“You three, my daughters and their friends, Will and his friends make fourteen, Hannah and I sixteen, my guests nineteen, leaving one of the critters for insurance,” she said. “Bring the lobsters back right away, no detours or tarrying. I want ’em alive and kicking—and a dollar in change. Don’t let that skinflint down-easter charge you more than twenty cents apiece.”

Down the white street they went on their errand, the gravel of stone and crushed shellfish crunching underfoot, and the trees casting long afternoon shadows over the great houses and the gardens, vibrant with iris and zinnia and wild rose. Drew whistled tunelessly to himself.

“Reckon you’re happy now, little man,” said Nathaniel. The whistling irritated him. “Got a fixed roof over your head again and, pretty soon, Mummy in the room down the hall.”

“Stop calling me ‘little man.’ ”

“He’ll stop when you stop letting him know it bothers you”—Eliot, exasperated.

“Aren’t you happy that Mother’s all right?” asked Drew, as they took a zigzag staircase down a rocky drop-off to the shorefront.

“Sure.”

“And I’d figure you to be extra happy about living in the same house with Constance.” Drew tossed a nasal mockery into Constance. “Now you two can practice being married.”

“Better not let Mrs. Williams hear you say that.”

“What do you mean?”

Nathaniel did not answer, suddenly distracted by a return of the alluring, frightening image: Constance’s head grafted onto the French woman’s naked body, the divan covered with the stripes and spots of slain beasts.

“What’s wrong with what I said?” Drew asked.

“For a genius, you’re an idiot, sometimes,” Nathaniel said, and then led the way down the shorefront road.

The lobsterman’s shack was a gray shingle box perched on the end of a wharf near the ferry dock. The lobsters, thousands of them, it looked like, were held alive in two cars—huge, submerged crates connected by block and tackle to booms, protruding from one side of the shack. The man who ran the place not only was a skinflint, he looked like one, as if his penurious soul had affected his flesh, paring it to the minimum required to cover his bones.

“Mrs. Williams told us twenty cents, not a penny more,” Nathaniel said, when the man declared that the price was thirty cents per lobster.

“Maakit price. Thuddy cents,” was all the man would say, his speech stripped of excesses like articles and verbs. He was sitting on a wooden stool behind a counter. In the back were stacked lobster traps resembling miniature Indian longhouses, piles of spindle-shaped pots painted white and green, and coils of pot warp smelling of the copper solvent into which they had been recently dipped against rot.

“Excuse me, sir,” Nathaniel said. “Mrs. Williams wants twenty lobsters and she gave us five dollars and expects a dollar change.”