Читать книгу Seating Arrangements - Maggie Shipstead - Страница 12

Before he became a father, Winn had assumed he would have sons. He had expected Daphne to be a boy, had lain with his ear against Biddy’s pregnant belly and heard male voices echoing down from future lacrosse games and ski trips. He saw a small blue blazer with brass buttons, short hair combed away from a straight part, himself teaching a boy to tie a necktie. He would drive his son to Harvard when the time came and help him carry his bags through the Yard, would greet his son’s roommates and their fathers with hearty handshakes. His son would join the Ophidian Club, and Winn would attend the initiation dinner and drink with the boy who would live his life over again, affirming its correctness at every juncture.

When the screaming ham hock the doctor pulled from between Biddy’s legs turned out to be unmistakably female, all crevices and puffiness, he felt a deep and essential surprise, not only that the child brewing in his wife those nine months was a girl but that he, Winn, possessed the seeds of a feminine anything. Inside the tangled pipes of his testicular factory there existed, beyond all reason, women. Watching Biddy and Daphne nestle together in the hospital bed, he realized he had been mistaken to think that pregnancy and birth had something to do with him. He had imagined that by impregnating this woman he had ensured she would deliver a son who would go forth and someday impregnate another woman who would, in turn, have a son, and so on and so forth down the Van Meter line into the misty future. But now, instead, there was this girl-child who would grow breasts and take another man’s name and sprout new branches on an unknown family tree and do all sorts of traitorous things a son would not do. The shifting and swelling of Biddy’s boyish body into a collection of spheroids, the quiet communion she lavished on her belly, her new status with her sisters and her covey of friends—all this should have told him he was standing at the threshold of a club that would not have him. Even though women held out their arms and exclaimed, “You’re going to be a faaa-ther!” he suspected they had seen him all along for what he was: the adjunct, the contributor of additional reporting, the lame duck about to be displaced from the center of his wife’s affections. The surprise should not have been that he had a daughter but that any boys were ever born at all.

When, five years later, Biddy announced she was pregnant for the second time, Winn assumed from the first that the baby would be a girl. The deck was stacked; the game was rigged. Daphne was so staunchly female that the possibility of his and Biddy’s genes being put back in the tumbler and coming out a boy seemed too small to bother with. Biddy gave him the news in bed in the morning, and he kissed her once, hard, and said, “Well!” before going downstairs to sit behind the Journal and think about a vasectomy. He was at the kitchen table, staring sightlessly at the pages when he heard the rustling, tinkling sound that announced Daphne. She slid into a chair and sat eating red grapes out of a plastic bag. She wore a piece of crenellated, bejeweled plastic in her hair, and a cloud of pink gauze stood up where her skirt bent against the back of the chair.

“Good morning, Daphne. Going to dance class today?”

“No. That’s on Wednesday.”

“Isn’t that a dance skirt you’re wearing?”

“My tutu? I just threw this on.”

Winn stared at her. She looked back at him and fingered one of the strands of plastic beads that garlanded her neck. Somehow in her infancy she had absorbed a set of phrases and mannerisms that Biddy called breezy and Winn called absurd but that, in any event, had her swanning through preschool like an aging socialite. They left her once with Biddy’s eldest sister, Tabitha, and went to Turks and Caicos for a week, hoping Tabitha’s son Dryden would get her to dirty her knees a little. Instead, they returned to find Dryden draped in baubles and Daphne arranging clips in his hair.

“Dryden,” Biddy said, “you look awfully dressed up for this time of day.”

The boy released a sigh of weary sophistication. He fluttered his blue-dusted eyelids and spread his fingers against his chest. “Oh, this? This is nothing. The good stuff’s in the safe.”

To Winn, Daphne was a foreign being, a sort of mystic, a snake charmer or a charismatic preacher, an ambassador from a distant frontier of experience. The academic knowledge that she was the product of his body was not enough to forge a true belief; he felt no instantaneous, involuntary recognition of her as flesh and blood. Not for lack of trying, either. He had changed her diapers and held her while she cried in the night and spooned gloopy food into her mouth, and certainly he loved her, but she only became more and more strange to him as she got older, and his love for her gave him no comfort but instead made him alarmingly porous, full of hidden passageways that let in feelings of yearning and exclusion. Sitting behind the paper, he imagined with trepidation a house populated by two Daphnes, a Biddy, and only one Winn.

“Daddy,” came the piping voice from across the table, “am I a princess?”

“No,” Winn said. “You’re a very nice little girl.”

“Will I be a princess someday?”

Winn bent the top of the newspaper down and looked over it. “It depends on whom you marry.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, there are two ways for a woman to become a princess. Either she’s born one, or she marries a prince or, I think, a grand duke—although I’m not sure those exist anymore. You see, Daphne, many countries that used to have princesses don’t anymore because they’ve abolished their monarchies, and an aristocracy doesn’t make sense without a monarchy. Austria, for example, got rid of all that business after the First World War. Hereditary systems like that aren’t fair, you see, and they breed resentment among the lower classes. Anyway, the long and short of it is, since you weren’t born a princess, you would need to marry a prince, and there aren’t very many of those around.”

Reproachfully, she ate a grape and then wiped her fingers one at a time on a napkin. He returned to reading.

“Daddy.”

“What?”

“Am I your princess?”

“Christ, Daphne.”

“What?”

“You sound like a kid on TV.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re full of treacle.”

“What’s treacle?”

“Something that’s too sweet. It gives you a stomachache.”

