“But it’s still your family. They’re in you. So tell me, if you really think this is what happened way back then, do you hate your family now?”

“Myles said it. You have to hate the sin but love the sinner.”

“There are a lot of sinners to love in this story. How about the boys? Do you suppose they found out and kept it to themselves?”

“Nathaniel may have, although I don’t see how. Maybe that’s why he dropped out of Andover and joined the marines only a couple of months after he got home. Turned his back on everything … but … no, I don’t think he found out, either. He probably enlisted looking for a chance to prove himself. I think the boys were innocent. If there was a conspiracy of silence, it was those two, Cyrus and Elizabeth.”

She turns to look over her shoulder at the horse pasture in the near distance, and in the middle distance at the San Rafael valley, dipping then rising to foothills tiered beneath the snow-rimmed Huachucas and the ranges of Sonora in the far distance.

“But do you?” I ask.

“What?”

“Hate the sin but love the sinner? Or do you hate the sinners, too? Do you hate your family?”

Sybil rubs her teeth with the knuckle of her thumb and looks at her papers, at a photograph of Nathaniel, Eliot, and Andrew when they were young, at the mildewed log of the voyage that ended their boyhoods, but I sense that she is not imagining them as they were then.

She is remembering Eliot and her grandfather as she knew them in her own early years: Eliot tall and slender and half bald, fond of jokes, a tenor in the church choir, a retired textile executive; an old man who had amused her as a child by picking up pencils and coins with his limber big toe. Andrew, two inches shorter, with Cyrus’s gray-blue eyes and hair still thick but gone pure white, retired from the mathematics department at MIT to work as a consultant for the Massachusetts State Economics Board in the 1950s, when he battled industrialists and labor unions alike to lay the foundation for what became the electronics research corridor along Route 128, a scholarly man in whom cool rationalism cohabited with a street fighter’s toughness (when he was in his early fifties, he had run down an adolescent purse snatcher in a North Boston alley and snatched the purse back, saying, “I’ll take that, young man”).

She does not remember Nathaniel. No one in her family does. No one in the family, dead or living, saw him after he left for the marines, except in a photograph he mailed home in 1902. It shows him in a khaki uniform and campaign hat, a Krag slung over one shoulder, the opposite shoulder leaning against a tree somewhere in the Philippines, where he died of malaria in the autumn of that year.