a gatehouse of a larger, grander estate, most of it burned or sold off in the twenties and rebuilt in clusters of war-era starter boxes. Papa and Dee, needing a change after their daughter Asta’s car slid off an icy road and into the Yellowstone River, left Montana during World War II and bought the house when Papa took a job at Columbia. The other remnants of the old estate were the greenhouse Dee now used for a pottery studio and a small stone house owned by a woman everyone called the witch, who had a mostly green parrot that Papa and Dee’s cat May kept trying to kill. Before Edmund arrived, Polly never looked at the witch’s house directly, despite passing it daily on the sanded-in path down to the Sound. Though the water was only a hundred yards from their house, it felt farther because of the trees, the curved path, the witch’s vine-covered bungalow. On the beach the footprint of a boathouse was still visible, with a high-tide iron ring Papa used to tie up his rowboat.

Nobody mentioned how long Rita and Edmund would stay, though Edmund’s father wouldn’t be home on leave until at least August. Merle spent most of the next day dragging things to the attic: his still-boxed journals, a steamer trunk with Dee’s old dresses, carton after carton of books. Polly was used to spreading her enthusiasms into the spare bedroom Rita now invaded, and spent hours cramming her dollhouse and her easel and a basket of her general mess back into her tiny room, which had been—like Edmund’s new room—a dressing room when people still cared about dressing.

“Rita could have warned us,” said Merle.

“She’s clearly not well,” said Dee, carefully.

Not well had so many possible meanings. After spending a week in the hospital with pneumonia, Polly connected illness with age, as in Dee, or with silence—Polly hadn’t talked much when she’d been in a little tent the fall before, sleeping and dreaming. Rita did not stop.

Rita’s mother-in-law phoned twice, and hung up on Dee both times when Rita wouldn’t come to the phone.

Papa called her back. “You know you’ve treated her like something stuck to your shoe, madam. And no, we will not send the boy alone to you.”

“Small-minded bitch,” he said, when she hung up again. “Horrible bourgeois cow. They should never be allowed to see that child again.”

“Do they want him or the idea of him?” asked Dee.

“Thomas will sort it out when he comes home,” said Papa.