She nodded, accepting this. “But,” she pressed on, “am I your princess?”

“To the best of my knowledge, I don’t have any princesses. What I do have is a little girl without any dignity.”

“What’s dignity?”

“Dignity is behaving the way you’re supposed to so people respect you.”

“Do princesses have dignity?”

“Some do.”

“Which ones?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Grace Kelly.”

“Who is she?”

“She was a princess. First she was an actress. Then she married a prince and became a princess. In Monaco. She was killed in a car accident.”

“What’s Monaco?”

“A place in Europe.”

Daphne took a moment to absorb and then asked, “Am I your princess?”

“We’ve just been through this,” Winn said, exasperated.

She looked like she was trying to decide whether her interests would be better served by smiling or crying. “I want to be your princess,” she said, teetering toward tears. Daphne was an accomplished crier, plaintive and capable of great stamina. For a girl so physically delicate and soft in voice, she was unexpectedly stalwart in her emotions. Her tears were purposeful, as were her smiles and pouts. Biddy called her Lady Macbeth.

Ducking back behind his paper, Winn did what was necessary. “All right,” he said. “Daphne, you are my princess.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely.”

Daphne nodded and ate a grape. Then she cocked her head to one side. “Am I your fairy princess?”

Biddy, when Winn went looking for her, was getting out of the shower. Through the closed door he heard the water shut off and the rattle of the shower curtain. She was humming something to herself. He thought it might be “Amazing Grace.” Knocking once, he pushed open the door, releasing a cloud of steam. Her bare body, flushed from the shower, was so close he could feel the heat coming off her back and small, neat buttocks. A foggy oval wiped on the mirror framed her breasts and belly button, the dark badge of hair below, his tight face hovering over her shoulder. After fall stripped away her summer tan, her skin tended toward a certain sallowness, but the hot water had turned her chest and legs a rosy pink. Already, her breasts looked swollen. A white towel was wrapped around her head. Her reflection smiled at him. Biddy, he had planned to say, maybe one is enough. He would suggest they sit down and make a pros and cons list. He was holding a yellow legal pad and a blue pen and had already thought of cons to counter all possible pros.

“What is it?” she asked, her smile draining away. He wondered if she had already guessed that he had trailed her to this warm, foggy room to argue her baby away from her. She had some lotion in her hand, and he watched her rub it on her sides and stomach, across stretch marks from Daphne that were only visible in the pale months. “Winn?” she asked. “What?”

“What was that you were just humming?” he asked.

“‘Unchained Melody,’” she said.

“Oh.”

“And?”

“And what?”

She took another towel and wrapped it around herself, tucking in the end beneath her armpit. “What else?”

“Nothing important.”

“What’s that for?” She pointed at the legal pad.

“I needed to take some notes.”

“About what?”

“A work thing.”

She turned to the mirror and asked, almost casually, “Are you excited about the baby?”

Winn was silent.

“Are you?” Biddy prodded.

“Yes,” Winn said. “No.”

“No, you’re not excited?” She and Daphne had the same way of wrinkling their foreheads when their plans went awry. “What were you going to say when you came in here?”

He tapped the legal pad against his thigh. “I’m not sure.”

“Winn, out with it.”

“Fine. I was thinking about saying we shouldn’t jump into anything. We didn’t exactly plan this.”

“We always said we would have two.”

“We hadn’t talked about it in years. Maybe four years.”

“No, we talked about it last year. On Waskeke. At the bar in the Enderby. You said you’d like to try for a son.”

“We’d been drinking, and that was still a year ago.”

“I didn’t think it was empty talk. We always said we’d have two. I understood our plan was for two. We always said so.”

“I thought … I assumed, apparently incorrectly, that we’d both cooled on the idea.”

“You should have said if you’d changed your mind.”

“You should have said you wanted another one.”

“Let me ask you this, if you could know right now that it’s a boy, would we be having this conversation? Would you have made one of your lists? That’s what you have there, isn’t it?”

He hid the pad behind his back and soldiered on. “I didn’t know you’d gone off the pill,” he said. “Did you do it on purpose?”

She rummaged in a drawer. “I forgot for a week. I know you don’t like to be surprised, but I thought we wanted this. I thought if it happens, it happens. I didn’t realize you had changed your mind. You should have said something.”

“I didn’t know I had to. I didn’t realize I had given tacit approval to conceive a child at the time of your choosing.”

He stepped back in time to remove himself from the path of the slamming door. The bath began to run. Biddy’s sisters said that Biddy was drawn to water in times of need because she was an Aquarius. Winn put no stock in astrology—the whole concept was embarrassing—but he admitted that his wife’s passion for baths, showers, lakes, rivers, ponds, swimming pools, and the ocean was a powerful force. Biddy descended from a line of people who were at once remarkably unlucky and extraordinarily fortunate in their encounters with the sea. Since a grandfather many greats ago had managed to catch hold of a dangling line after being swept by a wave from the deck of the Mayflower and be dragged back aboard, her forebears had been dumped into the ocean one after the other and then, while thousands around them perished, been plucked again from the waves. A grandaunt had survived the sinking of the Titanic; a distant cousin crossed eight hundred miles of angry Southern Ocean in a lifeboat with Ernest Shackleton; her father’s cruiser was sunk at Guadalcanal, and he saved not only himself but three others from shark-infested waters. The grandaunt’s photograph, a grainy enlargement of a small girl wrapped in a blanket and looking very alone on the deck of the Carpathia without her nanny (who had gone to the bottom of the Atlantic) hung in their front hallway.

