She outlined the harbor with her eyes. When he told her he would bring her here, she bought a book about the island. So she knew, as she looked out at the sea, that the island used to be round, that she was not overlooking a body of water but a submerged volcanic crater, flooded centuries ago by a catastrophic eruption.

What are you thinking? he asked.

About the earthquake, she said.

He was looking at her hand. You have a tan line, he said.

She glanced down at her ring finger, at the thin white line, just a shade paler than her hands, a tiny sliver of skin that hadn’t seen the sunlight for nearly a decade, now newly exposed.

She hadn’t taken off the ring until they were on the ferry. She was afraid she’d bump into her husband, or someone else she knew, before she could get to the airport. So she’d worn it on the flight to Athens, as she’d worn it for the nine years of her marriage, through every fight, through every restraining order. She’d worn it when he broke her fingers in the door of his Mercedes, when he’d burned her palm with a lit cigar.  But last night, on the ferry, as she watched the sleeping face of her rescuer, she slipped the ring off. Later, in the washroom, when she pulled back her hair, she saw a fading yellow bruise on her left cheek. She watched her hands in the mirror, thinking that, ringless, they looked strong, independent, like someone else’s hands.

*

The volcanic sand was rich, black, blisteringly hot. As she lowered her body to the sand, she felt its heat through the thick terrycloth.

She smiled up at him when he lay his towel next to hers. He smiled back. What are you thinking? he asked.

She was thinking about the big earthquake, the one that caused the eruption that destroyed Santorini. She’d read that the frequent quakes often set off volcanoes — but the islanders never moved; it was just a part of life. Yet after this particular quake, all of the inhabitants suddenly decided to pack up and leave. As if they knew something.

Nothing, she said. She leaned back onto her towel, head turned toward him. She would be safe with him, he had promised; her husband wouldn’t find her here. He would set her up with a place to stay and visit every few weeks. His own wife and kids would never know.

She turned her face to the sun and closed her eyes, the heat burning into her eyelids. She thought of the islanders. She recognized their knowledge, the necessity of fracturing your own life before it shuddered and came apart underneath your feet.

*

In bed the next morning, as she ran her hand along his sunburned bicep, she thought of her husband’s arm, the faded scar from a distant car accident, the heart-shaped birthmark on his thigh. She was now with a man who didn’t have any of these markings, an unfamiliar body with a history of its own.

They took a tourist boat to Nea Kameni, a small, flattish island nestled in the crook of Santorini’s bent arm. Its surface was dry and parched, and sulfuric fumes rose above the island’s sharp, rocky surface. The lava had taken away everything in its path —and yet, she noticed, they passed occasional buds of life sprouting from its layers: spots of green grass, a fig tree.

*

He saw her then and held up a finger, asking her to wait. Look, I’ve got someone at the door. I’ll call later. He hung up. Then he came over and put his arms around her. I have to check in every once in a while. He pulled back and looked at her. What do you want to do tonight? Dinner, dancing?

They ate outdoors, overlooking silvery waves under a full moon. Afterward, a nightclub, a loud glittering place where he swung her in his arms. He drank too much, and she helped him to bed.

After she heard his breathing deepen, she left the room. She walked back to the club and let a man buy her a drink. He was taller than her husband but shorter than her lover. She could see the moon in his eyes when they left the club and walked to the beach. He spoke accented English, but they didn’t talk much. As she pulled off his shirt, she scanned his shoulders, his arms, his chest, looking for scars or birthmarks, landmarks to guide her. She found nothing. She closed her eyes.

*

When he was in the shower, she found the return airline and ferry tickets, his cash. He had let her hold onto her own passport.

But she had to wait two days, until finally he went downstairs alone, to the pay phone in the lobby where he’d begun calling his wife. She took the tickets and his cash, and left through the hotel’s back exit.

In the taxi, she looked at her hands. The tan line on her ring finger had browned over, blended in.

She stood on the top deck. As the ferry passed through the harbor, over the sunken land, she dropped his airline ticket into the water. Then she turned and looked up at the cliffs, once the hidden underbelly of the island, layers of earth shaken apart and now exposed, as perhaps they were meant to be.

Stirring wretched coffee with a fork while a tinny radio played something that must have been relevant to the assertion, fifty-seven year old Alonzo Johnson wondered how it had been decided, at that moment, in a packed Greyhound diner, that the stranger sharing his two-person table would disclose that particular piece of information. Or, more properly, those pieces, as it wasn’t only the Elvis-death-birthday declaration, but there was also Delavan, the mom, and the club. That must have been Hugh Hefner’s old place on Lake Geneva. He wondered which was most pertinent.

“Delavan.” Alonzo took the safe route, geography. “Is that Walworth County, near Elkhorn?”

“That’s right, Walworth,” said the younger man. You can have one foot in Walworth, you know, and the other in Illinois. I guess it sounds better saying ‘one foot in Wisconsin, the other in Illinois,’ since they’re both states. When I was in fourth grade they got our whole class to some park or something once, and they lined us up, left foot Wisconsin, right foot Illinois. My mom’s still got the picture somebody took.”

Alonzo’s eyes focused on the window and the black winter night. He imagined a column of frozen jumping jacks posed forever on the borderline. Not for the first time, he vociferously argued to himself that state borders, all borders, their entirety, should be marked in a meaningful way: emboldened by massive yellow highlighters, or painted, or chalked, as the white lines on a football field. Sometimes you need to see the lines.

“My mom liked Elvis a lot, had all his music, but it was this friend of hers who was the fanatic. She was staying with us that summer, on her way to ‘California, or maybe Colorado.’ She was crazy in love with him. I was sitting right next to her when she heard it on the television. She looked like a clock someone threw out a window.”

The abrupt resumption of words shoved away Alonzo’s image, and he mourned the loss. He would like to see that photograph as it sat on an aged mother’s piano, or, more likely, in a dusty box in a closet, though he suspected it wouldn’t match the one in his mind. Smashed clocks, however, were things he had really seen.

“She was devastated. She dressed in black for a week, but I guess all she had that was black were these tight leotard dance things, and real short shorts … hot pants maybe? It was weird. She looked like something out of Hollywood. I couldn’t stop staring at her, and she was as old as my mom. I was even thinking about her in bed.”

Both sides of the tiny table paused at the revelation, giving it its due.

“She never left the house, just played those records over and over and over. Finally, one night when my mom was pulling a double-shift, she told me to sing — no, she didn’t tell me, she ordered me — to sing ‘Love Me Tender’ to her. I don’t even know if she knew I could sing or not. I hadn’t sung a word since they kicked me out of choir the year before, for smoking.”

Smoking at what, thirteen? Alonzo himself had started at fifteen. After a few desultory attempts over forty years, he had quit completely, finally, hadn’t smoked in eight months.

“It was the one she played the most, I heard it literally 35 times, maybe more, that week.”

It was rare to hear the word literally used correctly. Alonzo believed he had just experienced it.

“‘Sing it to me at midnight, on the back porch.’ That’s exactly what she said. She went to the porch — it was screened in, that’s where she was sleeping — and came back with a scrap of paper with the lyrics. They were in handwriting. Hers, I guess. She put it in my hand and didn’t say another word, just walked back out through the porch to the yard. I took it to my room, but I could watch her out my window, about twenty yards behind the house, sitting cross-legged on the hood of her old Pontiac, smoking and staring out somewhere. For the entire time, almost two hours, she just sat there, her eyes fixed. I angled my neck, but I couldn’t see what she was looking at.”

Stars, Alonzo explained to himself. She was searching southern Wisconsin’s endless summer sky, certain that solace could be found if only she knew where to look.

“Of course, I knew it already, the song, I’d heard it so much that week. I especially like the line in the middle: ‘Take me to your heart.’ But I did practice it a bunch of times. At first just to myself, then a little louder, and finally once, after I shut my window, at full strength until I knew I had it the way I wanted. Then I waited, but double-wide awake, keeping an eye on the clock, and keeping an eye on her, too, sitting right where she’d been the first time I looked.”

Alonzo stretched his right arm across his chest to knead his left shoulder. He lifted his coffee but replaced it without touching the cup to his lips.

“At two minutes of, I was still watching her. She slid off the hood and started in to the porch. I stuffed the lyrics into my jeans pocket even though I knew I didn’t need them, and I went to her. I remember I was barefoot, and I had on a Packer jersey, but for some reason I can’t remember which one. I had three or four different ones. I wish I knew.”

Alonzo had a fleeting memory of a refrain: “I went to her.” How much, in four words?

“When I got there, she was standing at the far end, by the head of the day bed we had, the one that she used. She motioned me to stay at the other end, so I was standing just inside the screen door. Next to her was a circle of candles on a little wrought-iron table. She lit every candle. Then she spoke, but when she did, I could barely hear her. She said ‘Now. Now, please.’ She closed her eyes and I sang. Maybe they were already closed the whole time, I don’t know.”

Even on a windless August night, the flames would have danced, sending gentle shadows to the fake-wood paneling of the summer porch.

“I nailed that song. I had a band later, and I still sing sometimes, but I’ve never hit it like that. About thirty seconds after I stopped, she opened her eyes and kind of tiptoed to where I was standing. She put both her hands on my face and kissed me for as long as the song had lasted.

I had kissed before, but I hadn’t, after all. In those minutes with her, with her tears pouring all down my face, I realized why and how grown-ups kissed.

She pulled back, traced the line of my jaw with one finger, and then rested it for a split-second on my peach-fuzz mustache. Sometimes I can still feel that finger. Then she picked up her little suitcase, walked past me into the yard, and drove away.”

He shrugged, took a few breaths, continued. “I’ve had three marriages, two of them good ones. My wife and I still surprise each other. I have no complaints. None. But that kiss will stay with me forever. Up to then, I’d just been waiting, you know, like you wait for a bus that might never show up.”

Alonzo Johnson took a large last swallow of cold coffee, grateful as it graced his tongue and teeth, swept both checks from the table, paid the cashier, added a generous tip, and, next to the cash register, found a cigarette machine. He pumped quarters into the slot until a crisp pack of Camels dropped to the tray. Grabbing a nameless book of matches from a bowl on the counter, he strode outside into the chill, his breath immediately visible, the pack already open and a Camel between his lips. Instinctively locating the darkest corner of the parking lot, he leaned against the base of a utility pole, its iciness cutting his thin jacket to the small of his back. Amid the constellations he was easily able to locate, as he struck his first match in 240 days, the screened-in porch in Delavan, the little blue suitcase and the stringed handbag, and the red tail lights, one brighter than the other, heading west across the bright yellow lines.

Over a number of years, as they grew toward a global war surfacing on both oceans, meetings were held, elections concluded, designs and improvements of all genres initiated, trysts enamored, hope burst continually from that domicile in which no one lived, not as a home site.

When the town, through the office of the chief of police, demanded taxes be paid on the property, thus quickly abandoned by the clubmen to the town, to the weather, to the times. They relocated their activities to another phantom house they’d build on land without a road, deeper in the tall pines, stray apple trees feeding off the ground since the Civil War days, and tyrant oaks that held their territory.

The membership included Frank Parkinson, Eddie Oljay, Bud Petitteau, Homer Barnard, Allie Devine, Clete Weavering, Asa Parnell, Poker Symonds, Nial O’Hara, Chuck Grabowski, and others, by adoption or temporary association, whose names will only resurface as the story progresses. Some girls, of course, toward that quick run at war building in Europe, had honorary admission at all hours of day or night after a code of secrecy had been imposed. Not one of those girls, from what I have heard over the long years, ever broke that code.

Even as the members pillaged materials in small doses from ready sources on Route One, begged and borrowed in addition to the stealing, the noises on the far side of two oceans began to sift into their meetings.

“Hey, guys,” Poker Symonds said one night as the moon sifted down through the trees, “I just heard today Buzz Marchowski joined the Canadian Air Force and is already in Moncton or Shediac or St. Something somewhere. Eddie Smiledge down The Rathole told me. Says Buzz’s all pissed off about the Germans screwing up Poland where his grandparents are living on the family farm.”

