Some of that, she answers, would have been habitual for an old sea captain, but, she adds, a man’s actions can appear orderly and rational while the impulse driving them is disorderly and mad. She urges me to look at things from this angle: The food, the instruments, the charts of unfamiliar shores and waters, and giving Nathaniel command of the vessel—that above all—was as irresponsible as putting a whiskey bottle in front of an alcoholic.

I shake my head. She leans forward in her chair as an eddy of dry wind drifts into the courtyard and rustles the papers on the table.

“How could he not have known that Nathaniel was a restless kid, a kid with an adventurous temperament, a kid with a habit of taking chances, and sometimes stupid chances?”

“Ah,” I say. “All that stuff was a way of encouraging Nathaniel, even tempting him? Cyrus could not have known that he would decide to sail to Florida, but he must’ve known that Nathaniel would take some sort of risk, eventually?”

Not known it in the sense we know things for certain, she expounds. Hoped it maybe. Wanted it maybe, way down in some rank and secret cellar of his heart or mind, the place where bugs and lizards crawl. Hoped it, wanted it, but could not consciously admit to the hope, the desire, because it was too malignant …

“Wait a second,” I interrupt, she sitting tensely before me, knees clamped, hands folded in her lap. “Are you suggesting that the thing he wanted, that he hoped would happen—Are you saying that he was trying to do away with his own sons?”

“He hoped the sea would do it for him. At the very least, he didn’t give a damn what happened to them. Maybe. Yes.”

“Could you tell me what ‘Maybe, yes’ means?”

“Not ‘Maybe comma yes,’ but ‘Maybe period. Yes period.’ Yes, that’s what I suspect, but only suspect, because I could never prove it.”

“But Sybil, you said that he said they were to come back in September, so if what he was trying to do was …”

“I think that instruction was part of his derangement,” she interjects. “It was to assuage his own conscience. He said it to pretend to one part of his mind, call it the upper part, that he wasn’t trying to do what the lower part wanted. Or maybe he said it because he knew that if he told the boys what he really meant—Don’t ever come back—they would have panicked, made a scene, caused a lot of fuss he wasn’t prepared to deal with. Anyway, I don’t think that he, knowing what he did about the sea, expected them to last the summer.”

Her composure has returned, which is odd, considering what she’s telling me.

“Maybe you’ve been affected by what Myles told you?” I suggest. “What was it? Parents who destroy their children?”