Whatever the root of Biddy’s affinity for water, as long as Winn had known her, she had been able to submerge herself and come out, if not entirely healed, at least calmed, her mood rubbed smooth. But he could not have anticipated that she would emerge from this particular bath and find him where he had settled with the newspaper in his favorite chair and announce that she was going to have a water birth for this baby.

“A what?”

“A water birth. You give birth in a tub of warm water. There’s a hospital in France that specializes in it. We’re going there.”

Winn felt an “absolutely not” pushing its way up his throat. He had married Biddy partly because she was not given to outlandish ideas, and he felt betrayed. But the rafters of the doghouse hung low over his head. “Sounds like some kind of hippie thing to me,” he said.

“I’ve done research. Candace McInnisee did it for her youngest, and she swears by it.”

“You did research before you knew you were pregnant?”

“We always said we would have two, Winn. And since you’re not the one giving birth, I don’t see why you should mind where it happens.”

Winn lifted his paper and let it fall, a white flag spreading on the floor in marital surrender. He held out his arms. She came close, leaned to kiss him on the forehead, and slipped away before he could embrace her.

LIVIA WAS BORN in France in a tub full of water, and she, like Biddy, had spent the years since her birth returning, whenever possible, to an aqueous state. She had once come home from a fruitful day in the fourth grade and declared that she was a thalassomaniac and a hydromaniac while Biddy was only a hydromaniac, which was true. Biddy’s love of water did not extend past the substance itself, whereas Livia loved all water but especially the ocean and its inhabitants. During her time at Deerfield, she had baffled Winn by organizing a Save the Cetaceans society and by spending her summers on Arctic islands helping researchers count walruses or on sailboats monitoring dolphin behavior in the Hebrides. She had passionately wished to join the crew of a vessel that interfered with Japanese whaling ships, but Biddy had managed to convince her that she would be more helpful elsewhere. Now she was studying biology at Harvard with plans for a Ph.D. afterward. She had made it clear to Winn that she thought his ocean-provoked existential horror was a bit of willful silliness. From the age of eleven, she had insisted on getting and maintaining her scuba certification and was always after Winn to do the same, though the idea held no appeal for him. He had snorkeled a few times and once swam by accident out over the lip of a reef, where the colorful orgy of waving, flitting life dropped into blackness. He felt like he had taken a casual glance out the window of a skyscraper and seen, instead of yellow taxis and human specks crawling along the sidewalks, only a chasm.

Winn had expected Livia’s passion for the ocean to fade away like her other childhood enthusiasms (volcanoes, rock collecting), but a vein of Neptunian ardor had persisted in the thickening stuff of her adult self. She spotted seals and dolphins that no one else noticed, and she was on constant watch for whales. A stray plume of spray was enough to get her hopes up, and after she had stopped and peered into the distance long enough to be convinced no tail or rolling back was going to show itself, she would blush and fall silent, seeming to suffer a sort of professional embarrassment. She claimed she would be happy to spend her life on tiny research vessels or in cramped submersibles, poking cameras and microphones into the depths as though the ocean might issue a statement explaining itself. His selkie daughter. How Livia could feel at home in a world so obviously hostile was beyond him, as was her willingness to lavish so much love on animals indifferent to her existence.

Daphne was the simpler of his daughters to get along with but also the more obscure. By the time she finished college, she seemed to have shed the serpentine guile of her infant self, or else her manipulations had grown so advanced as to conceal themselves entirely. He couldn’t be sure. A smoked mirror of sweetness and serenity hid Daphne’s inner workings, but Livia lived out in the open, blatantly so, the emotional equivalent of a streaker. Livia’s problem was a susceptibility to strong feelings, and her strongest feelings these days were about a boy, Teddy Fenn, who had thrown her over. She had seen too many movies; she did not understand that love was a choice, entered and exited by free will and with careful consideration, not a random thunderbolt sent from above. He had told her so, but she would not listen. She was angry at the world in general and Winn in particular, so he was angry with her in return. In the interest of familial peace, he would try to put everything aside for the wedding, and perhaps Waskeke would exert a healing influence, bring her back to herself.

He needed to buy more groceries for dinner and to deliver Biddy’s lunatic flowers to the Enderby, where the Duffs were staying. With the aim of forging an alliance, he sought out Livia to see if she would come along. She was in the bathtub.

“It’s after two,” he said through the door, “so the sooner we go the better.”

“Where’s Celeste?” Livia asked.

“Up on the roof.”

“Communing with the vodka gods?”

“And with your mother.”

A splash. “Give me a minute.”

They rattled back down the driveway in the old Land Rover, the Duffs’ flowers blooming up from between Livia’s knees like a Roman candle.

“What do you say we take the scenic route?” Winn said, pausing at the road.

She shrugged. “I thought we were in a hurry.”

Only to get out of the house, he thought. In the hour since his arrival, he had managed to offend Biddy by suggesting that all the test runs with makeup and hair and such were an extravagance and also to walk in on Agatha in the downstairs bathroom. He hadn’t seen anything, only her surprised face and bare thighs (the gauzy white dress concealed their crux) and a wad of toilet paper clutched in her hand, nor had he said anything, which made the situation worse. He had closed the door—not slammed it but closed it quietly and deliberately—before fleeing up to the widow’s walk to tell Biddy he was going to the market.

