Dad’s rescue of Gulf Shores Industries was only temporary, and the scene that had taken place in Boston was re-enacted the following year, with minor alterations in two of the dramatic unities: The time was midsummer, the setting was Mingulay; the characters were the same, and so was the action. The telegram from Tampa, then Lockwood himself, once again bleary-eyed and stubble-jawed and wearing the very same rumpled linen suit. (Though he himself had changed, looking more than ever like Father: His waist and jowls had thickened—physically, anyway, he was become more substantial—and he had grown a beard.) Another hushed conference with Mother, but on this occasion, Lockwood did not leave immediately afterward. The boys guessed she had stuck to her pledge to make him plead his own case, which is what he did that night in the library. She went with him, maybe to lend moral support, maybe to keep a lid on Father’s temper. He wasn’t likely to lose it with Lockwood, but he might, under these circumstances, and she would not want any unseemly shouting, not in that house where sound carried easily through unplastered walls made only of board-and-batten nailed to studs. And so it was three of them alone, the original family circle, that ring of intertwined lives from which the three brothers were locked out, literally by the library doors, metaphorically by the accident of their births, which had barred them from sharing in the history parents and half brother had lived together, beginning with the sea captain’s wooing of the virgin seamstress from her widowed aunt.

The boys were in their rooms upstairs, fresh from their baths, for the next day was Sunday and they had to be scrubbed and in their best for church. Like stagehands at a play, they caught only fragments of the actors’ dialogue, their father’s and Lockwood’s voices borne through the halls, up through the floorboards, Father speaking in his Yankee burr, all rounded r’s and broad a’s, Lockwood in his strange Florida Keys accent, cracker twang set to the meter of the West Indies. Rivals undercutting the markets … Profits insufficient to meet maintenance costs of the vessels … Second mortgage … Liquidation … That’s what you should do, at least keep creditors off.… Declare bankruptcy, Father?… Exactly what I’m saying … Then their mother interjecting with the only words she uttered that night: Oh, Cy, that is so drastic, it would be a disgrace!… Not as much of a disgrace as getting hauled into court for … No! Once and once only … Good money after bad …