Symonds, his name changed from hard–to-pronounce beginnings like Sczy and whatever, kept shaking his head as if he wondered why his name had been hidden behind soft edges. As it turned out, he was the first to leave the clubhouse one night, never to come back. Under the moon that night and light of kerosene lamps, others knew what was cooking in him; his eyes told the deep unrest so recently kicked free.
Each knew his turn was coming, that he was bound elsewhere on the globe’s face. If it touched Saugus in any manner at all, all swore an oath they’d be in the first line of recruits.

Germany was making too much noise, stepping on too many toes, bustling and bragging of their great inroads on small nations guarded by token armies, and Japan, like a lecher, was stretching its imperial hands across the rich skin and into too many orifices of the tasty Orient. In a matter of a week the balled fist of war came at them; one classmate, flying for the RCAF, was shot down over the English Channel; another enlistee, a neighbor of Parkinson’s, was missing from an RAF flight over France; an uncle of Clete Weavering was stomped to death on the China coast as he tried to sneak out to sea to board a submarine after secret service on the mainland, and Oljay’s distant cousin was shot in front of a firing squad at the edge of a ghetto in Poland.

War, in its demand for enlistment, called them, young and exuberant in their outlook and it was in the next week they gathered in the clubhouse, the house nobody lived in, and made their plans to help save the world.
Frank Parkinson said, “We don’t go as a group. We don’t get in one line to any branch of the service, and end up in one squad or one flight or one patrol, go down with one bang. We each go our own way. If we come back, or those who do come back, we’ll meet here. No Trafalgar Square for us or even under the clock at The Ritz. We will celebrate here someday. We ought to go down to see the Chief and tell him our plans. He might understand. If not, we’ll tell him not to tell us.”

“Why can’t we go as a group, the whole club of us?” Oljay said, seeing the whole group as a squad of its own, firepower from the start, Robin Hoods or Lone Rangers waging battle.

Parkie said, “No matter if we walked in and got consecutive numbers, they’d split us up. They do things like that so we don’t clique it up. Makes sense to me, so we should each go our way. I’m going in the army. When I heard about Big Red in Burma, it said I’d join the army.”

In a day’s time, it was all decided, for each of them, and all services were involved.

The war to end all wars bruised them all, each one, each in different ways, some with dread permanence. Clete Weavering was blown off the deck of a Navy supply vessel in the Pacific, never to be seen again. A year later an envelope ended up at the Legion Hall, from Clete, simply addressed to The Boys of Henshit Mountain, Saugus, Massachusetts. The Post Office, having no proper or known address, delivered it to the Legion Post, #210, to hold for any survivors of the war who might have been The Boys of Henshit Mountain. As it was, one old WW I vet said he knew of them and would deliver it to the first one who came home. The Legion held the letter for almost two years.

Then it was delivered to Bud Petitteau one evening at the Meadowglen Club as Bud had come home from two years in the far Pacific and hospital time, one hand gone from a nasty grenade. The old Legionnaire had heard Bud was home, spending time at The Meadowglen with some guys who had come home, and made a trip to deliver the letter, which was simple enough in its message:

“Miss you guys like hell, but some good guys here. I just wanted to see if this gets through to the clubhouse or to any of you. We have heard stories about miraculous deliveries of real short addresses. If I don’t get to see you on the mountain, I am sure that we will catch up to each other sometime, someplace. Your clubhouse pal,

Clete

PS: Say hi to Mildred Derning for me. I got her last letter about a year ago and never did answer it for one reason or another. She’s a real cute kid I’ve thought about a few times.”

(A note here: It was not revealed until 1950 that Mildred Derning had an eight-year old son she had named John Cletus Derning. She never married as far as I know and died in 1981. John Cletus Derning took down his physicians shingle in 2002. I don’t know if he ever knew anything about his father, but I hope he did. If this tells him, it’s about all I can do.)

Homer Barnard didn’t come home from the 2th Infantry Division in the Pacific, and the 31st Infantry Regiment of the 7th Infantry Division in Korea, until 1954 and after he had served in a POW camp in North Korea for two years. One of his letters, addressed to The Clubhouse on Henshit Mt, Saugus, Mass., was hung up in a dead letter box and a postal center under construction until it fell from between the cracks of time in 1963. It was delivered back to Homer by a personal friend, an employee of the USPS and an army comrade from basic days, who had intercepted it finally en route to Saugus and recognized the sender’s name. He drove from New York one day in the fall to deliver it and spent a week in Saugus. He even visited the original clubhouse, which by then had been jacked up and a cellar placed under it, three rooms added, and a porch wrapped half way and more around the house from where a huge section of Rumney Marsh was visible as well as a great chunk of the Atlantic Ocean on a good day. The two men sat on the porch a good part of one afternoon with the owner, in Italy with the 10th Mountain Division with a few other Saugus boys, and the beer was free. They even went to see the Patriots play the Kansas City Chiefs at Fenway Park, which ended up in a tie game.

Parkie, who admittedly only wrote one letter to the guys, which has not yet surfaced, but about whom much has been written by me, ended up on the hot sands of the Sahara and could have been dead a few times. Of him it has been said (in a poem, The Municipal Subterranean) :

He comes up, goggled, out of a manhole in the middle of a street in my peaceful town, sun the sole brazier, like an old Saharan veteran, Rommel-pointing his tank across the four-year stretch of sand, shell holes filling up quick as death. I think of Frank Parkinson, Tanker, Tiger of Tobruk, now in his grass roots, the acetylene smile on his oil-dirty face, the goggles still high on his high forehead, his forever knowing Egypt’s two dark eyes.

Frank told me his story one evening as we drank beer by old Lily Pond. It came around as “Parkie, Tanker, Tiger of Tobruk,” and many people have read it elsewhere.

Asa Parnell, it has been said, wrote dozens of letters to the guys but sent his via Harry Clemson at The Pythian Alleys (The Rathole Poolroom its other half), who held them until one of the guys picked them up in 1945, after the big boom went down. Parnell had 25 missions as a waist gunner of a B-17 over Europe, went to school on the GI Bill, ended up with his PhD, taught at two Maine colleges for more than 30 years before he drowned in a kayak ride on the Allagash River when he was over 70 years old. He only came to Saugus at the Founders Day festivities, out front of the town hall in September of the year when, at times, ten to fifteen thousand people might pass through the center of town during the celebration, the accompanying mini-marathon race, and the high school football game every other year. One year I heard that he found two other guys, and they sat for four hours on the steps of the library hashing over the old days and then he went north again for his last ride a few years later.

Every so often, as if I’m being summoned by a voice, a face, the edge of a shared incident, I leave the vets section of the cemetery and visit Henshit Mountain, trying to find any remnant of a clubhouse, cellar in place, second floor added, perhaps a porch and a garage, a garden for summer attendance. Once an old fishing buddy, who had lived on the mountain for many years, pointed out two or three places that had strange beginnings. There are no shortcuts in those places. They were built well by guys who knew their business. They had OJT before there was OJT. Go down alongside old Lily Pond and more than half the houses down there were summer camps before the big war, and when the boys came back home and were looking for cheap quarters, they bought a camp erected on cement blocks and after a while jacked it up, put in a stone or poured foundation, got central heating, raised a family, added rooms, sold it, bought or built a new place, all part of the economy. Some of the original camps are now so sprawling over the landscape you’d have to get a pre-war aerial map to find the beginning forms of them.

Parkie carried on for 20 some torturous years before he hugged the earth for the last time, but not on Henshit Mountain, home away from home for a long time in his short life. Every Memorial Day I re-flag his grave along with a host of people and have done so for more than 25 years.

All of them are gone now, some here, some elsewhere. Four of the membership share the same plot with Parkie. None of them ever climbed to the back end of Henshit Mountain after the war. The house that no one lived in really had passed on in their growth, even its nostalgia, for they had rushed onto the real estate of the whole globe.

Now and then, usually close to Memorial Day and again at Veterans Day, I drive up the hill, for that’s what it really is, a rise of about 500 feet above sea level, on a series of paved roads. From the road I can see two houses, now lived in for more than half a century, where no one lived when they were built. I can visualize the membership crossing the pond in winter on sleds loaded with purloined lumber and supplies, or on rafts tied together in the dead of summer nights. I know where they kept their beer in underground coolers, where it stayed cool and was hidden from the temptation of potential thieves. I know some of the girls, still here with us, grandmothers time and again, and great-grandmothers, who swore to the secrecy code and will carry it away with them.

It’s on a rare occasion when I come face to face with one of those ladies in the aisle of a mall store, or at the library with a chosen book, or in the cemetery on a special day, and get a wink acknowledging the deep and mostly hidden years. We understand the past, the pact, the passions. We understand what loyalty means, and where things have gone in this short passage.

Mary returned that night, late, after the fifty-mile round trip. Everyone but Jared was in bed. As Mary made her way to the house after bedding down the horse for the night, she saw the lone lantern in the window as she made her way to the house. The reflection of her young son in the window made her stop and stare. Jared was looking more and more like his daddy. And for just a minute, Mary let herself feel the joy of her years together with Henry. For just a split second, it felt as if her husband would be on the other side of that door when she opened it. But reality found its way back to Mary’s world as she opened the front door and saw no one there but Jared.

“Hey, Mama. I couldn’t sleep until I knew you were safely at home.”

Mary sat down at the table and reached down again into that right front pocket. This time she pulled out a small burlap sack. She pulled the drawstrings and looked inside at the tiny specks. Then she poured them out on the table.

“Jared, this is our future. Did you ever think we could hold all hope for tomorrow in one hand?”

Mary sat and stared at those magical little specks until her eyes closed and she laid her head down on her arms on the table. She sat there all night with one hand on the seeds that would become their master in the days and weeks to come.

After they planted the seeds in the plant beds that they had already prepared, Mary, along with her older sons, took turns keeping small fires burning all around the seedbeds to keep them warm. Early mornings were still cold, and frost could nip and blacken new growth way up into the spring in those mountains. They had taken pieces of old clothes and blankets to make tents over the seedlings. For six weeks, they tended the plants every night, praying to keep the still wintry air from nipping the tender plants.

Night after night, they stood vigil over the strange little sprouts. Hank took the first shift lighting the coal pits for warmth. Then Mame would relieve him. Jared’s turn was next, but most of the time, Mary would be up in the morning and take his turn. Mary had always heard the night was darkest just before dawn. As she walked around the beds of plants night after night fanning the warmth into the plants, she not only saw that darkness, she felt it. She had never been more alone in her life.

A chill rippled upon her spine as a shooting star fell to the ground not more than a hundred feet in front of her. Some people might call that a good omen. Mary thought it was just a shooting star. Schoolgirl dreaming was many years behind her.

Finally all fear of the chilling mists passed. Now all that was left to do was to wait until the plants were big enough to transplant into the newly formed fields. The day arrived and the work began. Disbelieving neighbors watched as Mary and her sons took the delicate plants one by one and dropped them into thousands of holes that they’d dug with a mattock into the rich mountain earth. It took them two weeks, working every day from daylight to dark, to finish their transplanting. All six acres or so that were cleared were set.

Now it was time to start back at the beginning, hoeing and putting livestock litter beside each plant. They continued this cycle of fertilizing all summer. Every day, even Sunday, no matter if it rained or if the sun shone, they were in the fields. The boys, Hank, James, and Jared, got very restless, doing nothing but working. But they respected their mother and knew she was working as hard as they were, so they kept it up. Soon, very soon, it would be time to start chopping down the stalks of tobacco. Then they would stack it like teepees in the fields for a few days to start it drying. Next they would move it to the barn loft and hang it to finish the curing out process.

As the last stalk fell to the ground, there rang a loud yell that could be heard for miles around. It was Mary Blackwell as she fell to the ground and cried. This was the first real emotion she had shown in almost two years. For the first time since Henry died, she felt as if she could breathe. The tight knot in her chest was beginning to unwind. She looked up at her family, spread across the rows like scarecrows. It was as if she were seeing her children for the first time in months.

