He backed an oar to swing the tender alongside, waited a couple of seconds for her answer, and when it was not forthcoming, clambered up on deck and lowered a short Jacob’s ladder for her.

“I am afraid that won’t be possible,” she replied finally. “There are private woman-to-woman things in it, and besides, one does not read another’s mail, does one?”

“No, ma’am, reckon one doesn’t.”

She smoothed her dress and squinted against the bright water.

“However, I would like you and your brothers to come to dinner tonight. Afterward, I can read you excerpts. Then you’ll see that she’s quite all right. Is that fair, Nathaniel?”

He nodded.

“Now fetch Eliot and Andrew, and then we’ll join the others and enjoy God’s gift of this splendid afternoon.”

7

WHICH THEY DID. There is no photograph of that day in her albums, but it’s easy enough for Sybil to picture the yachting party picnicking on an island in the harbor: seven girls and seven boys laughing, talking, eating sandwiches, drinking Coca-Cola and ginger ale, and all full of youth and health and simmering hormones, which their watchful chaperons insured would not come to a boil. She can see them gathered for dinner that evening in the big yellow house with the rose arbor out back and broad veranda in front, where Dr. Williams once sat on summer evenings, taking a holiday from his patients and sexual exertions. So it went for the next three days. Nathaniel chronicled the social events in his logbook—a round of day sails, another picnic, a tennis match, a dance at the casino, an afternoon of poetry readings. His accounts were mere bulletins, stripped of mood and emotion, yet Sybil claims she can sense, between the lines, his growing impatience with these genteel pursuits and pleasant diversions of the haute WASP, circa 1901.

On the afternoon of the fourth day in North Haven, a message from Gertrude Williams was delivered to Double Eagle by the launch pilot: A telegram for Nathaniel and his brothers had come to her house via the morning ferry from Camden. She believed it was from their mother, and would they kindly stop by to pick it up?

The maid, a rawboned German woman, admitted the boys into the house in which no man had dwelled for five years. She led them to the drawing room, where Gertrude was holding court, surrounded by her daughters and their friends and a couple of matrons from town. So large an assemblage in one average-sized room created a sense of feminine solidarity almost palpable, and when the maid knocked, ten pairs of female eyes turned as one toward the doorway where the three young males stood. Nathaniel could not say they were glaring, but their looks were not welcoming, as if he and his brothers had intruded on a sorority as hermetic and cabalistic in its way as Free Masonry.