The day was warm and unusually still. Split-rail fences and a thickety layer of brush hemmed in the road. The interior of the island was occupied mostly by scrublands called the Moors, low hills with sharp, rusty vegetation and bony, crooked trees, like a piece of the Serengeti delivered to the wrong address. On the ocean side, shingled houses were scattered among scrub pines, cranberry bogs, and marshes. They drove past the undulating, sand-trapped meadow belonging to the Pequod Golf Club, its ovoid greens marching off like footprints left by an elephant. Distant golfers bent and flexed, launching unseen balls into the blue air.

“Heard anything about the Pequod?” Livia asked.

“No, not yet,” Winn said, trying to sound cheerful. “I’ll have to call up Jack Fenn and get the latest.”

Livia let her head tip back until she was staring up at the Rover’s ceiling. “Would it be so bad not to join? You already belong to a thousand clubs. You hardly even go to half of them. I don’t see why belonging to the Pequod is so essential.”

“It’s not essential. Nothing is essential. I think we’ll all enjoy the membership, that’s all.”

“Can you leave the Fenns out of it at least?”

“Unfortunately, no. Look, they’re not my favorites, either, but Fenn and I go back long before you and Teddy were even born. We have a relationship that has nothing to do with you.”

“Not to mention Fee,” Livia said snidely, referring to Jack’s wife, Teddy’s mother, who was an ex-girlfriend of Winn’s.

“Ancient history,” said Winn. As a consequence of its selectivity, his world was sometimes too small. “No need to bring it up. Nothing to do with the Pequod.”

“No one besides you even golfs,” Livia said to the ceiling.

“There’s a gym there, and a bar. They have nice events—dances, silent auctions, theme parties. You’ll like it.”

She let her head roll in his direction. “I do love silent auctions.”

“Don’t be sarcastic, Livia. It isn’t ladylike.”

For three summers Winn had languished on a secrecy-shrouded wait list for membership in the Pequod. For three summers he had kept bitter evening vigils on the widow’s walk, staring out at what he could see of the course from the house: only a scrap of the tenth hole, but that bit of grass was the gateway to a verdant male haven and confessional. In the decades he had been coming to the island, he had always thought of membership as something obtainable but deliberately left for later. So it was to his bafflement that he had pulled all available strings and schmoozed all relevant parties, including the Fenns, and still he found himself relegated to guest status. He had an excellent track record with clubs. Though no club could equal the pleasures of his college club, the Ophidian—a brotherhood of such importance that he wrote one Christmas newsletter exclusively for its members and another for the remainder of the Van Meter family’s acquaintance—he had joined other clubs, in New York and in Boston, one in London, all places where he could drop in for dinner and feel welcome and sit in a leather chair and read newspapers hinged on long wooden sticks. He belonged to more specialized clubs, too, for the purposes of swimming or golf or racquet sports, and none had ever hesitated to accept him as a member. But Jack Fenn was on the Pequod’s membership committee and Fee Fenn was on the social committee, and, truth be told, Winn never knew where he stood with them, if bygones were bygones or not.

To change the mood, he reached over and patted Livia’s bony knee. “So,” he said, playing jolly, “the big day!”

“It’s not my big day.”

“Don’t be sour. Your day will come.”

She moved her leg irritably, and the flowers trembled. “I wouldn’t mind if everyone would stop telling me that. I’ll either get married or I won’t. I’m not jealous. I’m looking forward to this weekend being over. End of story.”

“That’s not quite the spirit, Livia.” Yearn as he might for the end of the wedding hoopla, Winn knew he must ride in front of the troops, sword raised, toward a successful event. “Especially from the maid of honor. You’re in charge of honor.”

He meant it as a joke, but she said, grimly, “I thought you weren’t impressed with my honor.”

He refrained from answering. They passed a marshy pond crowded with cattails and bulrushes.

“Look at the egret,” she said

Winn glimpsed a tall, slender shape and a flash of white wings. “It’s a heron,” he said.

“No, it’s an egret. Egrets are white. Herons aren’t.”

“Well,” said Winn in a voice that signaled he was being kind but not sincere. “All right.”

In town, the traffic was slow, and without a breeze the car was warm. Livia shifted the flowers, and some greenery tickled Winn’s hand. He pushed it away. Livia sighed and rested her elbow on the window’s edge. “All these people. Too many people.”

“Hopefully they’re not all wedding guests,” he said.

She snorted. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to share a room with Celeste?”

“I think I can imagine.”

“After the lights are out, I hear ice cubes rattling around. Then she tries to get me to girl talk with her and whispers questions about my love life until she falls asleep, which is when she starts snoring. You can’t imagine. She sounds like someone trying to vacuum up a mud puddle.”

Many times in the past, over holidays or vacation weekends, Winn had been kept awake by Celeste’s industrial rumble from several rooms away, but he said, “Buck up, pal. I’d appreciate if you’d contribute by being nice to your aunt.”

“I contribute. I contribute in lots of ways. I’m the maid of honor. I’m a servant to the pregnant queen. Why do I also have to be a companion to the drunken aunt?”

“Celeste has had some rough breaks along the way. The charitable thing would be to cut her some slack.”

“She’s a gargoyle.”

“She’s a ruin.”

“Of her own making. I can’t get away from her. She’s everywhere with her martinis and her stories. She’s like, ‘Roomie, did I tell you about the time my third husband ran off to Bolivia with my best friend’s daughter? You don’t know heartbreak until your third husband has run off to Bolivia with your best friend’s daughter.’ That clink-clink, clink-clink, clink-clink that lets you know she’s coming—it’s like the shark music in Jaws.”

“Be thankful you weren’t around for that divorce, the Bolivian one. That was a dogfight.”