These had not been mere children. Even little William, not quite three, helped Mame in the house. They had been fellow workers doing much more than seemed possible. All odds had been against them—a woman and a bunch of kids, raising a tobacco crop. Never, the townspeople had predicted. There were even bets placed against them. No one imagined tobacco growing in these hills. But Mary had taken her chances and done a lot of research. She had bought the new burly seeds that were supposed to be better suited to their cool climate. And it had worked. That wad of ninety-two dollars had turned into what Mary believed was a fine crop of tobacco that would soon be loaded into a wagon ready for market.

Shades of Grey, by Jasper Fforde, Viking Adult, published Dec. 29, 2009 by Viking Adult. 400 pages.

There’s something compelling about a Jasper Fforde novel, something that sucks you into the story, tossing you along until the end when it finally grinds you up and spits you out before you even know what’s happened. Fforde is a true satirist, not just pulling apart the way we tell stories, but pulling apart accepted critical conventions and putting them back together again, reinterpreting criticism and analysis from the inside out.

A clever satire set in a dystopic/post-apocalpyptic future, Shades of Grey conjures a disturbing new world with a society defined by color perception, and ruled by a fearsomely rule-abiding Colortocracy. Prefects are appointed according to their perception values; Greys, unable to see any color at all, are a largely ignored working class. When Eddie Russett plays a prank on a Prefect’s son, he’s exiled to East Carmine, a town on the Outer Fringes, to learn humility–and conduct a chair census. (The accepted number of chairs per person? 1.8.) An untested Red with a Chromaticologist, or color-doctor father, Eddie is an average, hard-working member of society on a half-promise to Constance Oxblood, the very eligible daughter of a high-ranking Red family. But the more time Eddie spends in the Outer Fringes, the more he realizes the world is not as neat and tidy as he thought–particularly when it comes to Jane, a Grey with a tendency to clobber people who compliment her charmingly retrousse nose.

Ridiculousness in the extreme is something of a catchphrase for Fforde. In 2006‘s The Fourth Bear, he uses, amongst other things, Somme World, a realistic theme park (complete with simulated shattered corpses) based on the Battle of the Somme to make a statement about war. But Shades of Grey moves beyond the simplicity of a war-inspired theme park. This world, fully realized, is a stark, near-colorless landscape filled with carnivorous trees, megafauna, and giant swans. Spoons, a casualty of progressive Leap Backs, are no longer manufactured, and have become a hot commodity on the black market. Funny, disturbing remnants of our time–the last rabbit, risk maps, statues of characters from the Wizard of Oz–are wildly misinterpreted, yet in a very plausible way, a way that made me cringe with something between horror and delight. The very fine amounts of detail, however, hide a few glaring holes, like the scarcity of information about the Previous and the Something That Happened. While Fforde’s glossing over the particulars is skillful–his allegorical exploration of colors/political theory, much like the earlier Madeleine L’Engle book, A Wrinkle in Time (remember the grayness of the world Meg visits when rescuing her father?)–the lack of Big Picture information hinders the story.

Perhaps more interesting is Fforde’s supporting cast–Tommo, Lucy, and Jane are well-sketched, with clear motivations and believable, relatable personal baggage. Eddie himself is less interesting, more of a not-quite invisible tour guide leading the reader through a mixed bag of swans, megafauna, spoon hunts, and enforced–often extreme and ridiculous–societal mores. When Eddie does have the odd moment of growth, it’s an epiphanic second with little prior development, less of an aha! moment and more of a groan. The writing is better than his previous novels, with no forced punnery, and dialogue and scenes flow naturally, making it easy to get lost in the story, though there is no clear sense of time. In many ways, Fforde’s latest novel is a work of genius. It turns accepted tropes on their heads, deftly shows the absurdity of racism and the color divide etc. etc. And yet, like one of Shakespeare’s best beloved heroes, it has a fatal flaw: there is no real plot.

Reader: No real plot? How can you say that?
Me: Um, easily. I mean, I just did, right?
Reader: But–but it’s a book! A Jasper Fforde book! There must be chases and criminals and a triumph of good over evil! That’s how all Fforde books go!
Me: Not this one. Sorry. I mean, there is a plot, but it’s not much of a plot, really just a foil, a thinly veiled draw card, something to get you inside the book and force your head into its pages for a while until the insanity takes hold and you can’t do anything but finish the story. It’s a bit Seussian that way.

Shades of Grey, while mocking literary device (like all Fforde novels), treats plot–a prince, if not the king/queen/emperor of storytelling–as a mere device, an excuse to meander around a dystopic world in an Umberto Eco-esque manner. Just like Seuss in Green Eggs and Ham, Fforde hangs all on, as Mr. Creosote would have it, a wafer-thin plot, then plays with words, making the reader work for every nugget of information and hoping it is enough.

Although all the details necessary to understand the final revelations are introduced throughout the story, they’re handled in a subtle, almost sly way, presented as trivial detail and tricking the reader into a certain unwarranted sense of security. Feeling more like a set up for another story, the ending falls flat on its arse, particularly since everything is neatly tied up, but only just neatly, like a child’s first attempt at shoelaces. Unsurprising, since Shades of Grey is the first in a projected trilogy. That said, the ending, though intensely unsatisfying, is chew-worthy, and could keep the deeper reader in food for thought for quite a long time.

Despite its faults, Shades of Grey is a worthwhile read, perhaps more so than Fforde’s other novels. Though Eddie’s realizations border on the banal, the world and its supporting cast provide a funny, thought-provoking break from reality while at the same time making life, even with its many frustrations, all the more appealing.

“A waste of life,” her father said.  “Maybe he had talent, too, Murmur.”

Murmur was sure he did.  It was always the saddest people who had talent.

Her father was a coroner and sad most of the time, thought everybody died young.  He named her Murmur when his wife was asleep from the drugs.  Sometimes, she still was.  Murmur’s father believed it a very beautiful name, read a long time before it was the most fragile word in the English language.

Murmur felt she ought to be something because of her name.  She wanted to do it quick, too, before she got old and couldn’t die young anymore.  Dying wasn’t so bad, she thought.  Dying young was the most noble thing you could do.  Gave people motivation.  They wanted to do everything you didn’t have time to.

Her father wasn’t supposed to let people view someone they didn’t know, but it was a dark night and no one alive was around.

“See,” her father said.  “See.”

Murmur did see and was sad.  The boy’s eyes were open.  Faded.  The silver of the gurney stabbing lights in the pupils.  She wondered if anything had been lost.  What had been meant.  The white made her skin feel tight, her father’s hand on her shoulder a weight too close.  The boy would give her dreams.  Dreams she’d spend whole nights waking up from.

Falling into a dream was always an unpleasant sensation for Murmur.  She’d often feared the real world would never return, leaving her floating somewhere with no up and down, no right and wrong, only hazy memories amounting to nothing.  It was only when she woke up that the dream seemed preferable, easy, and safe.  It took her a few hours to resign herself again, to forget what relief she’d given up by opening her eyes.

“I wanted you to see the difference,” her father said suddenly.  The dark made everything sudden.  “The difference between you.”

Murmur’s palm stretched over her heart like struts.  Arms tingled cold, thin blue veins crossing and uncrossing, tendons sharp and white.

***

When she closed her eyes that night the boy was everywhere, sheets curled around her like thin strips of black.

“Murmur,” her father called.  “Murmur, wake up.”  The dark of his body deepened under the door, steps weighing the floor down.  “You’re okay, Murmur.  Wake up.”

It was all so familiar now.  Her eyes had given up long ago, only touch and temperature within her grasp.  She wondered suddenly, in the dark, why the boy bothered drinking bleach.  Why he let himself die twice, a redundancy of pain.  It didn’t take much for people to die.  It never took much at all.

Her head nodded involuntarily at her father’s entering, a sliver of light running across the bed, clutching the shadows of her shape.  The mattress fell into its worn spaces, grooves of cotton like climbing holds.

It was all about waiting.  Finding a focus that blurred the edges of her vision.  The boy.  A fresh snow fall sinking deep within him.  Silver stretches of cold underneath the slashes of black.  Eyes frozen, mirrors, lights flashing pale on the surface.  It was all about waiting.

Murmur struggled, tangled in sheets like hands, feeling the rhythm of her heart under the skin.  He was heavy and suffocating, moisture sliding down the veins of her arms.  Hair jagged against her face, slicing smears of sweat across her forehead.  The room inhaled and exhaled her father’s heaving, a confederate, shutting out sounds, protecting the rest of the house.  It wasn’t over until his hand released her mouth, clammy and shaking.  With her skin stretched tight, Murmur waited for the seam to break, maps forming in red and white, a legend tearing in her eyes.  She was a Kirlian phantom, split in two.

Murmur watched the door close, the weight retreat, her body littered with fingerprints, depressions molded into her form.  It was decided.  She would give people dreams.  Someday soon, a slab of white on a silver sheet, a map to see the difference.  It didn’t take much to die.  It was all about waiting.  Someday soon, a snow spreading through her, her father watching, the only one alive around.  Murmur would give him dreams he couldn’t wake up from.

Ida Maclaird is turning to glass. Afraid of people, water, and his dead father, Midas Crook may as well be made of glass. In true fairy tale fashion, the two meet in a wood tinged with darkness, awkwardly blundering past social niceties and into love. Told in alternating points of view, The Girl with Glass Feet flits between Ida and Midas, weaving their stories in and around others: Midas’ father, a detached academic who commits suicide; Carl Maulsen, a Maclaird family friend still in love with Ida’s dead mother; Henry Fuwa, a solitary biologist caring for moth-winged bulls, hunting for other fairy tale creatures, once in love with Midas’ mother; and Emiliana Stallows, a natural therapist once in love with Carl.

While not based on any specific fairy tale, Shaw’s story explores elements common to many transformation tales, particularly Jorinda and Joringel. Like Jorinda, Ida is lured into a trap, (though hers is, in some part, of her own making), lingering, pitying, and readying herself for what lies ahead. Like Joringel, Midas struggles through woods until he comes upon a strange village, battles a witch, and ultimately comes to free his love. Stronger, more aggressive than Jorinda, Ida meets Midas halfway, drawing him into the castle, coaching him through his rescue.

Ida could almost as easily have been dying of cancer. But cancer is not as clean, as beautiful, and yet Ida’s glass is not beautiful. Shaw’s exploration of the dichotomy between the exquisiteness of her feet and the brutality of their effect is haunting, Ida’s grief for her lost self, believable. Her later acceptance of her fate and search for grace border on maudlin, though this is may be an entirely plausible response.

Where Ida is engrossing, Midas is not. His retreat into photography (observing rather than living) is a tired metaphor, and his interactions with other characters are slow and stilted, almost autistic in nature. His relationship with his employer and best friend, Gustav, is saccharine at best; Gustav’s treatment of Midas’ fear of touch is more deus ex machina than convincing character growth.

Shaw is a gifted writer. Atmosphere and character are painted with broad strokes then filled in with minute, pin-prick detail. But the story suffers from early chapter syndrome: the first few chapters are focused (insofar as a thoughtful, dreamlike, meandering story can be) and insightful, the descriptions of St. Hauda’s Land and moth-winged bulls enchanting. Yet somewhere after the fifth chapter, Shaw loses his way, plunging the reader into magic realism at its worst, giving us enough detail to pique curiosity, but not enough to enthrall. Moth-winged bulls and creeping glass soon fall into footnote territory, no more than a reminder that Midas and Ida’s love is transient, ethereal, and doomed. The pacing slows, the time between the reader’s discovery of Ida’s affliction and Midas’ discovery of it too great.“Thats” run rampant as an angry moth-winged bull; light “dazzles” off a surface; characters “oblige” rather than speak. In a less thoughtful, faster-paced work such flaws would be less noticeable, less irritating. Shaw’s story, however, hinges on the unhurried, contemplative bent of Midas, the forced slowing of Ida. As the story buillds–or rather crashes into–momentum, the point of view switches become quicker, the chapters shorter, a failed attempt at creating tension where there is none as Ida’s fate is clear within the first few chapters of the book. Midas and Ida each give in to violent actions as the Shaw attempts to speed the romantic process; toward the end, clunky sentences become the norm, the author’s early precision giving way to a rushed feeling that doesn’t agree with the story.

