The power of stereotype should not be underestimated. Its distorting prism can affect the way we see ourselves; sometimes, we strive to imitate the images others have of us and thus turn a picture essentially false into one that is true—a case, more or less, of life imitating art. That goes for families as well as for individuals. If old Southern families (like Sybil’s mother’s, the McDaniels) are supposed to be dysfunctional by nature—asylums without walls, swamps of forbidden desires and passions populated by drunks, drug addicts, beautiful but self-destructive females who depend on the kindness of strangers, murderers, suicides, and idiot cousins—old Yankee families like her father’s are expected to be ruthlessly functional, composed of virtuous pragmatists immunized to the more destructive promptings of the libido and the id. The House of the Seven Gables (according to this view) has become a museum of extinct curiosities, the descendants of its inhabitants having moved out to the suburbs to shuck off their black lunacies for nothing worse than quaint eccentricities or madnesses temperate enough to be cured with a martini or a few Valium.

But Sybil knows that the real difference between the Braithwaites and the McDaniels is her father’s family’s greater talent for concealing their Gothic pathologies. Its good name is its most precious asset, the glue that has held it together while the Great American Cyclotron has smashed the extended familes of Sybil’s grandfather’s day into the nuclear familes of her father’s day, and those into the single-parent leptons and no-parent quarks of her own day. Not that Braithwaites haven’t been touched by divorce or any of the other centrifugal forces that knock families to pieces; but divorces and the like seem to have had no lasting effect on their coherence, on the unity signified by the Wheel Chart, a copy of which hangs in Sybil’s bedroom here on her Arizona ranch, a good long way from her roots in salt marsh, granite coast, everlasting sea. The Wheel Chart is the Braithwaite family tree—not the diagrammatic type usually found in genealogies but a series of concentric circles. In the center are the names of the clan’s progenitors, Joshua Caleb Braithwaite (1647–1711) and Sarah Siddons Braithwaite (1653–1722). Around them is a slightly larger ring, with the names of their children and their spouses, and then a still larger ring of grandchildren, and so on, generation after generation radiating outward through time to the present. The impression is not so much of a wheel as of a solar system, ordered and impregnable.