“I don’t think a divorce that happened twenty-something years ago is an excuse for her to be a complete mess.”

“What do you propose we do?” Winn said. “Should we put her in a burlap sack and push her off the ferry?”

“The sack is probably overkill.”

“If she wants to get drunk and say the wrong thing, then that’s what she’s going to do. And as much as we’d like for her not to exist, she does. Death, taxes, and family, Livia.”

THE FARM might have been the end of the earth. A thin seam of ocean sealed its fields to the sky, all of it coppered by the sun. The water’s surface, choppy and striated with light, was beautiful, but Livia liked to think about what was teeming underneath: phytoplankton, of course, stripers, bluefish, bonito, maybe tuna, certainly fish larvae and fry, worms and mollusks in the sea floor. Pelicans diving to fill up their huge mouths. Seals. Perhaps a whale, although they were rare around Waskeke. In previous centuries, the islanders had hunted sperm whales and right whales almost to extinction, and Livia suspected the animals still picked up bad vibes from the surrounding waters.

The older she got, the more claustrophobic she felt within her family. Her father’s desire to join clubs had once seemed perfectly normal but now struck her as grasping and embarrassing. He seemed to believe his various clubhouses, stuffy old buildings full of stuffy old people, were bunkers that would shelter him from the fallout of ordinary life, protect him like the green fence out in the yard was supposed to keep his precious vegetables safe from the menacing deer. Teddy had felt a similar skepticism about his own family, and she had imagined that together they could forge a new freedom, make lives of their own, but then he had left her, an outcome she could not accept. She kept turning the breakup around and around in her mind like a Rubik’s cube, unable to puzzle out what had driven him off. She had never been so happy as she was with him. He had been happy, too—she was sure of it.

“For Christ’s sake,” her father said, waiting for an old lady to maneuver her Cadillac out of a parking space in the market’s gravel lot.

The market building, towering over a clump of greenhouses, resembled an enormous, gray-shingled schoolhouse. Livia got out first and walked ahead. Inside, the market was airy and cool and smelled of field dirt, tomatoes, cold meat, and cellophane. Her father caught up with her, peering over his glasses at a list he’d written on a napkin. “Corn, tomatoes, lettuce, I brought cocktail onions from home, we need pickles, we’ll get shrimp at the seafood place, we’ll get smoked salmon at the seafood place, something-not-shellfish for Dicky, lobsters are being delivered, then bread, cheese, et cetera, et cetera. You get the corn first, please, Livia.”

“How much?”

“We’ve got seventeen for dinner, so why don’t you get twenty ears.”

“Do you have a cauldron to cook it all in?”

Tilting his chin down, he gave her one of his trademark looks, half smiling, steely eyed.

“Okay,” she said. “Never mind. No problem.”

She found a cart and was steering it toward a tasseled mountain of corn when she saw Jack Fenn and his daughter Meg standing beside the refrigerated shelves of fresh herbs. Even from the back they were easy to identify because they, like Teddy, were redheads. Six months had passed since she’d last seen Jack, since before the breakup, but he looked the same, like Teddy but older. He wore a blue shirt with the collar undone, and he was handsome in a rough, shaggy-dog way, with full lips and thick marigold hair that was long enough to cover the tops of his ears. He was holding Meg’s hand, a market basket over the crook of his other arm. Meg was a tall girl, a woman really, and she was dressed with perfect neatness, like a child in a school uniform: oxford shirt, webbed belt, broomstick legs poking out of Bermuda shorts and into a set of ankle braces, beneath which her long feet in gray sneakers nosed each other like a pair of kissing trout. Her hair was in a French braid, exposing the hearing aids she wore in each ear, and her face might have been pretty if not for the wide, crooked mouth that slanted open, revealing teeth and darkness. Jack asked her something—Livia could not hear what—and she replied with a round, deep burst of sound like four or five words spoken all on top of one another. Shoppers looked up from their lettuces and bell peppers. Jack set down his basket and reached for a bag of baby carrots, still holding her hand.

Livia turned to find her father. He was holding a tomato in front of his nose and frowning at it. With as much stealth as she could muster, she abandoned her cart and slunk toward him, her back to the Fenns. Catching sight of her, he said loudly, “Livia, would you find me some black peppercorns?” Grasping his arm, she tried to turn him toward the door, but he stood as though hammered into the floor. “What are you doing?” he said. “I need tomatoes.”

“Can we just go? I’m not feeling well.”

That was true enough. Her desperation had become a sort of nausea. His eyes lit with worry, and he glanced once at her belly as though she were suddenly Daphne and pregnant and the object of great concern and pillow plumping. But Meg Fenn let loose another blast of her foghorn voice, and he looked up.

“Fenn!” Winn called boisterously over Livia’s head. “Jack Fenn!”

Jack lifted a hand and walked in their direction with Meg shuffling beside him, her trout feet tumbling over each other.

“Winn,” Jack said. “Hello, Livia.” He leaned in to kiss her cheek, and she felt the corner of her mouth spasm. She prayed she would not cry. Her father’s hand twitched toward Meg and then veered back and froze into a signpost pointing at Jack. Jack set down his basket and allowed Winn to pump his broad paw. Livia put her arms lightly around Meg, who stood very still to receive her embrace. “I like your belt,” Livia said. She noticed the girl was wearing lip gloss and remembered once seeing Teddy’s mother applying it, holding Meg’s chin in her hand.

Jack turned his green eyes on Livia, Teddy’s eyes, and she blushed, conscious of her thinness. “How are you?” he asked.