Written in third person limited, Shaw’s story is–somewhat fittingly–removed from its players. Shaw’s characters are well-described, their voices clear and distinct. Were this a two person narrative, Shaw’s prose would be spot on. As a multi-person story, though, the clear, distinct voices war for attention, their subplots shouting for deeper treatment. Carl Maulsen’s obsession with Ida’s mother and Henry Fuwa’s weak struggles to Do The Right Thing are so scarcely dealt with that they fail to give context. Emiliana Stallows’ short chapter serves no purpose save putting Midas’ friend Gustav in the right place at the right time in another deus ex machina moment. And yet there are hints of something deeper, some thought-provoking turning point in Carl’s, Henry’s, even Emiliana’s chapters that beg to be explored.

Though I’m normally hesitant to pigeonhole books, The Girl with Glass Feet is definitely a niche story. Shaw’s characters, are alternately satisfying (Gustav’s daughter, Denver, who deserves a story of her own) and frustrating (Henry Fuwa, and Midas’ mother, Evaline). Fairy tale lovers, philosophers, and thoughtful readers may enjoy its wandering nature; readers in search of another Great and Terrible Beauty will be disappointed.

Oscar Banks is cookie-cutter perfect. He’s a straight A student, is dating the prettiest, smartest girl in Candor High, and has more friends than a parrot at a pirate convention. He also has a secret – he’s the only one who knows about the “messages”–subliminal commands coded into the elevator music that floods every house, street, and store in town–and his father’s attempt to turn Candor into the ideal small American town. Armed with carefully created messages of his own, Oscar runs his own underground railroad, shuttling the richest kids out of Candor before the messages can take hold. Enter Nia Silva, a black-clad skateboarding artist–and the girl Oscar can’t stop thinking about. How can he save her, when saving means letting go?

Candor’s great strength is its use of the here and now. Bachorz’ take on a subliminally-controlled-small-town-Florida is, perhaps, a little too realistic. The town’s perfection is a clever honey-trap: messages such as “the great are never late” and “respectful space in every place” pepper the book, keeping Oscar and other teens in check. But the book’s structure is such that the plot-driving secrets are apparent from the get-go. Moreover, as soon as Nia, the story’s love interest and damsel in distress skateboards on to the scene, the band-aid’s off. The rest of the story becomes almost immediately apparent: boy tries to save girl, girl refuses, boy tries again, girl gets sucked in, boy saves her. While the ending is not quite so neat as my summary, it’s not too far off.

Of course, Candor can be forgiven for its plot’s not too subtle twists–many books are actually stronger for following an obvious course. Think of Austen’s classic, Pride and Prejudice–from the moment Miss Bennet meets Mr. Darcy, the reader knows they’ll end up professing undying love in a matter of pages. Even the title makes it obvious. And that, of course, leads to the ultimate conversation between author and reader:

Reader: Oh, they are so going to get it on.
Austen: Yes, madam, I know I have made it abundantly clear Miss Bennet and Mr. Darcy shall wed.
Reader: But how? And why? Why would she even look at him? He called her ugly!
Austen: If you truly wish to find out, I suppose you shall just have to read the book.

While Bachorz’ attempt at drawing us into the hows, whys, and whens of the outcome isn’t as smooth as Austen’s, it’s still compelling. Her style is strong, and heavy on the imagery. And while I’m not usually drawn to novels written in first person present tense, it lends immediacy to the story, helping us to focus still more on the story’s questions, while drawing attention away from the ending. Oscar’s concern for Nia never wavers, and Bachorz does an excellent job of reinforcing his motivation without banging on about it. In terms of straight writing skill and style, the book is the debut every writer wants: cool but not slick, well-written but not flowery.

Yet Candor isn’t all sweetness and light (or whatever the dystopian equivalent would be). Some sections feel forced; after the climax, the pacing becomes wobbly, and the tension trickles away, making the last scene between Oscar and Nia weaker than it could be. Some of Oscar’s lines are off: “her smile looks tasty and right” was corny enough to make me want to slap him and snap, “She’s a girl, not a bowl of cornflakes!”

Bachorz’ story is also very single-minded: we focus only on Oscar and his relationships. Her treatment, or better, dissection of Oscar’s relationship with his father, Campbell, is wonderfully apt, and Bachorz uses the absence of Oscar’s mother and brother to great effect. Yet, this single-character treatment means there are no real subplots in the book–every aspect of the story feeds back into Oscar’s, leaving the world incomplete. True, a carefully controlled small town peopled by carefully controlled families doesn’t exactly need Orion slave girls or Daleks to push the story along (although subliminally-messaging Daleks could end in awesome). But the book’s supporting cast–Mandy, the bossy beauty queen and Sherman, Oscar’s fat, mommy’s boy client–react to Candor’s influence too. In fact, Mandy’s not-quite realization of the town’s purpose, and her attempt to play it, is one of the most interesting parts of the book. The lack of subplots is somewhat ameliorated by Bachorz’ supplementary material–as part of her promotion, she’s produced a dedicated in-story Candor website,  complete with podcasts and other related content.

Most irritating, though, is Bachorz’ treatment of women. Nia, for all her spunk, is a damsel in distress. And Oscar’s reluctance to tell her the truth “because he doesn’t want to lose her” only reinforces the idea: by not giving her a choice, he pigeonholes her, and, worse, tricks her into being his girlfriend. At no point does Nia take real action for herself–her emancipation hinges on Oscar. Her personality doesn’t change, and she lacks character growth–in short, Nia is an object, a means to an end–someone for Oscar to attach to, to drive his story forward. Likewise, Mandy is a foil for Nia, though her story is even worse–Oscar’s actions end in her being forced to date whiny rich kid Sherman, with little remorse on either Sherman or Oscar’s part. And while it’s possible Bachorz’ intent was to demonstrate, again, the deeper power of the messages, the story reads otherwise.

Despite its obvious riffing on other dystopias, Candor’s grounding in reality–subliminal messaging is a real and powerful thing–lends the story a certain creepiness other YA dystopias are lacking (Yes, Uglies, Pretties, Specials I’m looking at you). Its shortcomings, while frustrating, were not enough to keep me from finishing the book and appreciating the ending. And Bachorz’ strong, clear writing is definitely worth the time. I’ll be keeping an eye out for her next novel.

“What sound do goats make?” Ginnie asked.

Roger, reclining in his lounge, didn’t look up from the book resting on his expanse of belly.

“We’ll get one of those little hut contraptions,” Ginnie went on. “You know, like a playpen with a top? Set it in the shade.” She pointed to a clutch of palm trees. “And she’ll need one of those inner tube things, the kind with a seat, and some of that special baby sun block.”

“Waste of money,” Roger said, turning a page. “Regular sun block will do. And she might be walking by next year. Won’t like being cooped up in a cage.”

“Not a cage,” Ginnie said, angling her chair away from him, to face the sun. “You know what I mean, like a pup tent. Kids always like tents. Remember how Maxine used to beg me to drape a blanket over the dining room table? She’d spend the whole day under there if I’d let her.”

This was the first time in years Ginnie and Roger were alone on the island, Maxine back home with her husband Stu and the new baby. It had been touch and go if they’d make the trip this year. First Maxine was laid up with high blood pressure, so Ginnie’d had to take off from work to go up there and help out. Stu tried, but he only knew how to cook chicken stir-fry, with red sauce over spaghetti or teriyaki sauce over rice. Then the doctors decided to take the baby early, and there was the jaundice that lasted long past it was supposed to.

But everything was fine now, thank God, the baby fattening up, nursing like a champ, Maxine whipping out a boob at a moment’s notice, so Roger couldn’t bring himself to look at her below the neck. I was better off not knowing what everything looked like under there, he said.

Judy, Ginnie’s boss at the bookstore, told Ginnie to take her scheduled vacation, never mind all the time she’d just taken off for the baby. Judy knew Ginnie was no good to anyone without her week in Paradise.

They booked the same week every year, used to pull Maxine out of school if her vacation didn’t fall the second week of February. In the fifth grade, they actually got a phone call from her teacher, suggesting they leave Maxine home with a friend, as if her life would be ruined by missing a week of multiplication and fifth grade spelling. But Madame Jeanette expected them, reserved their cottage a year in advance, took next year’s deposit at the end of last year’s week when they turned in their keys – cash, Roger would peel from his wallet the bills he’d stashed before leaving home. No need for cancelled checks or credit card receipts. In Paradise? he’d say, a handshake and trust all that was needed between him and Madame Jeanette after all these years.

She always saved them the same cottage, plenty of room for noisy children, although there’d only ever been Maxine, directly across from the beach, pink and soft underfoot, no need for shoes. Madame Jeanette advertised a B&B, although they’d learned early on there’d only be the occasional homemade breakfast, if Madame Jeanette happened to be in the mood.

We have ze same name, Madame Jeanette had said that very first year, Ginnie and Roger also alone then, treating themselves to a week in the tropics as they tried and tried for a baby, as if sun and heat would start their innards properly cooking, a bun in the oven, as someone’s grandma might say, not Ginnie’s, who would’ve had some spicy Yiddish exhortation. Ginnie didn’t bother mentioning to Madame Jeanette that her name was actually Virginia, for the state where her grandparents ended up fresh off the boat, the American name Ginnie’s grandmother had picked to celebrate her escape from Eastern Europe with its poverty and pogroms. Zhinnie, Madame Jeannette pronounced the soft French J, ma soeur. Although sisters, of course, would not have the same name. Soul sisters, Maxine sneered one sullen teenage year, rolling her eyes at the story she’d heard umpteen times.

Once, after an argument with Roger, surely something about Maxine – were they too hard on her, or too easy? – Ginnie had encountered Madame Jeanette on the midnight patio, had inquired after Monsieur Jeanette. The Madame had turned away with a flap of her hand, as if to say, You I will know, the fights, the secrets, the kids gone wrong. But me, no. I belong to myself. So much for sisterhood. But the next morning she left a basket of fresh banana muffins on Ginnie and Roger’s porch, under a dishtowel against the lizards and the brilliant tropical birds.

If you’d asked Ginnie, last year, whether she could’ve missed any baby so much after one day away as she missed Maxine’s, she’d have said you were crazy. It’s not as if she saw the baby every day back home, with the kids way up in Boston. Stu had set them up with a computer, with a camera and speakers, so they could goggle and burble at the monitor down in Connecticut, while at the other end sat Maxine with Ruby in her lap, sucking on her burp cloth or nodding off to sleep, hardly noticing the show going on for her benefit.

Roger even toted the new laptop with him on the airplane, practically getting strip-searched after forgetting to take it out of his carry-on going through security. But of course there was no Internet at the cottage, no wireless in their corner of Paradise. They’d have to wait ’til they were home next week to get a look, Maxine flapping one of Ruby’s arms up and down in a frantic way for the camera. Say hi to Grandma. Say hi to Grandpa.

Ginnie always resisted the urge to tell Maxine to be careful, she might dislocate Ruby’s delicate shoulder. Hard to believe this was the same Maxine from those first days in the hospital, afraid to pick up the baby, practically afraid to touch her, she might break. Maxine was turning into a good mother, talked to the baby nonstop, carried her around all day in one of those papoose baby carriers. She certainly had all the paraphernalia, the swing and the bouncy seat and the baby genius CDs, Ruby should learn Mozart in her sleep.

Ruby. Maxine and Stu had picked a good name. For Ginnie’s mother, Rose, but better. A gem, a sparkling jewel. Perfect. Ginnie finally understood the phrase light of my life in a way she hadn’t when she’d been a harried young mother herself, Roger rolling in late every night from the office, and Maxine with the colic that lasted a full year, never mind only three months like the books promised. Guess she never read the books, Roger would say, lifting a squalling Maxine from Ginnie’s aching arms just when Ginnie was sure she’d drop that baby, if she didn’t toss her into the trash.

