Inside, the cathedral was brilliant with uncharacteristically hot July sun, a kaleidoscope of golden light ratcheting through the stained-glass windows on either end of the vault, as if honey were pouring, liquid, through the glass. The immense stone room was blinding in the concentrated light, a world of amber-toned compartments magnified and mathematical under the ribs of the flying buttresses. The whole glowing interior seemed to be respirating in the heat. A sweet waxy musk of incense seeped out from deep in the pores of the stone. It was like being inside a hive: the capped windows in their gilded hexagonal fittings, the marble-skinned martyrs writhing like pupas up the walls.

“Watch.” Her father stood in sepia light by the fence of their house in Winthrop, across the bay from Boston. The coarse-textured sand inched right up into the yard, blowing in little eddies between the salt-bleached pickets, drifting over the shells that bordered the grass. It was 1937; she was four years old, almost five. He would be dead in three years, and they’d move away from the ocean. The door of her childhood would close.

Her father waited, perfectly still before a snaggle of battered geraniums, tall in his nubby brown suit, his hands held out and stiff. He was uncompromising; he could wait forever. Suddenly he clapped his hands together in a trap, then folded down onto one knee. Flicking his head to one side, beckoning her over. He held his cupped hands to her ear. From inside came a stifled, frantic vibrato. “A bee,” he said, smiling down at her like a god. “It won’t sting me. I know which ones to catch.” The bee buzzed and buzzed in its cramped black cave. Slowly her father opened his blunt fingers. The bee shot out, sputtering like a backfiring motor; it droned again and was gone.

She watched it fly, amazed.

Her father watched it too, grinning. Then he tugged one of her sun-blond plaits and stood, his broad hand cantilevered on his knee.

The cathedral was humming with holy, golden judgment. It sizzled at the back of her eyes. She held their bags from Jaeger and the toy shop, the library renewals for Ted that she’d forgotten to drop off in the car before they entered the church. Her mother was gawking at the long Gothic ceiling in the nave. All that light pouring in. Sylvia was ill; it was making her ill. The barefoot saints muttering at the door, the honeyed light bucketing down on all their heads. All that sorrow, all the wringing of hands. What made all that gold so bright was the blackness yawning behind it.