At the same moment, her father, radiating a sudden vigor, said, “Can you believe the traffic today?”

“I’m fine,” Livia said.

“Absolute pandemonium,” Winn said in answer to his own question.

Tripped up, they all hesitated, and gradually discomfort saturated the air as though puffed from an atomizer. The cause, Livia knew, would not be named or alluded to, not here beside the tomatoes or anywhere else where her father and Teddy’s father happened to be at the same time. Her father would rather die than acknowledge in Jack Fenn’s presence that, for five short weeks, the two of them had shared an embryonic grandchild. Nor had Livia ever spoken with Jack about her pregnancy. The last time she had seen him was in a different life, back before she had gotten knocked up, when Teddy was still her boyfriend.

“Have you been out on the links yet?” Winn asked Jack, a note of ingratiating fellowship creeping into his voice. His body was taut, humming with too much enthusiasm. The possibility occurred to Livia that he wasn’t even thinking about her but only about the golf club.

“Just once,” Jack said.

“Good!” Winn said. “Good! Glad to hear it.”

Meg spoke, addressing Winn. “You like golf?” she asked, vowels dwarfing her sticky, guttural k and g sounds. Livia had explained to her father a thousand times that Meg could understand him, but still he froze whenever he had to communicate with her. He stared, neck straining forward, pupils moving over her face in a rapid search for comprehension, and then he gave up and examined his wristwatch.

Meg repeated herself, louder, and Winn looked helplessly at Livia. With an apologetic glance at Jack, Livia translated. “She said, ‘You like golf?’”

“Oh. I do. Very much,” Winn told Livia.

Jack lifted his daughter’s hand and kissed it. Meg’s eyes and her wide mouth closed, making her face look, in its moment of repose, normal.

“Do you like golf?” Livia asked Meg, and Meg laughed like a honking goose.

“Say,” Winn said to Jack, “I heard somewhere that you’re involved in the bluffs project.”

“Unfortunately.”

Winn chuckled. “Fenn versus nature.”

“The lighthouse is set to be moved next summer,” Jack said. “But that’s the easy part.” He went on about some scheme to shore up a disappearing beach with drainage pipes and to reinforce crumbling bluffs with rebar, concrete, and wire baskets of rocks called gabions. A line of expensive houses sat atop the cliffs, and every year their owners paid a foot or so of lawn in taxes to the wind and rain, the brink creeping slowly closer to their cedar porches.

“I hate to say it,” Winn said, “but those houses are goners. Five years and they’re in the drink.”

Livia saw an Atlantis of gray-shingled houses, weather vanes spinning in the currents beneath a white foam sky, fish at the windows and in the attics, the shadow of a whale sweeping over the roofs like the shadow of an airplane. She marveled at the two of them, chattering on like this. Her father claimed things had been awkward with the Fenns since his college years, when he had belonged to the Ophidian and Jack, a legacy, had not been invited to join. Then Winn had slept with Jack’s wife (long before Jack met her, but still), and Livia had slept with Jack’s son. Then Teddy had broken her heart. She had sacrificed their child. What could be more intimate? Probably she should be grateful the conversation was only about rebar and property values even if something in her was longing for them to acknowledge, just once, what had happened. Not likely. Even when she and Teddy were still together, relations between the families had been less than comfortable. The few times both sets of parents came together for dinners in Cambridge they had all bravely skated the hours away on a thin crust of chitchat.

Jack shook his head. “I have to say I hope you’re wrong, Winn. That wouldn’t do the island any good.”

Winn raised a finger. “But you didn’t build there, did you? No sense taking that kind of risk when you’re finally getting your own place. Rent on the bluffs, buy on the flat.”

“I don’t know—we considered building there. Of course, we’re still renting. The new house won’t be livable until the end of the summer. Even that’s not for sure. How is your family? The wedding’s soon, isn’t it?”

“Saturday,” Livia said.

“Just a small affair,” Winn said. “Mostly family.” He touched his chin. Livia guessed he was worried Jack would feel slighted.

Jack said, “Remind me of the groom’s name.”

“Greyson Duff,” said Winn. “It’s a fine match. We’re all very pleased.”

“Congratulations,” said Meg, and Jack kissed her hand again.

Livia was astonished to feel her father’s fingers clasp her own, once, quickly, and then release. The touch was something between a caress and a pinch. She could not remember the last time he had held her hand. “Thank you,” she said to Meg.

“How is Teddy?” Winn asked.

Heat crept into Livia’s face. She willed herself to hold her gaze steady, not to fold her arms. Jack smiled. He had always been kind to her. “He’s fine,” Jack said. “In fact, he’s made a very big decision.” Livia braced herself, though she did not know for what.

“Oh?” said Winn.

WINN WISHED he had gotten more of an opportunity to probe Fenn about the Pequod, but the man had stonewalled him as usual and then dropped the news about Teddy into the conversation like a meat cleaver. Teddy had joined the army. A chip off the old block—Fenn had done two tours in Vietnam. His time in the army was something people always mentioned about him, that and Meg. Now they would talk about Teddy, too, how he had traded Harvard for Iraq, and everyone would feel sorry for Jack and Fee because they must be so worried but thank heavens they had such stalwart spirits. Teddy’s decision seemed rash and odd to Winn, but at least it would take him far from Livia. Let the Fenns do as they pleased. Let them cultivate their moral superiority the way some people grew enormous, prizewinning pumpkins or watermelons that were, when you came down to it, really just freaks.

