my left side. Joseph just rowed, steady and efficient, like a fellow who’d been rowing boats since he could walk, which was probably the case. He wasn’t lying about the current. I watched as he fought the strength of the outgoing tide, hurtling through the narrow channel and out into the broad Atlantic; I watched the strain of his muscles, the movement of his shoulders, the pop of his biceps, and my bones filled with terror as I realized I couldn’t have done this by myself, Isobel unconscious at my feet, however hard I pulled. The boat would have borne out past the Island to the open sea.
At one point, near the dock and the shelter of the small Fisher cove, our eyes met. I’d been looking over his shoulder and so had he, judging the distance to shore, and when he turned back his gaze made right for my face and stayed there, so that I couldn’t help but succumb to its human gravitation. Instead of looking away, he smiled, as if we’d just shared a secret, the nature of which I couldn’t have guessed, so young as I was in the early days of that summer. I only thought that he had a warm, beautiful smile, the most beautiful smile I’d ever seen, and in the instant before I ducked my head, I knew I was in love with him. Just imagine. As innocent, as uncomplicated as that. I still remember that moment, that sweet, shy revelation, remember it fondly, because it only comes once in your life, and then it’s gone. You can’t have it back. And it’s only a second! Isn’t that capricious? One measly instant of clarity, tucked inside the reach of your livelong days. And then the boat touches the shore, and the moment flies, and your life—your real, murky, messy, incalculable life—your life resumes.
10.
AT EIGHT O’CLOCK the next morning, the morning after our parents’ wedding, Isobel came into my room, dressed and fragrant, and told me we were going to church.
I hadn’t exactly expected her, as you might imagine. I lay curled on the armchair in my dressing gown, comfortable as could be, staring through the window at the young, watery sunshine that drenched the Flood Rock lighthouse. A book spread open in my lap, unread. Last night, I’d fallen into bed, slept a sound, soundless six hours, and woken more refreshed than I ought, filled with an anticipation I couldn’t yet name, and unable to concentrate on any words written on any page. I blinked at the shadows under Isobel’s eyes and said, “Church?”
“Darling, it’s Sunday,” she said, as if the two ideas couldn’t possibly exist without each other.
My father came from an old, intellectual family, and Mama from a young bohemian one. Neither viewed organized religion with uncritical awe; it was one of the few common territories between them. After my birth, nobody thought of baptizing me. When I asked about God—aged eight, mind you—Daddy told me solemnly that I should believe whatever my conscience held to be true. I asked him, what was a conscience? He said it was my inner voice that told me right from wrong, and from then on, when I thought of God at all, I thought of old Grandmama Schuyler, because for some reason her voice shrilled inside my head whenever I faced any kind of moral crisis. Don’t you take that second cookie! or Let the adults speak for a change! and that kind of thing.
At the moment, and in her present condition, Isobel Fisher did bear an uncommon resemblance to Grandmama Schuyler, who was also longboned and lean, and whose hair had been blond before it turned a rusty, streaked silver. I hadn’t seen my stepsister since the previous night, when she’d stumbled onto dry land, vomited over the grass, and staggered into the house under Joseph’s protection. His arm had held her shoulder, and his face wore an expression of stern pity, mixed with maybe a little remorse. He must have cleaned her up and put her to bed, but you could still read the history of the night before in that wan, tanned skin, in that dull hair, in those lavender half-moons beneath her eyes, which squinted against the sunshine. She wore an immaculate suit of dandelion yellow and a pair of matching shoes, and one hand rested against the doorframe to hold the whole act upright. The other hand contained her white gloves and pocketbook.
“What time does it start?” I asked feebly.
“Eight thirty.” She glanced at her watch. “You’d better hurry. I’ll get the car.”
11.
“THE THING IS, everybody goes,” Isobel called, above the roar of the engine, as we hurtled down the road toward St. Ann’s Episcopal Church at the eastern end of the Island. “If you don’t turn up, they’ll wonder why.”
“I don’t care about that!” I called back.
“You will, believe me.”
She drove wantonly, wastefully, rushing down the straight stretches and then slamming the brakes into the curves, so that the tires of her father’s sleek Plymouth convertible whined and slid against the faded asphalt. All the while, she clutched a cigarette between the first two fingers of her right hand, and along the straightaways she sucked long currents of smoke between her clenched, red lips.
I kept my hands fixed in my lap. The sun packed its heat into the car’s interior—Isobel had put the top up, in order to save our good hats from the draft—and my flesh still glowed from the haste of getting dressed. Underneath the suit and blouse, a trickle of perspiration ran down my left armpit and along my side. The smell of hot leather and cigarettes made me want to vomit. By the time we reached the neat white church, sitting against a field of green and surrounded by cars, I’d begun to feel faint for the first time since that terrible flu in my freshman year at Foxcroft. Isobel slammed to a stop in the grass and I threw open the door to inhale the clean, green-smelling air. The swollen chords of an organ billowed past.
“Damn it all to hell and back again.” Isobel threw her cigarette into the grass and stomped it with her toe. “We’re late.”
We ran across the meadow, holding hands, weaving between cars until we reached the wooden steps of the church and slowed to a reverent pace. Isobel turned in the vestibule and ripped off her glove to fix my hat. By some strange trick of the sunlight, her engagement ring threw a shower of glitter on the wall just above the altar, and all the inhabitants of the packed pews started and turned, searching for the source of this otherworldly fireworks. They found us soon enough.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience, a churchful of well-dressed strangers all staring at you in astonished disapproval. I don’t recommend it. Sometimes, in my nightmares, the image of those faces still returns to me, except I’m naked and grossly pregnant, and Isobel’s left me to face them all alone, instead of clutching my hand in a firm grip—as she did then—and leading me to a pew in the last row, wedged up against the side aisle. The organ tootled on from above, oblivious, and the faces turned away, one by one, because the singing was about to start and none of those great ladies wanted to miss her cue. On Winthrop Island, as I learned, the singing of hymns was a competitive exercise, preferably in a high, godly soprano to reach Heaven itself and—coincidentally—drown out the efforts of both your neighbor and the choir in the small balcony above. (The choir, you understand, had room for just ten members, filled by a ritual of cordial, bitterly contested auditions at the beginning of each summer season.)
As for the men? I don’t know. I don’t think they cared as much. Even so innocent as I then was, I noticed how they kept slipping impious glances at Isobel and me, young and animal, glowing with perspiration in our shapely pastel suits. That space of ours at the end of the pew had lain empty for a good reason, because it stood square in the path of a block of sunlight, and as Isobel flipped hastily through the hymnal I found myself gasping for air once more. The notes and words swam before me. The hymn ended, the blessing began, the congregational responses, and at last—at last—we lowered ourselves to the hard wooden bench and allowed the service to swallow us.
12.
