Her line of sight rose toward the portrait of her great-grandfather hanging over the fireplace, he in a nautical cap and coat that bore none of the showy braid and brass of the yachtsman he became later in his life but was the plain uniform of the working sea captain he had been when the portrait was painted. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, with a beard the color of brick dust and the neck and shoulders of a man capable of giving you as much trouble as you could ask for, and maybe some that you hadn’t yet thought of. The knuckles of his raw, brown hands rested on a quarterdeck’s rail and his eyes were of a shade and chill opacity that always reminded Sybil of seasmoke. The artist hadn’t depicted them according to the conventions of the day, fixed on a far-off horizon, but glaring sidelong and slightly downward with contempt and rebuke, as if Cyrus had been captured at the moment he’d noticed a shirking sailor on the deck below. The angle of his glance was such that it seemed to meet Sybil’s; and so vividly had his expression been rendered that she could put herself in the goldbricking sailor’s shoes as he looked up at his captain, from whom he could surely expect more justice than mercy.

“What about him?” asked Myles.

And she told him she had heard that Cyrus, one summer morning in the century’s infancy, banished his three teenage sons to sea, cast them out onto the broad ocean in a sailboat, warning them not to show their faces again until September, giving them less explanation than a tyrant would have offered prisoners condemned to a convict island; that is to say, no explanation whatsoever. They weighed anchor, and except for a letter Eliot had written to their mother, there was no word from or about them until August, when a cable from the U.S. Legation in Havana was delivered to Cyrus. There the tale got murky. Sybil’s mother had only vague knowledge about what the telegram said, something to the effect that his sons were stranded in Cuba without a dime or a vessel, something about a dreadful storm, a shipwreck, injuries, and an urgent plea to Cyrus to wire money for passage home. But Cyrus responded to it with a silence as complete and inexplicable as the silence of God when He chooses not to answer the most desperate petition.

“Okay, Sybil, what are these theatrics?” Myles grumbled, in interruption. “Don’t presume on the Deity.”

“I’m not presuming, just telling it the way Mama told it.”

“Your mother’s a wonderful woman, but you know her penchant for histrionics. They’re all that way down in Uncle Remusland. ‘The silence of God’ … Really …”