He and Eliot and Drew spent the afternoon fishing in the dory, taking turns at the oars as they trolled a bay. They had caught only a few small mackerel, until Drew landed a monster bluefish of twelve pounds or more. When they got back, their father was sitting far up the lawn in an Adirondack chair, a boater pulled low over his eyes. Drew ran toward him, dragging his prize by the stringer looped through its gills and mouth. “Dad, look what I caught, lookit!” he shouted. “Did it all by himself, too!” hollered Eliot, he and Nathaniel striding behind. Dad rose and started toward them, and then doffed the hat and called out, “Surprise!”

They stopped short when they saw the full head of hair without a strand of gray in it.

“Lockwood!” said Drew. “From back there, you …”

“ ’Mazing, isn’t it?” A crooked grin appeared in the ruddy beard, and the cheeks above it ruddy also. “But I can do better, sure, a lot better,” Lockwood said, just as Mother, in her white muslin morning dress, came out of the house and held the door open for Moira, wheeling a tea cart. “Now you watch this.” Lockwood half closed one eye and cocked his head a little to one side to make the opposite eye look askance, miming Dad’s peculiar glance. He took a step toward Drew, stumbled, and caught his balance. “Fine fish you caught there, son. Fine fish. Like the cut of your jib, boy”—mimicking, almost flawlessly, their father’s clipped accent.

Drew and Eliot laughed; it wasn’t only rare for Lockwood to clown around with them, it was unprecedented. Nathaniel managed only a flickering smile, for as Lockwood came nearer, he realized what had ruddied his complexion and caused the change from his usual aloofness, and that faint whiskey reek also brought back the picture from the night before.

“Well, how was that, boys?”

“Pretty good,” Eliot replied. “Think you can do the story about Mobile Bay?”

“Lockwood, dear,” Mother called. “We’ll be having tea now.”

He spun on his heel, faced her.

“In a moment, my dear Mrs. Braithwaite.” (He always addressed her that way.) “Y’see, looks like I’m a victim of mistaken identity, and I am trying to live up to it.”

She stepped off the veranda and pointed her sun parasol, Nathaniel struck by how like a goddess she looked in the moment she moved out of shade into light, how like a white-robed goddess, pointing a sacred sword.

“Gracious! Look at that fish! Who caught that?”

Drew answered that he had.

“Why, darling, good for you. It is a leviathan!”

She told him to take it immediately around back to the kitchen and give it to Mrs. Carter to put on ice, before it spoiled in the heat. Drew started, but Lockwood laid a hand against his chest.