Now he spoke about the family’s other history, the one Catherine had alluded to—the chronicle of things that didn’t bear looking into too closely. He’d intended, he said, to include as much of it in The Braithwaite Gathering as could be verified and had gone to near and distant relatives, tracking down rumors, asking for letters and diaries sequestered in attic trunks; if they had no documentary evidence, he asked for verbal accounts of misdeeds and moral failings they might have heard about from parents or grandparents, or had witnessed, or possibly even committed themselves. A few balked, considering his enterprise a violation of their privacy. As for the rest of his kinsmen, he’d relied on his reputation for integrity and on his clerical vocation to win their trust and overcome the reserve ingrained in their Yankee natures. More than mere reserve, it was a reticence that made it almost impossible for most Braithwaites to be candid about the family’s dark side, even when they wanted to be. It was as if a Board of Censors sat within their heads, ruling on which episodes were suitable for broadcast, which were too sordid or subversive of the family’s collective self-image ever to be aired. Oh, its standards were not inflexible, he discovered. Had a ratings system, of sorts, that made allowances for changing moral standards. The kinds of wrongdoing that acquire a patina of roguish charm with time, for example, were upgraded from R to PG. And so—Myles grinned tightly—he had learned that the legendary clipper captain, Silas Braithwaite, had been running opium into a Chinese port when he encountered the typhoon; but that was in 1847, and his dope smuggling, seen now through a softening haze of high-seas adventure in the great days of sail, was readily admitted to by his great-great-grandchildren. The Connecticut headmaster, for another example, hadn’t gone to the Arizona Territory only to spread the blossoms of the New England flowering among outlaws and Indians; he was on the run, dismissed from his post because he had, well, put it like this, Sybil, conceived a passion for one of his male students and attempted to express it physically.

“You’re kidding!” She was enjoying this tabloid history. “So his descendants outed that skeleton.”

“Yeah, you could say that,” replied Myles. And why not, what with a couple of current relatives out of their closets and welcomed with their lovers at family reunions and holiday gatherings. No, those mossy scandals had not been his quest, but the expurgated chapters about which only vague hearsay existed. Buzzes in the air, half-known tales borne on the currents of time, about instances of gross fraud and greed, acts of violence and cruelty that Braithwaites had inflicted, not only on other people, but even on their own and maybe especially on their own.