Sybil’s name is in the second-to-last orbit, the twelfth. With one glance, she can find her position within her family’s history, her coordinates, so to speak. Any other Braithwaite can do the same, and that gives them, in a time of deracination, an abiding sense of place. Most of Joshua’s and Sarah’s descendants still live close to the flinty, unyielding soil from which those first two settlers wrested their bread and in which their dust lies today (in the cemetery in Dedham, Massachusetts). For the most part, the Braithwaites did not scatter themselves across the American wilderness, as if they feared that they would lose themselves in the raw vast vacancy of the continent, would forget who they were and from whom they had sprung if they lost sight of one another and the tombstones of Joshua and Sarah and of all the Seths and Hannahs and Enochs and Abigails who followed. Yet, there is a Braithwaite diaspora (which Sybil joined when she moved west in 1992). Small branches of the family—twigs, really—dwell in Ohio, Washington, and California; a few retired Braithwaites inhabit the golf-club communities of the Sun Belt; two expatriate Braithwaites live overseas. But every year, at different times during the summer, different branches convene at Mingulay, just as Cyrus had envisioned when he built the place in the late 1880s. They come together to play tennis and bridge and billiards, to sail and swim and fish and hike in the woods, or to sit reading on the verandas when Maine fogs descend; but the true purpose of these assemblies is to reaffirm their bond of blood. The bond is almost palpable when large numbers of them gather. A visitor sipping cocktails with them at the appropriate hour is likely to feel, amid the polite conversation made by people in blue blazers and Lands’ End dresses, that he is observing the tribal rite of some white, Protestant Yanomami, preserved in the isolation of their metaphorical Amazon.

In the courtyard of her ranch house on this winter’s day in 1998, Sybil and I reminisce about the Fourth of July, 1974, when we, roommates recently graduated from Mount Holyoke, stood on Mingulay’s lawn with a mob of Braithwaites, from septuagenarians to toddlers, to watch fireworks burst over Blue Hill Bay. We remember how the thunderous finale that made noon of night seemed to shine on the firm clean patrician faces of her relatives, like a light of grace. Yes, they had it even at that late date in their history: that air of belonging to an America that belonged to them.