All right, forget Catherine’s figures of speech, Sybil continued. The fact was, Cyrus did not answer the cable, and that was as much as she had been told.

Myles turned toward the middle of the three windows, set like triptych panels in the bayed wall of the study, his gaze wandering outside to land on something far away, beyond the dull lawn whereon oak leaves flew, settled, and flew again, beyond the tin-colored harbor intermittently rippled by the fluky wind that set the leaves in motion.

“Our family’s full of these misty yarns, what’s so special about this one?”

“Why would a man toss his sons onto a small boat?…”

“If it was Double Eagle, it wasn’t all that small,” Myles said, and gave her dimensions and said there was an old photograph of her, somewhere in an album.

With a nod, Sybil acknowledged this information, or lack of it, then acknowledged with her voice that the vessel was bigger than she had thought; nevertheless, forty-six feet wasn’t much on the open ocean, which made her wonder why Cyrus would put his sons aboard and tell them to get lost for three months. She didn’t know what he had in mind, but her mother had said a banishment, a term of exile.…

“Sounds like your mother and her Uncle Remusland bombast. Ha! I can hear her now.” Myles, turning his head part way to look at Sybil askance, raised his voice two octaves and put on a Southern drawl thick as buttermilk: “They wuh ba-yanushed, they wuh eggzahled.” His hand, with its serpentry of bloodless vessels, stiffly fluttered at the bookcases flanking the door. “The left one, bottom shelf. See those albums? Top one on the stack. Open it.”

She got out of the chair. Its pages aged to a khaki color, curled at the edges, and barely held together by half-rotted cloth bindings, the album had the delicate, decayed look of a medieval manuscript. She opened it carefully, afraid it would fall apart in her hands, and saw pasted to the inside of the front cover a photograph of Theodore Roosevelt that had been cut out of the frontispiece of a book. Scowling from behind his trademark glasses, firm lips partly hidden by his walrus mustache, bull terrier’s head thrust a little forward, as if he were about to charge straight out of the confining oval frame an artist had drawn around him, T.R. looked to be at the pinnacle of his ostentatious virility. Beneath the photo, clutched in the talons of an American eagle, was a scroll bearing a quotation, which Myles asked Sybil to read aloud. She raised the album closer to her eyes to see the small print.

“ ‘ “No nation facing the unhealthy softening and relaxation of fiber which tend to accompany civilization can afford to neglect anything that will develop hardihood, resolution, and the scorn of discomfort and danger.” From The Wilderness Hunter, by Theodore Roosevelt.’ ”