LOCKWOOD HAD lived with Mother and Dad in New England until a few weeks after Nathaniel was born, and then, frustrating Dad’s hopes to make him a partner in the granite business, went under sail on coasters between Canada and the Gulf of Mexico. When he saw the steel and rivets of the coming age, he switched to steamers that took him to the farthest corners of the earth, from which he would return six months or a year later and pay one of his brief calls on the family before departing to pick up another ship. Eliot dubbed him “the Magi” for the gifts he always bore on his visits, each wrapped in brown paper with a name on it and the occasion on which it was to be presented, Christmas or a birthday. There were silks and perfumes for Mother, Arab daggers and African spears for the boys, barbaric tribal masks for Dad’s study, and sometimes he gave Dad a box of cigars for immediate consumption, and the two of them would smoke and drink whiskeys after dinner.

If he was a remote figure to the boys, he was also fabulous, a trans-mundane phantom of the sea, face browned by exotic suns that had etched spidery lines into the corners of his eyes, and his whole person wreathed in the scent, in the romance of fabled ports like Maricaibo and Jakarta and Dakar. The stories he told about those places and about the things that happened at sea were his most valuable gifts. He loosened up when he spun yarns, and the yarns brightened the drab Boston days, bringing to the common world of school and home a vicarious one of adventure and the uncommon. Nathaniel envied him his sailor’s life, as he also envied the youth Lockwood had lived, sailing with Dad in the wild old wrecking days on the Florida reefs—a youth painted in bold hues beside which his, Nathaniel’s, seemed a pallid watercolor.