Ruby, on the other hand, was a placid, happy baby, gurgled and cooed in front of the computer, seldom cried, or if she did Maxine wasn’t admitting to it. Maxine seemed to have developed a sudden need for Ginnie’s approval, phoned home every day, which was not her usual habit, reporting how much Ruby had nursed, slept, pooped. She’d made Ginnie promise to check for cell phone service in Paradise, but, as always, there was none. Everyone knew there was only one landline at Madame Jeanette’s, in the Madame’s bedroom, off limits except for the direst emergency, which Maxine had discovered the hard way the time she thought she could sneak a call home to some gangly high school heart throb. It’d be good for Maxine, this week on her own, without her mother to lean on for advice. Still, Ginnie flipped open her cell phone every morning to check for bars, always a spark of hope, and then a pang of regret.

At the market, buying milk and juice and Ginnie’s yogurt and Roger’s fiber cereal that Maxine called straw, Ginnie spotted just exactly the inner tube she wanted, with a cloth sling seat so the baby could sit safely, not slip out the bottom. Roger said she was nuts to buy it now, a year in advance, but the way the corners of his mouth crept up when he pulled out his wallet to pay told a different story. He was just as nuts about that baby as she was.

By the end of the week, Ginnie had read six novels and a story collection she was previewing for the bookstore, Roger had finished the latest John Grisham and his backlog of Popular Science, and they’d bought blow-up swimmies for Ruby’s tiny arms, a folding umbrella to protect her from the sun, and the cutest baby swim suit, a one-piece tank with foam inserts all around the waist like a built-in life preserver. Ruby was going to be the safest baby alive in Paradise next year.

“We should stop,” Ginnie said. But she couldn’t stop, planning the easiest route to push the stroller to the water, wondering if their favorite island burger joint had high chairs. When Roger discovered, in one of the free island dailies he picked up at the market, a service that would store stuff for winter folks, Ginnie even dragged him to the new discount mart for a folding crib – wouldn’t Ruby need a place to sleep next year? He laughed at her foolishness, but she didn’t have to ask twice.

Who’d have imagined a discount mart in Paradise? And high-rises going up, condominiums and time-shares. Now this storage service, so you didn’t have to schlep stuff back and forth every year, what with new airline weight restrictions and that damn airport security.

Ginnie and Roger were changing, too. Won’t be much of a vacation, Roger’s cheeky brother Paul had teased before they left, now that you’re sleeping with a grandma, and Ginnie had surprised herself, feeling not old, but newborn with joy. All week she noticed Roger patting her rump, ogling her breasts, as if she were the new mother sporting a youthful, milk-filled rack. Rack! A word she didn’t remember Roger ever using before, at least not in reference to his wife. When they made love, he took special care to please her, brought glasses and a split of chilled champagne to bed, on the last night even joked about trying again, twice in one night, like when they were kids.

In the morning, Roger paid the storage fellow who picked everything up, arranged for him to deliver the load to Madame Jeanette’s next year. Then he unfolded the bills for next year’s deposit, planting a kiss on each of the Madame’s cheeks to seal the deal. Some things never changed, second week of February, their week in Paradise.

That was last year. Last year’s next year has turned into this year. Confusing. Which is how Ginnie feels. Confused. Swimming through fog. Gasping for air. She and Roger are once again alone in Paradise.

Even after four months, people back home were still asking what happened. Did it have something to do with the jaundice? The difficult birth? Was the crib mattress too soft? Too hard? As if it was somehow Maxine’s fault, and then, by extension, Ginnie’s.

Are you sure Maxine understood the new rule against blankets in the crib? Roger’s obnoxious brother Paul had the nerve to ask. How could any new mother be expected to keep track of all the rules, especially when those rules shifted as quickly and dangerously as quicksand?

No wonder everyone asks, Ginnie thinks. If they can figure it out, it won’t happen to them.

Madame Jeanette doesn’t ask. She packs up the crib and the swimmies and the life-preserver bathing suit that were delivered from storage as scheduled – the delivery Ginnie and Roger forgot to cancel, their minds full to bursting with other thoughts – and whisks them away, Ginnie has no idea where, and Madame Jeanette knows Ginnie won’t care. The Madame seems suddenly old this year, her lovely copper hair now a brassy bronze, dangly earrings turned from island exotic to dead weights threatening to stretch old-lady earlobes down to bony brown shoulders.

The island is different this year, as well, not older, but suddenly younger, flooded with children, a tsunami of babies in arms, in strollers, in backpacks, and toddlers weaving and lurching, unstoppable forward motion. Every which way Ginnie turns her head, she sees only sand toys and saggy diapers, tiny sunhats and sandy thumbs in rosy mouths, little boys with their Yankees caps and their swim shorts down to their knees. But it’s the little girls Ginnie can’t peel her eyes from – dimples and soft curls and ruffled bottoms, sweet rolls of flesh behind their necks, Ginnie’s secret place for bestowing kisses and blessings on Ruby.

Against all the strength and wisdom she possesses, Ginnie finds herself secretly planning for next year, Maxine and Stu already trying again, although Ginnie knows from experience sometimes you only ever get the one chance. There’s a family filling a blow-up baby pool with buckets of water, their own safe baby-sized ocean. Look at that little one’s miniature safari hat, perfect to protect her gentle white neck from the sun.

“It’s our fault,” Ginnie whispers, “with our plans and our purchases. We shouldn’t have done that. We gave ourselves a kine-ahora, quoting her grandmother, Yiddish for jinx, or evil eye, or worse, no English equivalent for the troubles she’d once seen.

“Nobody’s fault,” Roger says, not bothering with the pretense of a book this year, just staring at the unchanging ocean, so close to the equator there isn’t even a tide to break the seamless monotony. He’s the one who brought home the news that the kids were trying again, after a trip to Home Depot with Stu, unexpected confidence shared over nails or roach killer or drill bits. Ginnie certainly didn’t hear it from Maxine, who’s too busy back at work for those daily phone calls, back to her old self, if Ginnie didn’t know better. Ginnie is secretly relieved Maxine doesn’t call, Ginnie who once told knock-knock jokes while Maxine’s broken arm was casted, who sang Mairzy Doats and Dozy Doats through stitches in Maxine’s knee. “Nobody’s fault,” Roger repeats, “don’t shop for troubles,” quoting his shrink. That’s something else new this year, the shrink.

So they pass the week on fruity vodka cocktails and platitudes, set upon by the intrusion of familiar floral fragrances, blinding red sunsets, insistent singing birds. Too much. It overwhelms the senses. If only it could knock you senseless.

“We should phone the kids,” Roger says. “Maybe they need us.” Which Ginnie translates to mean he needs them, needs to hear Maxine’s voice. Maxine, his own baby girl.

“Don’t you know there’s no cell service on this goddamn island?” Ginnie snaps.

At night she lies in bed, pretending to sleep, remembering that dreadful first week home from the hospital, when Ruby wouldn’t sleep at all. Maxine and Stu were bleary with exhaustion, Ginnie on the foldout couch, up every hour trying to help, discovering there’s a reason God makes mothers young. Take her into your bed, Ginnie finally advised Maxine. That’s what I did with you.

But the rules, Maxine said.

Fuck the rules, Ginnie said. It was three in the morning. Maxine was crying. Everyone does it. It’s every new mother’s secret.

Ginnie startles upright in bed under the ceiling fan stirring the cottage’s dense humid air, reaching blindly in the dark for the comfort of Roger’s cool back. But Roger is in the living room, weeping, no help at all. Not that he hasn’t been trying. He washes the breakfast dishes, except he forgets to use soap. He straightens the bed linens, although when Ginnie crawls back in at noon, she finds he hasn’t really made the bed, just pulled up the duvet to hide sheets still crumpled and twisted, evidence of the night spent less than sleeping.

The bedroom sliders allow Ginnie to avoid Roger on her way to the darkened patio, where she finds not solitude but Madame Jeanette, who seems to subsist on tall glasses clinking ice cubes and lack of sleep. Madame Jeanette doesn’t ask, so she’s the one Ginnie chooses to tell.

“It wasn’t the crib mattress,” Ginnie says, “or some forbidden crib blanket. No crib at all, at least not so you’d notice, turned to extra storage space for packs of diapers, piles of laundry Maxine couldn’t find time to put away.”

Jeanette holds out her glass, and Ginnie takes a sip of something that burns going down, an unexpectedly intimate gesture.

“If she’d been asleep in the crib,” Ginnie continues, “maybe Stu would’ve been the one to find her. Aren’t fathers supposed to get up for the 6 am feeding? Why did it have to be Maxine, half asleep, pulling Ruby to her breast? Do you think she was cold already, the baby?” Ginnie is whispering now, and shivering despite the heavy tropical heat. “It might help,” she says so softly she might only be thinking it, “if only I could know she wasn’t cold.” She takes another drink, this time a long swallow, before handing back the glass. “The Internet says it’s safe to sleep with your baby, or else it’s not. Who knows?”

“This knowing,” Jeanette says, “this will change something?”

The next morning, the last day before the long flight home, Roger sneaks away when Ginnie has slumped into the drugged sleep that eluded her at night, returns with a rental car, a bottle of French wine, plans for a trip to the far beach, the one with the goats. Then he gets lost along the way, meandering across the island, no one to ask directions, so by the time they arrive, it’s nearly dusk. And they find the goats are gone, banished, replaced by a tiki bar and raft rentals, the steel girders of a new high-rise towering overhead, blocking the last waning view of the sun.

They drink the wine and ride back in silence, not at all mellow. Then they make love – the first time this week, the first time in a long time – slowly and drunkenly, like the two old people they have become. She needs a lot of wine, and he needs a lot of time. It was better last year, when you were sleeping with a grandma, Ginnie thinks, moving and grinding under his weight, tears sliding backwards into her ears. Roger pauses briefly, mid-thrust, then resumes. Had she spoken out loud?

In the morning, Madame Jeanette has the taxi waiting, as always, a bag of warm croissants and Styrofoam cups of milky coffee they’ll have to drink before going through security. Roger rolls out the bags, Ginnie lagging behind, checking under the bed, in the bathroom drawers. She double-checks her purse – passports, wallet, house keys, phone. Roger doesn’t have to know that she noticed bars one day midweek, when she thought to check, cell phone service having apparently arrived along with the high-rises on Paradise. Tonight, back home, she will call Maxine, be strong for her once again.

By the time she steps outside, Roger is holding open the taxi door, glancing at his watch, Madame Jeanette grabbing Ginnie for a hot, bony hug before heading into the cottage to strip the bed for the next visitors. If Roger handed her the cash for next year’s deposit, Ginnie missed it.

It’s strange to grow old. I feel I’m the same person inside. All my life I was around people more or less my own age, and suddenly there are hardly any left. I think about death all the time. I guess you could say I’m apprehensive. I don’t want to suffer. I live my life as if my actions could make a difference, but I suppose at heart I’m a fatalist. Whatever happens, happens. I have to accept the fact that my efforts might not have the results I want them to have.

Images and impressions from different times in my life come to my mind, and I exist simultaneously in all of them. I am the short girl with the pale, round face posing in the family photo between Patricia and Eddie, who are between our parents, Martin and Mary Helen Wrightsman. I am right in the middle of the photo, and yet I am the least of them. I am the adopted child.

Most of the time it went unspoken, yet I was always aware of it. I felt it most acutely from Patricia. As the daughter of the family, her status was threatened by my addition more than anyone else’s. I was afraid of her, and I gave in to her. She could be fierce, and I couldn’t cope with that. Better let her keep her advantage.

All those years, I got used to staying out of the spotlight. Instinctively, I avoid attention. Let it come to people who believe that good will follow from their being noticed. I don’t. And who knows? Maybe that’s why I’ve survived so long, when others haven’t.

Eddie didn’t feel the same way about me as Patricia did, but neither were we particularly close. In our childhood, I was a dreamer, and he was a doer. He was off with other boys, playing games. It made a difference that Daddy taught at the school he went to, and it was an all boys’ school, whereas Patricia and I went to a girls’ school. We lived in a faculty house on the campus of Harrison, the boys’ school, so Eddie had a lot more opportunities to get together with friends than we did. But that didn’t stop Patricia from having a life chock-filled with activities, too. She was also sports-minded. She played lacrosse, tennis, basketball; she was a big, strong girl, and she’d try almost anything.

