When Sybil’s father died sixteen years later, some of the same people assembled to lay him to rest in Mount Auburn cemetery, but there was something different about them, beyond the obvious changes time had brought about, something less confident, less commanding; their movements as they gathered around the small marble slab, simply inscribed WADE EDWARD BRAITHWAITE: FEB. 19, 1920—JUNE 30, 1990, suggested a people no longer as sure of their footing as they once were. The service was brief and plain, there amid the mansions of Wade’s ancestors, under groves of maple and copper beech whose long shadows lay like fallen pillars over headstones bearing ancient names of the Republic-Thayer, Greenleaf, Bryant, Peabody. Sybil and her brother, Jason, spoke a few words about their father, then a craggy Congregational minister delivered a eulogy in a Brahmin accent that struck my ear like a scratchy recording made sixty years ago.

The memory of that scene reminds her of something Cousinuncle Myles told her that somber November afternoon in his somber Gloucester house with its scent of roses slightly past their prime: that families like theirs had not suffered a dramatic fall from grace, but rather a slow withdrawal of its light. No, that was not quite how he put it, she recalls. We’ve slipped into irrelevancy, that is what he said, but it means the same thing.

She recalls another of his observations as she sits and ponders whether Nathaniel, Eliot, and Andrew ever discovered the meaning of their father’s message.

Myles had been in the middle of an anecdote about how his grandfather’s granite business had won its first big contract, the profits of which helped to build Mingulay, when he lost his train of thought, and began to reminisce about past summers at the capital of the Braithwaite family-nation. The reminiscence led him to a recollection of his daughter, Allyson, the “blueblood bomb-thrower,” as the newspapers referred to her after she had been arrested in 1970, with several other members of a Weather Underground cell making pipe bombs in a New York basement.

Myles had fallen silent for several moments, and then made the observation that sent Sybil off on the quest that has taken her six years.

“Our lives are a kind of inherited disease, Cousinniece. We Braithwaites have been condemned to commit the sins of our fathers over and over,” he’d said, and when Sybil had asked what he’d meant by that, Myles replied, “Parents who destroy their children, unless the kids get to them first, that’s us.”

“Myles!” Sybil had said, confused and haunted by his choice of verb: not “hurt,” not “abuse,” but destroy. “That’s an awful thing to say. A little while ago you told me you hoped that I wouldn’t end up hating our family like Allyson does. How could you have said that, then tell me what you just did?”