Sybil heard the ticks of the hall clock in the quiet house.

“Like my father? My father and Hilary?” she had asked.

Hilary, golden Hilary, sporty and daring, who in her sophomore year at Mount Holyoke broke any number of taboos and precedents by crewing on a Gloucester swordfishing boat for a day to write an article for her journalism class. The skipper and mate gave her a chance to harpoon a swordfish—a challenge they were sure she wouldn’t accept. They were dumbfounded when the child of privilege walked out onto the bow pulpit with a harpoon, and with an aim as true as if she’d been schooled by her whaling forefathers, ironed a three-hundred-pounder basking on the surface. As the great fish thrashed and the barrel at the end of the rope dipped and rose like a bobber, she further astonished captain and mate by quoting Melville, something to the effect that a harpooner casts his lance not out of toil but out of relaxation.

Hilary, Sybil’s sistermother because Catherine, the Garden District deb, queen of the classiest krewe in the 1941 Mardi Gras, was appalled by children younger than six or seven. Their stink and shrieks and incessant demands, their irrationality. Hilary was the one who daubed iodine on the knees Sybil was forever skinning as she scrambled in summer tide pools to net crabs and shellfish and minnows. She comforted Sybil when she came home from school crying because the teacher scolded her for not participating in class. Come on, dry your eyes, Fudge. You’re a little bit of snail, and she was only trying to get you to come out of your shell. Her voice was husky (a little like Lauren Bacall’s, their mother used to say) and her hands were strong from all the sailing and rowing she did; oh, sistermother was quite a woman, and her death had left Sybil feeling more orphaned than if Catherine had died.

The summer of 1963, the summer before things started to go wrong—and not just in Sybil’s family. Wade was sailing his Concordia yawl, Double Eagle III, in a class race at Newport. He was helmsman and captain; the editor of one of his magazines was navigator; his son, Jason, seventeen that year, was being trained to handle the main and mizzen sheets like a crack crewman; and Hilary was foredeck man—the toughest job, the one that required a fine sense of balance and timing. There was nothing particularly critical or prestigious about the race, but Wade, former Dartmouth boxer and hockey player, marine fighter pilot in World War II, intended to win it, wanted to, needed to. He had inherited, like his uncle Nathaniel, a competiveness almost pathological.