I, on the other hand, dodged sports like I’ve dodged so much else. I’ve learned that although I’m left-handed, my right eye is dominant, which makes it hard for me to aim or catch. My hand-eye coordination is a nightmare, and I’m right-footed, too. I’ve thought sometimes that my brain must be more strangely configured than other people’s. Maybe no one side is dominant; I don’t know. Whatever the reason, I was a bookish child, and introspective, and I tried to be obedient and agreeable and not cause anyone any trouble. There was a deep, lingering fear that I couldn’t give voice to, that Mother and Daddy might one day decide they didn’t want me after all, and send me back to the orphanage, or wherever it was I had come from.

Of my earliest days, I have no memory.

* * *

There’s a passage I once read in a book, The Lights of Earth, by Gina Berriault, that struck a deep chord in me:

“A dense fog covered the city, concealing the hills below this one. Only a few patches of neighborhoods could be seen, floating islets, appearing and vanishing, in a gray sea. She went down the hill trying not to shiver…She had inquired at every bookstore for a job, the secondhand ones, the antiquarian ones, the ones that sold only the latest, because to work in the midst of thousands of books, no matter how cluttered, how musty, how concrete-cold the store might be, was to feel cloistered and concealed from the world and yet in the world.”

Daddy would have been unhappy with my expressing this preference. He was forever encouraging me to be more involved and connected, the way he was, and the ways, after their own inclinations, Mother, Patricia, and Eddie were as well. They all had a tendency to throw themselves into things, whereas I have always held back.

Mother loved me, but hers was a tough love; I had to earn it. I tried hard, she tried hard, too; and this created a strain between us. I wouldn’t naturally go to her if I had a problem; in fact, I’d try to keep it from her, worried about lowering her assessment of me.

I sought out Daddy when I was in need of help or comfort. He was the one who loved me wholeheartedly, and I him in return. His father had died when he was six years old, and that fact brought us together as much as it indicated our differences. He knew firmly who he was. He had taken on the responsibilities for his mother and sister at a tender age. I, on the other hand, had been given away, and taken in, and reared up, like a grafted plant.

Maybe even more than Patricia and Eddie, I loved listening to Daddy’s stories of his past, with its deep roots in New England. In his boyhood, he knew the Civil War veterans who used to sit on the front porch of the general store in Ashland, New Hampshire, smoking and swapping stores and passing time. One man had only one leg; another was missing an eye. They’d all been wounded in one way or another, and they weren’t shy about showing Daddy their old wounds. Their wounds were evidence that they’d given their utmost to their country.

These men made a tremendous impression on Daddy when he was a boy and later influenced his attitudes when it came time for him to serve his country in World War II. He transferred from the Coast Guard into the Navy as Lieutenant Junior Grade and finished the war with his own command. He served on board the Clay at the battles of Saipan and Guam and on the Morrison at Truk and Okinawa without injury. He left the Morrison two weeks before it was sunk by a kami-kaze. Then he was given the job of writing to the families of all the men who had died, men whom he remembered and wrote about personally.

He was assigned to navigate the empty tanker Androscoggin. On a return trip from Okinawa to Ulihi Atoll, they picked up the signal of a Japanese submarine on their sonar and outran it. Back on Guam, he learned that the cruiser Indianapolis had been sunk at that very spot with the loss of 1,300 lives.

He was on the St. Paul, part of Bull Halsey’s fleet. Ten miles from Honshu, planes took off, dropped bombs, and circled back to the fleet, steaming east away from Japan. Many ran out of fuel and didn’t make it; he saw them drop in the sea to be left behind.

He had no illusions about his survival. “It was a matter of pure chance,” he said, as we sat spellbound around him. As I recall, Mother didn’t take part, either as narrator or listener, in Daddy’s story hours, but neither did she discourage him, even though his stories were frightening to children—and to grown-ups, too. I think she recognized how important they were for him to tell and us to hear, and she tolerated them, even though they weren’t part of her world. She didn’t like to dwell on war and adventure and courageous deeds and grisly ends.

She had a Yankee background, too; her people were ministers and college professors. I admired both Mother and Daddy, and if I could have chosen my own family, I would have selected people like them. They knew where they came from, and they stood up for what they believed in.

* * *

Mother and Daddy were frugal to a fault. They practiced economies that most of their friends never considered. Mother mended and patched our clothes and darned our socks until they were falling apart. She bought dented cans at the grocery store to save a nickel. Anything that she and Daddy could make or repair themselves, they did. Never once did they buy a new car or appliance. The general opinion held that their attitude was a result of their having grown up during the Depression. I think that those experiences contributed, but it went deeper than that.

When Daddy was three years old, his father, a New Hampshire country doctor, contracted tuberculosis from a patient. For three years Dr. Wrightsman lingered in a worsening illness. Without success, he tried special diets, treatments, a sojourn at a sanitarium. His illness was a financial disaster for his family—Daddy, Daddy’s mother Alma, and sister Gertrude. He couldn’t practice medicine. His earnings dried up. For years, he had treated any patient who came to him, regardless of his or her ability to pay, with the result that many of his patients had accumulated quite substantial debts, and when he fell ill, none came forward to pay him. At the time of his death, when Daddy was six years old, he was owed about fifty thousand dollars, an enormous sum at that time. My grandmother never saw this money.

One of Daddy’s indelible memories was of being summoned to a family conference shortly after his father’s death. There he was, six years old, surrounded by his aunts and uncles. Uncle Henry, his mother’s sister’s husband, bent down so they were at eye level and, wagging a finger in Daddy’s face, he told Daddy that he was the man of the family now, and it was up to him to provide for his mother and sister.

Uncle Henry was the one who owned The Eaton, a rambling resort hotel in the White Mountains that catered to a rich city clientele escaping the summer heat. After his father died, Daddy and his mother and sister spent their summers there. But it was quickly understood that Daddy had to work—all day long he was required to be available to run errands and do odd jobs.

Grandma was a fragile woman, overwhelmed by grief. She was unequipped to take charge of the family’s affairs and unprepared to earn a living. I knew her, but not well; she died when I was ten. It certainly seems that she was content to be dependent and had few qualms about her young son going to work to support her. Daddy shoveled snow and split wood for the neighbors, and soon he was taking care of the horses that were used back then for road work or to pull the narrow-gauge railroad trains that plied the mountain valleys out of the snow drifts that stranded them in the bitter winters.

Daddy handed over all his earnings to his mother. He developed a life-long reluctance to spend money on himself. In old photographs I see a handsome youth with a painful smile. Yet sociability came easily to him, more easily than to me. He knew how to fit into a group and make himself indispensable. He was a natural leader. These qualities were evident in his Navy career and in his profession as a prep school master.

As a growing boy, Daddy had a mentor—a boyhood friend of his father, who was kinder to him than most of his relatives. This man had a house on Oyster Bay and kept a sailboat. It was he who taught Daddy how to sail in Long Island Sound and developed in him his life-long love of ships and the sea.

Daddy was a natural athlete (Patricia and Eddie take after him), and in his studies he discovered a talent for Latin. All college-bound boys needed Latin back then. As a high school student, Daddy tutored other students and coached sport teams for younger boys (which prevented him from playing on his school’s varsity teams). After The Eaton was sold out of the family, Daddy worked at various summer camps as a tennis, horseback riding, and canoe and sailing instructor. He loved these jobs and cherished happy memories of those relatively carefree summers.

He was a hardworking student, well-liked by his teachers, and it was a happy day for him when he was accepted into Harvard. He borrowed the tuition fees, $1,200 for the four years, from a great-aunt, with a promise to pay back every penny, which he eventually did. In addition to attending class, he had to work to earn his room and board, and the first semester he nearly flunked out. In his rural high school, he had not been taught how to write a formal essay. He was unprepared for the college curriculum. He nearly broke down from the stress, but he was lucky; a friend he had made, from a Boston Brahmin family, invited him to live rent-free in the apartment over the family garage, enabling him to quit some of his jobs and devote more time to his studies. For the rest of the year, Daddy had to commute from Boston, and he missed out on extracurricular campus life, but he learned to perform academically at the level expected of him. He graduated with honors in history.

As a teacher, Daddy was all for giving his students another chance—to a point. In the sixties, when Harrison began to accept more students from underprivileged backgrounds, Daddy held firm to the belief that Harrison could be the making of them. For students who refused to conform or put forth the effort, he had no patience. He let them know in no uncertain terms what opportunities they would be throwing away. Usually they would come to their senses, but if they didn’t, Harrison wasn’t the place for them, and they didn’t last there.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m not sure how Daddy became a history master and athletic coach. I know when he began teaching at Harrison before the war, he had earned his master’s degree in history and taught at two other schools. Knowing him as I do, I think that the first teaching job must have been offered to him, and that he probably accepted it because it promised work that appealed to him, benefits, and job security. After a few years, the war intervened and took him off to the adventure of his life, and by that time, I think, he already had earned tenure at Harrison.

In other words, I doubt prep school teaching was what he set out to do. I’m not sure what his aspirations were, but I think he would have liked a university career. But the life that chose him was suited for him. There’s no denying he had a gift for molding hearts and minds—particularly boys’. For several years, he’d handpick a group of six students and invite them on a summer sailing trip, charging their families only expenses. He’d drive the group from outside of Philadelphia, where we lived, to New London, Connecticut, where his boat, a navy surplus tender that he had bought after the war at auction and had refitted—would be ready. For a month they would sail up and down the New England coast, from Connecticut to Maine and back, stopping at ports of interest along the way. Some of those boys later cited Daddy as their single most important influence and kept in touch with him for the rest of his life.

While Daddy was on his sailing trips with his students, we stayed at the cottage on the Vermont lake that belonged to Mother’s family. All summer, friends and relatives dropped in—it was that kind of place. We loved it. It was paradise to us.

There was a day camp on the other side of the lake, with a swimming school, canoeing, hiking, and other activities that we all participated in, but most of the time we were free to wander.

By the time that Patricia was twelve and I was nine and Eddie seven, Daddy put an end to his summer sailing trips with his students. Instead, we all sailed together for a couple of summers, and then Daddy sold his boat and bought a smaller sailboat, named the Mary Helen for mother, for the lake. We also kept canoes and kayaks there. Back then motor boats weren’t allowed on the lake, and we eschewed them on principle.

There was a state forest bordering part of the lake, with steep trails up rocky slopes and streams that fell in small waterfalls on their courses into the lake. There were also deep underground springs that fed the lake, whose waters at that time were crystal clear. I remember summer nights, sleeping in the hammock on the screened-in porch. If I craned my neck, I could see the stars over the lake. On moonless nights they seemed to hang so close in the black sky that I found it hard to believe how many millions of miles away they really were.

* * *

Mother and Daddy had met while chaperoning a co-ed dance that brought together students from Chapin-Oakes, the all-girls’ school where Mother was teaching, and Harrison. Mother had reached her thirties without getting married and seemed destined for spinsterhood. In fact, that evening she had hoped to get out of going to the dance, but there weren’t enough chaperones.

No less than Harrison’s headmaster claimed the first dance from Mother. Daddy later said that he had noticed Mother right away and wanted to ask her first, but the headmaster’s rank was higher, and Daddy dared not presume on it. By this time he had already commanded a ship of three thousand men on Guam, and he was a scrupulous observer of courtesy and hierarchy.

It seemed to Mother that she had been waiting for Daddy all her life without knowing it. For the rest of the evening, they danced all the dances together, except when they stopped to talk to each other.

Mother instinctively felt that Daddy was a man who could be depended on, a man who had already proved his worth as an adult many times over, and who would be a good husband and father. She saw that he respected her intelligence, and she believed he would let himself be influenced by her opinions. When she learned of the hardships he had suffered in his youth and the burdens he had borne for others, her heart went out to him. She fell in love with him because she could tell he was a loving man who had been deprived of love. She believed that her love could rescue him from his unhappy past.

