“I didn’t know that!” Annie exclaimed. “How could I have known that? When we got back she asked me, ‘Well, is the toothache gone?’”

“And was it?”

“Yes.”

“My mother was a lush, an Irish lush, the worst of the worst,” Jim said, clasping his knees. Annie lit a cigarette and he took it from her companionably. “And the dear old man, St. Vincent himself, left us and beat it back to Donegal or County Clare—I never inquired—and there we were, the seven of us, in Boston, with her falling down, urinating in her clothes. Well, we all had to go to work, except the littlest girl, and she died anyhow. We had to beg the money for a box for her. I can tell you all of it in a few minutes, fourteen years of it. The truth may not be important in the way of real lives, anyhow. By the way, would you like to see Bea?”

She could make out his grin even in the dark.

“La Siciliana,” he said when she remained silent, then in a melancholy voice, “Your father never writes me, never calls. He’s afraid of me, you see. It’s too bad about you, but he always was the slave of grown-up women—and how they hated him for it! When your mother died, he was fair game. He would have left her in the long run, I fear. She didn’t beat him sufficiently. She was a pale thing, from a nice Irish Protestant gang, not the ghastly mad Catholic sort at all.”

“You knew her well? I didn’t know you’d known Tony so long.”

“Oh, hardly. She was not knowable, being so modest and still and nearly dying at the sight of a human face.”

“I might have liked her.”

“Like?” he cried. “Oh, no! I like my old sweaters and my golf clubs. But not my children. Nor they me. Nor my dead mother and my brothers. Like is no word for such things. It’s all passions…”

“The water’s coming up,” she said, one of her feet slipping forward in the wet. He rose silently and stood behind her. There was a tinge of gray in the black sky. “I suppose you don’t have a watch?” he asked. “Well, no matter. We’ll get that gang and take you home.”

They went back to the shiphouse, passing other houses, dark, silent, facing the sea. As they mounted the steps of the deck, they saw through the windows that the room was almost empty. A man slept on the floor, his mouth open; a woman lay curled up on a wicker couch, near her shoe protruded the head of a dachshund, resting on his paws. But upright and awake in a corner chair, a half-filled glass in one hand, sat Karin.

Through the window, her eyes met theirs.