He gestured to her to return the scrapbook to its place. She sat again in the wing chair, its leather, too long without saddlesoap or mink oil, stiff and dry and mazed with creases, like the mummified hide of an extinct beast.

“Cyrus met Roosevelt one time and was a great admirer and held him up as a model to his boys,” Myles said. “Want to know my opinion, a man like him, a self-made man, was thinking about that unhealthy softening, that relaxation of fiber.”

Sybil replied that that possibility had occurred to her: a family-style Outward Bound trip to make men of boys. But you did not have to give the matter an abundance of second thought to question Cyrus’s judgment and sense of paternal responsibility. Here was a man on the most intimate terms with the perils of the sea, and those perils in 1901 double or triple what they were today, what with weather forecasting about as accurate as astrology, and no such thing as marine radios, not to mention the electronic gewgaws that made modern navigation only a little trickier than driving a freeway. So, to put a sixteen-year-old in command of a small craft crewed by a fifteen-year-old and a thirteen-year-old, and then to leave them stranded in Cuba …

“Ah, sterner times, sterner people, used to taking chances, taking their knocks. No big deal for three strong boys to be on their own at sea. And they were Braithwaites to the marrow. Learned how to hand, reef, and steer before they’d learned to tie their shoes.”

“All right, I’ll give you that. They could handle themselves and they had a great adventure. If I had an experience like that … Well, think about my grandfather. He was always writing stories for sailing magazines.…”

“For Yachting, yeah.”

“But he never wrote about that. Or said a thing. If ever there was a story to tell your grandchildren, that was it, but Grandpa never spoke a word about it to me or my brother or Hilary, never to my father, not as far as I know. I was wondering if he ever mentioned it to you.”

Myles shook his head.

“So tell me one thing—why did he never talk about it?”

He began to shrug and then stopped the movement halfway, his wide but thin-fleshed shoulders hunched against the white stalk of his neck to give him the crouched crabbed look of a night heron at rest—a pose he held for several moments, while the dust-moted silence of the house thickened and closed around them and made the air feel viscous. During that brief interlude, she tried to pick out what it was outside that continued to hold Myles’s attention, but all she saw were the leaves like shreds of paper bags and the gray harbor and, through the right window of the bayed alcove, Ten Pound Island, with its squat lighthouse and girdle of lobster buoys.