Consciously, they entered into marriage as an equal partnership. Mother came from a line of strong-minded men and women, who weren’t afraid to agitate for what they believed in. They were Abolitionists and women suffragists. One hundred fifty years ago, they had been Quakers; now they were Congregationalists. No matter the denomination, their religious ideals stressed works more than faith. They focused their efforts on building a better world in the here and now.

They were sober people, plain and respectable. They revered music, painting, poetry, drama—in a serious-minded way that was in keeping with their characters. Everything they did had a purpose of improvement. Their great values were humanism and education, yet they also indulged their children, allowing them long stretches of unstructured time in which to develop their interests as they wished.

Mother was devoted to her parents and to her younger sister, who suffered from cerebral palsy, but because of the family’s care and support, lived a normal life. I was well into my teenaged years before I realized that Aunt Kat had a disability. It had not occurred to me before.

Mother’s father, Julius Phelps, was Professor of English and Philosophy at Swarthmore College, and his living room was often a gathering place for his students, where they were welcomed with cookies and conversation. Mother later created that atmosphere in our home, but with an inescapable difference, because Daddy’s students were all boys.

When Mother and Daddy met, she was French instructor at Chapin-Oakes. She had graduated from Bryn Mawr College with honors in French and continued her studies at the Sorbonne. That was in the thirties, before the war. Sensing that Europe was about to explode, she returned to the U.S. and found a teaching job. Chapin-Oakes had an excellent reputation and the added advantage of being near her family. She had been employed there for eight years when she met Daddy.

To hear Mother tell it, through her college and graduate years, she was too busy studying to think of young men, and once she found herself ensconced in a girls’ school, there were no young men around to meet. Then came the war, and all the young men were off fighting, and many didn’t come back. Eventually she had to face it; there weren’t a lot of men around, period. As I said, she’d just about given up when she met Daddy.

The dance was in November; by Christmas, they were engaged, but they had to conceal it, because if Mother’s principal knew, Mother would lose her job. School policy did not allow married teachers or even engaged teachers at Chapin-Oakes. But Mother and Daddy needed the salary from her job to start their married life with, and she was intending to finish out the year before resigning.

There followed a winter and spring of secrecy and subterfuge. Mother’s parents knew, but no one else did. Daddy was insistent that he wanted to be married in a small ceremony with only Mother’s immediate family attending. Mother felt guilty about excluding Daddy’s mother. She hadn’t yet met her future mother-in-law, yet felt she would never be forgiven. Daddy explained to her that his mother would insist on their having a fancy, expensive wedding, just the kind of wedding that they didn’t want and couldn’t afford, and she would involve herself in the planning of it, and the result would be an additional headache for them that they could well do without.

“Believe me,” he emphasized, “I know my mother. I’m certain what she’ll do.”

As Mother got to know Daddy better, she realized that he had an additional reason for not including his mother: she lived with a man that she wasn’t married to. She called herself Mrs. Bruce Aylmer; she had the name engraved on her calling cards and her stationery, but, in fact, there was already a Mrs. Bruce Aylmer, and that first Mrs. Bruce Aylmer clung to the name and refused to divorce, even though she and Bruce Aylmer hadn’t lived as man and wife for nearly twenty years.

Mother also learned that Daddy’s mother was still his chief financial burden. Since Bruce Aylmer was disabled by an injury and unable to resume employment as a train conductor, Daddy was obliged to contribute to maintain them. Gertrude, now married, also helped out when she could, but she had a young child and depended upon her husband’s salary.

Poor Martin! thought Mother. His family has caused him little but trouble! Almost all his life, Martin has been supporting his mother, and he still is, and he is ashamed of her.

Once Mother understood the sources of Daddy’s feelings, she willingly acceded to his wishes. They were married in early June, just after their school terms ended, in the Phelpses’ garden. A garland of roses was wound around a wire arch under which Mother walked, escorted by her father, on her way to Daddy. Mother wore a white, calf-length dress suitable for the afternoon, and perched on her head was a tiara sewn with pearls, anchoring a veil, that had been passed down in her family for four generations.

The service deliberately omitted the word “obey” from the vows.

Mother and Daddy spent their honeymoon at a summer camp in the Berkshires, where Daddy had worked, that hadn’t yet opened for the season. The owner had offered it to Daddy free of charge. They were the only people there, except for two workmen making repairs to the cabins. There was a large kitchen in the main building, but they had brought an ice chest with them and preferred to cook their dinner over an open fire and at breakfast and lunch sustain themselves on sandwiches and fruit.

There was a lake where Daddy took Mother rowing and canoeing. No sailboats were available, but Daddy promised Mother a future of many sails.

Following their honeymoon, they went to Amherst to pay a visit to Daddy’s mother and Bruce Aylmer, who were living there.

In my experience, Mother was always careful of what she said about her mother-in-law. “She’s had a hard life,” Mother was apt to remark, “we mustn’t blame her.” But a note of impatience invariably got into Mother’s voice when she mentioned Grandma; she couldn’t seem to help it.

When Mother married, she was in her thirties, past what was then considered childbearing age, and she and Daddy tried to start a family immediately. She suffered two miscarriages before she gave birth to Patricia, and then there was a long space before they had Eddie, during which time they adopted me.

After Mother and Daddy were married, Harrison rented them a house on the campus. This was the house we grew up in, a lovely center-hall colonial, painted white, with a dining room downstairs on one side, a living room on the other, and a kitchen at the back. Upstairs were three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Patricia and I shared a bedroom until Mother and Daddy created a room for Eddie in the attic, and I took his bedroom.

In the beginning of their marriage, in order to spare Mother the work of shopping and cooking, Mother and Daddy paid Harrison a boarding fee and took their meals in the dining hall with students and other faculty. They had calculated the costs, and they were more or less equivalent. But after Mother became pregnant, she wasn’t allowed to eat with the students. Apparently, these boys were of a tender age and not to be subjected to the sight of a pregnant woman.

For all Mother’s championship of women’s rights and equality, she was unable to continue to work after she was married, and, pregnant, she was banned from the dining hall at her husband’s school. The school refunded her portion of the board, and for the remainder of the term, Daddy ate his meals in the dining hall and Mother at home.

But this was an unsatisfactory situation, made infinitely worse when Mother lost the baby. From then on, Mother and Daddy ate their meals at home. Daddy washed the dishes and frequently assisted with food preparation. He preferred to cook what was simple and easy, and so did Mother, with an emphasis on what was good for you.

I admit, as teenagers, that Patricia and I were hard on Mother when we asked her how she could call herself a feminist and yet have put up with such discriminatory behavior from both schools. We once reproached her in this way as she sat at the sewing machine, mending a torn seam in a sheet so it could still be used. I recall, bent like that over the sprigged fabric, that she reminded me of nothing as much as a pioneer woman (although pioneer women didn’t have electric sewing machines). After we both upbraided her, she was silent for a moment. Raising her eyes to meet ours, she said, “One cannot bring about such a revolution in a year or even ten years. Or in my lifetime. Perhaps your generation will experience perfect equality between the sexes, but I doubt it.”

The glare of the sewing machine light was reflected upward on her face. It hurt my eyes to look back at her, but Patricia wasn’t fazed. “Women can’t continue to wait forever,” Patricia replied. “You’ll see.”

Patricia came of age at the exact break in our culture between cotillion balls and rock concerts, between padded bras and girdles and nylons (what was once called a “foundation”) and a loose, liberated, bra-less way of being and dressing—tie-dye, fringe on jeans, flowing blouses, and wavy hair. Mother was tolerant of Patricia’s appearance. Not Daddy. He said he’d had too much experience of men to trust them around his daughter with her looking the way she did when she went out.

Daddy and Patricia clashed. They each claimed the moral high ground, and they both had to be right. When they argued, I pictured two determined bulls locking horns. With Patricia, Daddy seemed to forget his tact, and once, when she had infuriated him, he lashed out at her in such a tone of voice I have never forgotten it. Until he got control of himself, it sounded as if he were strangling.

I think Daddy’s conflicts with Patricia must have triggered a reaction that awakened his complicated feelings about his mother. Daddy’s mother had been an intelligent and cultured woman; she’d read widely and had good taste. He admired her in many ways, and her discriminating nature had helped form his character. Yet she’d been a weight on him that dragged him down and a sorrow he had to bear.

His mother’s experiences indicated to Daddy that Patricia did not appreciate how hard life could be for a woman, and how, more than a man, she needed protection and support. An unblemished reputation, a good name—these were important assets, difficult to acquire, and essential to maintain. Daddy believed that Patricia valued these too lightly. He knew she was impulsive, and he didn’t trust her judgment.

There was something about Patricia that drove her to tangle with Daddy. She would oppose him even when she had no intention of disobeying him. Struggle with him seemed to energize her. Her excitement built, and Daddy would get angrier.

Eddie and I both took cautionary lessons from Patricia. Instead of welcoming confrontation, we try to avoid it. To give her credit, she blazed a trail for us as the eldest child. After Patricia opposed Mother and Daddy, there was no need for us to.

In many ways, I admired Patricia for her bravery. She was then—and remained—a crusader. She was too transparent to be a politician, but she had a politician’s ability to change people’s opinions. In the union office where she ran the literacy program, she attracted many followers, and they became the union’s next generation of leaders. For all that she conceived of herself in opposition to Daddy, she ended up transmitting Daddy’s essential values and his lessons in civic duties and responsibilities.

Yet I’ve always felt uncomfortable around her. I felt she judged me and found me lacking because I wasn’t like her. It’s not that I’m a cynic, or don’t believe in helping my fellow human being, but I’ve always avoided large public demonstrations. I guess I’m afraid of losing my individuality in the multitude. I invariably had an excuse for Patricia when she wanted me to join one of her marches, because I knew she wouldn’t understand or accept my real reasons for not participating.

When we were growing up, she definitely let me know that my accomplishments were a threat to her, except in areas she did not care about, and I did my best to avoid arousing her feelings of competition. There’s no denying that I was a plump, mousy, stay-at-home girl. While part of me longed to be pretty and popular, another part of me was relieved not to be. I was only twelve when Patricia started going out with boys, and I had plenty of opportunities to witness examples of her jealousy and possessiveness. I wasn’t eager to stimulate them, nor, after the anxieties that she’d caused Mother and Daddy, did I want to be the source of any more trouble for them.

I never have been willing to reveal my private feelings and motives in the same way Patricia did. Patricia, who was touchy about so many things—her prerogatives as the eldest, her principles when she felt they were being compromised—did not seem to feel sensitive at all about what other people knew about her.

Mother was more like me, circumspect. Patricia sometimes shocked her. She considered Patricia headstrong and occasionally thoughtless. She knew I was not, but I don’t think she was at all aware of the fear I lived with, of having been an unwanted child. I was good at concealing my feelings. I succeeded in concealing them from myself.

* * *

I was a little afraid and in awe of Harrison students when I was young. Sometimes I’d be crossing the campus with Mother and Daddy, and I’d see some of them chasing after each other or throwing a football or butting into each other in the way that boys do, and I’d worry that I’d somehow get in their way and get hurt. I tended to avoid them and knew little at all about them, except for occasional details that Daddy shared with us at the dinner table. It wasn’t until I began to attend Daddy’s “Cookies and Conversations” that I became acquainted with any of them.

As I mentioned, the idea for Daddy’s “Cookies and Conversations” was really Mother’s, because it was inspired by Professor Phelps’s evenings with his students in his home. But while Professor Phelps’s gatherings had a literary purpose—one particularly notable evening was his reading from The Turn of the Screw, in which he frightened some of his students so much they couldn’t go to sleep—Daddy’s meetings had a wholly different raison d’être. Daddy was deeply interested in his students as individuals, and he welcomed opportunities for frank and stimulating exchange. I believe he had in mind Socrates’ Academy when he spoke of education as a kind of conversation. This was the lofty ideal behind his “Cookies and Conversations.”