The damp fragrance of corn silk and the dusty, acidic smell of tomatoes overpowered the perfume of the Duffs’ flowers, which shuddered and bobbed between Livia’s knees. Leaving her in the car, Winn popped into the seafood store, and once he was back in the car, he found he wasn’t sure where he wanted to go. After hesitating long enough at a stop sign to draw the indignant horn of the driver behind him, he turned left.

“Aren’t we going to the Enderby?” Livia asked. She had not spoken since they parted ways with the Fenns in the market.

“First we’re going to take a look at this house of Fenn’s,” he said, choosing to ignore her petulant tone.

“Seriously? What if someone’s there?”

“Is it a crime to visit our friends’ house?”

“I can’t believe Teddy joined the army.” She said “army” as though it were the name of another woman.

“Well,” said Winn, “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Jack is the same way, always having to showboat. That family has a holier-than-thou streak a mile wide. Just between you and me, I’ve never cared for it. He uses that girl like a shield.”

“Meg?” Livia said. “I think they’d probably prefer she was normal.”

“We all make sacrifices,” Winn went on, “but they expect everyone to praise theirs all the time. This army thing seems excessive. Why not the navy? Why not the air force? Coast guard? No, the Fenns have to make a show out of humility. Teddy should have gone to West Point if he wanted to go this route.”

“I don’t think this was the plan from the beginning. Not that I know anything, apparently.”

“I don’t see why he has to be a grunt like his father.”

“Wasn’t Jack drafted?”

“Yes, but he handled it in a very odd way. He could have deferred. Men like Greyson have it figured out. Greyson gives up the little things, little luxuries. He doesn’t overdo it. He’ll be good for Daphne that way.”

“I don’t think being selectively cheap is the same thing as enlisting.”

“So you’re on the Fenns’ side now?”

“I wish you hadn’t mentioned Teddy.”

“I was being polite. Better to hear the news from Jack, anyway. Now you won’t be caught off guard.”

“You can’t go around asking about Teddy like he’s just another person, Dad.”

“He is just another person, Livia. He should be, anyway.”

“Well, he’s not!”

“Ah,” Winn said, “here we are.”

In his opinion, the finest houses on the island were marked by dented mailboxes and rutted driveways. Only a chimney or maybe a widow’s walk should be visible from the road. Jack Fenn’s house, however, was a blatant, dazzling Oz set against the blue horizon of Waskeke Sound. Privet plants wrapped in burlap stood in wooden boxes at regular intervals along the road like blindfolded prisoners, holes already dug and waiting for them in the rich-looking soil. After a few years, they would merge into a hedge and provide a semblance of privacy, but the driveway was needlessly wide, a blinding avenue of broken quahog shells that unspooled in a graceful S curve up to the house, where one offshoot led to a garage and the other to the front door, making a loop around a flagpole. To one side of the house, confined by an infant hedge of its own and a cage of dark green chain-link, a mountain of red clay waited to be spread and rolled into a tennis court. Yet another nascent hedge encircled an empty, freshly poured swimming pool and the wooden bones of a pool house.

Winn turned in between two glossy black post lanterns, crunching on the shells. The flagpole at the top of the driveway was the nautical style, a yardarm across a mast, and stood in an oval of dirt. No flags were flying, but the cords were ready, their clips dinging against the metal pole, waiting to hoist the colors when the Fenns were in residence. The windows still bore the manufacturer’s decals. Part of the ground floor had been covered with new, lemony shingles, stark against the tar paper. Two years might pass before they faded to the desirable gray, and until then the house would be a bright imposition on the subtle landscape. The beginnings of a yard—paving stones, sacks of cement, a heap of mulch—loitered in the broad expanse of dirt that would one day be a lawn. Tarpaulins covered bales of shingles on one side of the driveway. The roof was a steep landscape of peaks, dormers, and gables, all sheathed in new cedar shake that shone in the sun. Brick chimneys crowned with terra-cotta pots pointed at the sky. Above the whole mess presided the bright copper sails of the three-masted clipper ship Fenn had chosen for his weather vane. Winn’s weather vane was a man alone in a rowboat.

“Anyway,” Livia said, “Greyson’s sacrifices are completely superficial. They’re not any kind of real loss. They’re just symbolic of loss. You know, like giving up chocolate for Lent or rending garments or something. At least what Teddy’s doing is genuinely hard.”

“Would you look at the size of this place,” said Winn. “I’m surprised. Jack comes from a fine old family. This is … it’s showy.”

Construction debris was strewn around: rolls of wire, crumpled wrappers, twine, tape, pipes, buckets crusted with cements and sealants. Two beige portable toilets stood a discreet distance away. “The house is poorly designed,” he said, pointing up through the windshield. “It must be a swamp up on that roof after a big rain. You see? I can pick out at least two spots where water will pool. They’ll have leaks. They probably already do. Shake is tricky. If you don’t cover the nail holes properly, you get leaks.”

“Fine,” said Livia. “The Fenns have made a mockery of roofs. They join the army just to bug you, and they design their houses to really get under your skin.”

“You disagree?”

“I don’t want Jack Fenn to drive up and find us sitting here staring at his house.”

“It’s a ridiculous house. I’m telling you. Look at that roof. Millions of dollars just to have leaks.”

“Dad, people like living by the ocean. Why shouldn’t they have a nice house if they want?”

“So you think people should have everything they want even if what they want is an ostentatious eyesore?”

“I don’t think it’s an eyesore.”

“This house is an eyesore.”

