Meanwhile, she needed a bookend: a winter for herself in Ireland while Ted was gone, a plan she meant to compel during this trip. Ted would walk the baked roads of Andalusia with an image of her on this briny strand—a vision of their marriage in which Assia could take no part. Court Green had been corrupted, London as well; soon, possibly, Spain. But Ireland was unblemished territory—a place they had both imagined but never seen, a layer of their joint and private myth, as marriage, until this summer, had been.

Remote Cleggan, with its sand-edged views of the Western Isles, was an hour’s drive through orchid bogs and salmon rivers to Thoor Ballylee, the tower home of William Butler Yeats, the poet loved independently by both of them before they met. Ted’s first loyalty, the double helix about whom all literature, before and after, cycled, was always Shakespeare; she was more a reader of serial enthusiasms and legion jealousies. Yeats, though, was a shared passion, since their courtship a rallying point, a writer with whose works they were on equal footing—equals—whose mystical leanings and poetics seemed often to mirror their own. Ireland, then, had been reached with heavy freight—she, in particular, hectic with gushing appreciations, that old, mortifying fault reborn of desperation to rectify their marriage, the Roman candle of her trajected future suddenly snuffed, dropping to earth.

Thirty years ago, a freak storm blew up over Cleggan Bay while the entire fleet was at sea catching mackerel by hook and line. Forty-five fishermen drowned. Houses, farms still stood empty. Their host owned the last surviving fishing boat from the Cleggan disaster, a Galway hooker—the True Light, its triple-sailed rigging of brown calico stiffened with tar. “Let’s take the other one,” she had joked nervously, leaving nothing to chance, and for six miles of open sea and sky she lay on the sloping foredeck of the blessed Ave Maria gulping salt air with exaggerated pleasure, head down to avoid a crack in the skull from the jib, ballast groaning below the deck, the sinuous timbers of the hull slapping hard over whitecap swells as they sailed toward Inishbofin.

Not all of it was exaggeration. It was real, her sense of release away from Court Green—not merely a break from the numbing baby routine or the staggering blow of Ted’s affair, its moment-by-moment reminders of their bond ringing hollow all around her in the house. Miles from shore on the muscular Atlantic, her lungs bursting from sea spray, icy-eyed diving gannets gliding high and watchful for herring, ribboned silhouettes of seals sleek beneath the surf on either side of the slicing hooker, her sense of strangulation faded back. That was the sea’s gift, the legacy of her Winthrop childhood. But relief cut both ways, leaving her lashing for resolution, clear and final.