They were memorable evenings, not so much, I think, for what was said, but for their relaxed and pleasant atmosphere. Daddy laid some ground rules: no one could monopolize the conversation or interrupt anyone else; each had to speak in turn and give all a chance to have their say. It sounds simple, but I think it was the rare quality of Daddy’s encouragement—and Mother’s, too, for she always participated at these gatherings—that left us feeling uplifted.

Daddy never asked, “Do you mean?” He made a statement, “You mean,” and when he finished, he had not only expressed the thought clearly and simply but had made it sound as though it had been entirely the other person’s, with no contribution from him. He was a generous teacher, and that was why his students revered him.

There’s a story Daddy used to tell from his days in Guam that illustrates some of his qualities. A Japanese sampan, a fifty-foot fishing boat, had been stranded a hundred feet up on the beach of the base where Daddy was stationed. One of Daddy’s young ensigns rounded up a motor machinist and several others and went to work on the engine. Daddy regarded this as good recreation. They got the engine going, and they began digging up the beach to get the boat into the water. Daddy saw what they were doing, and he also saw that they had to cope with a hard coral beach below the sand.

One afternoon Daddy heard a loud explosion, and he knew there would be trouble. When he got back from the beach, he had to return a call to Naval Supply Command and report that the explosion was unauthorized and wouldn’t happen again. He thought the boys would give up in the hundred-degree heat, but two days later he noticed that the boat was not on the beach. In fact, it was out in the water inside the reef at anchor.

At the Officers’ Club, the Captain informed Daddy that he had no authorization to increase the size of the United States Navy, and further, Daddy was to get rid of the boat even if he had to sink it.

Daddy bargained with him to let him give it to Captain Olaf, the Swedish husband of a native lady with whom Daddy had been working to set up a school for the native children. The Captain approved and said Daddy could let those boys cruise on the sampan with Captain Olaf if they had an officer present in charge and did not go more than a half mile beyond the reef and only in perfect weather. Captain Olaf was glad of the boat and took the boys for their well-earned outing. It was a great boost to their morale, said Daddy.

Daddy enjoyed telling this story to his students because he believed it was important not to discourage young people. He didn’t let his deep, unfulfilled need for a father prevent him from becoming the kind of fatherly man that two generations of young men looked up to. It was only with Patricia that Daddy’s ideals came into painful conflict with his behavior, and I think it was because Patricia was able to hurt him in ways that no one else had except his mother.

But at the “Cookies and Conversations,” Daddy took a calmer, more measured attitude to Patricia. He seemed to listen to her more carefully and weigh her opinions, which were sometimes extreme, more judiciously than he might at other times. Thus, these evenings had a salutary effect on him as well, and he was able to be more accepting of Patricia as an individual.

It is an indication of the difference between Patricia and me that at these gatherings she liked to sit in the center of the room, where everyone could see her, and I preferred to remain at the periphery. Eddie, when he was old enough to be included, was rarely still, but liked to be petted and made much of by the young men. It excited him to be around them. It excited all of us. Patricia’s face glowed in the lamplight, and even Mother relaxed and grew more animated than usual.

I was excited, too. Listening to the high-minded talk gave me a sense of security and contentment, and I rarely felt the need to add any idea of my own. I was shy and unconfident of my ability to express myself. I preferred to watch the others; I hardly thought they noticed me.

I noticed them, of course. And so it is that now I find myself approaching the other subject, as yet unmentioned, underlying these pages.

Paden. Paden Powell. Just saying his name aloud affects me strongly.

At Harrison, one of my first memories of Paden was of him kneeling on the rug in front of the coffee table in our living room, pouring out tea and passing around the cups. Paden had beautiful hands, with long, slender, tapering fingers, and he loved tea and the ceremonial aspects of tea drinking. The reason for his presence in our living room was that he was one of a group of Daddy’s students invited over for “Cookies and Conversations.” Yet from the beginning Paden was more than a student. He was almost like a member of the family.

One reason was because the Powells had become our neighbors at the lake. They had bought a three-acre lot on the water a quarter-mile down from us. The first year after Daddy had stopped taking his students sailing up the New England coast and had taken us instead, we visited the lake at Labor Day to find the Powells already well-established.

Augustus Powell had first seen the lake many years before that, when he had been one of Mother’s father’s favorite students and had come to stay for a week one summer and assist Professor Phelps in his research. When I knew Augustus, he was Professor of Philosophy at Columbia. He had piercing blue eyes under bushy eyebrows and an abrupt way of coming up behind me when I wasn’t looking and surprising me with direct questions. I felt uncomfortable around him, because he seemed to enjoy embarrassing me, and I never knew what he would say.

His wife Sally was blonde and curvy, as different from him as could be. When I think of her, I think of a de Kooning painting, all chaos and bright colors. She liked to make outrageous statements for effect. Much of the time Augustus barely seemed to pay attention to her. Paden knew just how to calm her down when she was upset. “Now, Sally,” he’d begin, with that silky note in his voice, slightly teasing and flirtatious, and it worked every time.

Paden had always called his parents by their first names. They didn’t seem to mind—quite the opposite. Sarah, Paden’s junior by nine years, followed his example, and so did everyone else in Paden’s circle.

* * *

Another memory I have of Paden is of when he was building his treehouse at the lake that summer after his freshman year at Columbia, before he went to France. He said he’d always wanted a treehouse. It would be his place, where no one else could come unless invited. He was making it purposely hard to get to. He’d found the tree—a tall red maple out of sight of the lake and the Powells’ house. The first thing he did was nail a ladder up the trunk. Fifteen feet up, he constructed the treehouse’s platform. He brought the boards up on a pulley, and he used a hammer, nails, wood screws, and a cordless drill.

Once Paden had built the platform, he’d sleep up there sometimes, even before there were any walls. He wasn’t afraid of falling out of the tree in his sleep. He said that he just told himself not to move, and he never did. He buried his head in his sleeping bag to keep off the insects, and he said he’d never slept so soundly.

There was a path through the woods that went near Paden’s treehouse, and during the day sometimes I would pass by there to observe his progress. By mid-August, he’d gotten the roof and three walls up.

The day I’m remembering was hot and sunny. The sun filtered down through the trees, creating a dappled pattern on the forest floor. It was so pronounced it was almost like an optical illusion. I had lost track of where I was when I came on the small clearing where Paden’s tree had grown so tall. Shielding my eyes with my hand, I peered up at the treehouse. In my angle of vision, it was in front of the sun, and I was dazzled. I made out a dark shape—it was Paden—waving his arms, in greeting or in warning, I couldn’t tell. Then I saw part of a shape moving behind him, the glimpse of a bare shoulder and a woman’s hair.

I knew who it was. I hadn’t spoken, and neither had Paden, but he had seen me, and I had seen him. Very quietly, I turned my back and retraced my steps the way I had come. I didn’t think the woman he was with had seen me.

That’s how I found out that Patricia was sleeping with Paden.

* * *

It was a long time after Paden was dead, and I was living on my own, when I discovered a new connection to him. Oliver had been Paden’s friend at Columbia. When Paden went to France, they had kept up the friendship for a while and then lost track of each other—so Oliver told me when we met. They were out of touch when Oliver had learned of Paden’s death. He hadn’t even known that Paden had gone to Chile.

Apparently, even years later, Oliver remained affected by Paden, because he’d spoken about him to his girlfriend, Renée, who was the high school friend of my friend, Maria, which is how I learned of it.

At that time I was not in close contact with the Powells, and the wish to talk about Paden with someone who had been his friend overwhelmed me. Through my grapevine connection between Maria and Renée, I sent out feelers to learn if Oliver would be willing to meet with me to share our reminiscences. It took about a month for the answer to come back in the affirmative and another week for us to set a time and place.

Over the phone Oliver had a deep voice, and I tried to picture him. I had seen his likeness in a photograph Maria showed me of him and Renée. He was handsome, there was no doubt about it, with dark hair and eyes, and easily as tall as Paden.

Impulsively, I told him about the letters and asked him if he and Paden had ever corresponded.

“Oh yes, I believe we did,” he replied. “Paden was a great one for writing letters.”

“I have some wonderful letters from him,” I said. “I’ll bring them to show you, if you show me yours.”

To my surprise, he and Renée didn’t live far from me. I agreed to meet him at a neighborhood bar later that week after he got off from work.

I was nervous when the time came, and I deliberately arrived late so I wouldn’t have to wait alone for him. He was sitting at a booth with a bowl of peanuts in front of him when I walked in. It was winter, and he was wearing a heavy knit turtleneck sweater, like one Paden might have worn.

In person, Oliver was even handsomer than in his picture, and I felt nervous, the way I often feel with someone that physically attractive, that I won’t be able to measure up to the same standard. The lighting in the room was deliberately dim, and I was glad of it, since it made it harder for us to scrutinize each other. Immediately I brought the conversation to Paden.

I wanted so much to understand Paden, and I thought perhaps Oliver could provide me with some keys to knowing him that would give me new insights.

“I have to hand it to Paden that he was a serious scholar and thorough in his studies. He wasn’t afraid of hard work. For example, he was determined to read the Greek and Roman philosophers in the original, and he would do it,” Oliver recalled. “And yet, I wonder if there wasn’t something lacking in him. That he just didn’t have that spark of creativity, and all his diligence couldn’t make up for it.”

What Oliver said caused me pain. I didn’t want to believe it. To my mind, there had been no one like Paden, no one with his brilliance. Why, it was even legend in our family. I remembered what Daddy had said about him as his prize student.

I also remembered, of course, how later Paden lost much of his luster. But that had been due to his illness.

At this thought, I felt sadness cloud my feelings—sadness, and nostalgia. It was then that I offered to show Oliver my letters. It turned out he had none to show me in return. I accepted the disappointment.

As I handed him the small collection of thin, light-blue aerogrammes and white, blue-lined envelopes, they seemed to me as delicate and fragile as butterfly wings. Paden had had a small, careful handwriting, and Oliver had to put on glasses and strain close to read in the dim light of the bar. For a while I looked at him reading, and then I looked away. I couldn’t see his expression, but I felt embarrassed all the same. I wondered if I had made a mistake in showing him the letters, and if I would regret it.

Oliver read one letter, and then another, and another, perhaps half a dozen in all, before he folded them, arranged them in a neat stack, and carefully laid his hand over them. There was a silence as I sensed him struggling for what to say.

I could feel his eyes on me, and his voice was so gentle I could barely make it out. “Were you Paden’s lover?”

His question astonished me. “Oh no, no…nothing like that,” I stammered. “You don’t understand. He was so much older than I. Four years…”

Oliver’s expression turned to disbelief, and I suddenly remembered that he was six years older than Renée.

“Well, it seemed a big difference back then,” I lamely tried to explain.

It was clear that Oliver didn’t believe me. “But these are intimate letters,” he said. “Letters you would write to a lover. Paden never wrote letters like these to me.”

Our hands touched briefly as he gave me back my letters, but it was his words that had opened up a well of feeling. I had never allowed myself to admit how much I loved Paden. That I had been afraid of Patricia, afraid of her anger, long after she and Paden broke apart—that was one reason. I’d also believed that, because of Patricia, Mother and Daddy wouldn’t have approved. But the main reason was Paden himself. I couldn’t comprehend that he could really have been interested in me as a lover. He always seemed lofty and unapproachable, far above me. For years I had treasured his letters and kept them separate from other letters, but the thought that they might have been as important to him—that was a new thought, and an answer I’ll never know.

Oliver and I never met again, but he helped me see what had passed between me and Paden in a new light. The ancient Greeks whom Paden revered believed that what happens to you after you die can affect how well your life has gone. Most people today would scoff at the notion that what you say about a man after he is dead can make a difference to him, yet the ancient Greeks took it for granted.

One purpose in writing this memoir is to learn about myself and explain myself to me. Another is to make a gesture of love and affection to Paden in perpetuating his memory. I ask his forgiveness from beyond the grave for not being as good to him as I might have been, for not understanding what he was suffering when I should have, and not helping him when I could have.

At last I acknowledge the love for him that I never allowed myself to express to him directly.