“I don’t know—to each his own. We could have built a house like this if we wanted to, right? It’s just not our style.”

Leaning forward with his chest pressed to the steering wheel, craning to see the roof, Winn was gratified by Livia’s use of “our,” that she was including herself in his aesthetic of quality, longevity, and simplicity. Since their childhood he had told his daughters he was going to give away all his money before he died, and they should make or marry their own if money was what they wanted. Better that than letting them feel the same disappointment he had after his parents died, when he discovered his inheritance was little more than untenable expectations. He had done well enough, but he was thankful for the way a certain degree of gentle dilapidation could be made to suggest old wealth. Shabbiness of necessity was easily disguised as modesty and thrift. Not that having a simple, hard-won summer-house instead of this castle by the sea would qualify him as shabby by most standards.

“Right?” Livia persisted. “We just do things differently. You aren’t a fancy house kind of guy.”

“What do they need such a big house for?” he said. “Is Teddy going to have a thousand children?”

Livia drew the Duffs’ flowers up onto her lap. “That’s the last thing I want to think about, assuming he lives long enough to have children.”

“Don’t be dramatic. He’ll be fine. Anyway, the girl’s not going to have any.”

“I can’t even wrap my head around … what if I was his only chance?”

The premise, simple enough on its surface, gave way beneath Winn’s consideration, dropping him into a feminine thicket of improbable hypotheses and garbled cause and effect. He clapped her knee. “Now, listen. I don’t want you thinking this army business has anything to do with you.” He drove around the oval and back down the driveway. Livia was obscured by pink and orange flowers and curls of green, leafy things, a tiger in the grass.

“What if Teddy and I get back together?” she said.

“I don’t think that’s very likely.”

“Thanks a lot!”

“Do you think you’re going to get back together?”

“I don’t know. I’m just saying.” She pulled the vase even closer to herself. “What would you have done if I had been born like Meg Fenn?”

“I don’t know. I suppose I would have gotten used to it.”

“Really?”

“I think when something like that happens you rise to the occasion.” In truth, Winn could not imagine holding the hand of his grown daughter as she bellowed beside a pyramid of tomatoes.

“If Daphne had been born like that, would you have had another child?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Would you have wished you had never had children?”

“This is a silly conversation.”

At the Enderby, Livia jumped out with the flowers and took them inside. When she returned, she looked naked without her portable jungle, and the car felt empty.

After he’d parked in front of the house, Winn said, “Tell your mother I’ll be in in a minute.” Livia took two of the grocery bags and went inside, and Winn walked along the driveway past the garage and down a path shaded by trees and padded with a russet layer of pine needles. Unseen birds burst into a chorus of jabbering laughter as he passed. He paused beside his garden, peering through the deer fence in consternation. Dominique had chosen the right word: sad. The plants were all smaller than they should have been and drooped on rubbery stems: dwarfish melons, bloodless tomatoes, cucumbers that had not come up at all. There were some acceptable-looking green beans, but he saw no sign of the chervil or hyssop he had requested. Mint, which would grow in the crater left by a nuclear blast, was the only thing flourishing. The idea occurred to him that the caretakers could be sabotaging his little agricultural oasis, mistreating the soil or planting in adverse weather conditions. Poking his fingers through the fence, he rubbed a few leaves of mint together and walked away, farther into the trees. He held his fingers to his nose and sniffed the weed’s sharp, sweet smell.

He walked until he could no longer see the house, and then he looped back, coming to the edge of a dense clump of trees and brush and spotting, through the branches, Agatha sunning herself on the grass near the house. She was lying on a blue and white towel, and he recognized her polka-dotted bikini as the one from his study. She must have gone in there to retrieve it. Perhaps she had left him something else, a hair clip or a scarf. The afternoon sun was dropping lower in the sky, and a serrated front of tree shade advanced across the grass toward her bare toes. Daphne came out the French doors from the kitchen and crossed the deck and then the lawn, carrying a towel. She wore a black bikini, her huge, naked belly protruding brazenly between the two halves. Piper followed, turning to shut the doors behind her and giving Winn a view of wishbone thighs and a derriere so nonexistent that the blue fabric of her bathing suit hung in flaccid wrinkles. As Daphne shook out her towel, Agatha reached up and patted the side of her bare leg in a friendly way. Piper settled crossed-legged on the grass, her face obscured by massive sunglasses like ski goggles. Daphne eased herself down so her feet were facing Winn and the hummock of her pregnancy hid the top half of her body. Her shadow, humped like a camel, drew a smooth, dark curve over Agatha’s flat stomach and golden hipbones.

Watching them, he became aware of the elasticity of his lungs, the hard ridges of tree roots pressing into his feet, the muscular, rippling action of swallowing. His heart raced with stealth and vitality. That was another man’s house, another man’s daughter and her friends. He was a stranger, a prowler, a hunter, a wood dweller excluded from their world. The girls’ obliviousness transformed them, although he couldn’t pinpoint how. He couldn’t decide if they seemed more innocent when left to themselves, or more unabashedly sensual. Or were they unreal, like mermaids caught basking on a rock? They were only sitting—but there was something about them. Daphne, distorted by pregnancy, could not be reconciled with the little girl he remembered. Piper sat erect and unmoving, a sphinx. Agatha was lying on her back with her knees bent, and she moved her legs in a slow rhythm, bumping her thighs together and then letting them fall apart. A narrow strip of polka-dotted material concealed her crotch, and it tightened and slackened as she moved her legs, lifting slightly.

Close in his ear, a voice said, “Boo!”