all the happiness in the world, such a beautiful couple. I realized I must have been entirely mistaken about those hostile expressions at the beginning of the service.
Mrs. Monk invited us over for bridge. “Of course,” said Isobel, kissing her cheek. “I’ll drive Miranda.”
Clay regarded Isobel with a slight frown. “I’d be happy to drive.”
“But we’ll be all squished in front, and I won’t have Miranda in back all by herself.”
“She wouldn’t mind. Would you, Miranda?”
A word or two about Clayton Monk, as he aimed a respectful pair of eyes at me and awaited my reply. At the time, I thought he was too good for Isobel. Not too handsome and dashing and rich, I mean, but too good. She was probably going to ruin him. I thought he had no natural defense against her, no edge at all. I mean, just look at him as he then was, made of pleasant, bland good looks that would inevitably grow red and jowly in middle age, but not before he’d passed them on to a pair of sons, whom he taught to sail. (I could picture them all, father and sons and sailboat.) He wore a double-breasted navy jacket and tan slacks, a white shirt with a crisp collar, a sedate silk tie the color of hydrangeas. Looking at him, you wouldn’t imagine that he’d once spent his days crisscrossing Europe in a B-17 Flying Fortress, dropping bombs all over the place, and that on a nice summer midnight in 1944 he’d crashed said Flying Fortress into a French field, so expertly that only one man was killed, and Clay himself had gotten away with a broken arm and a concussion. Afterward, as I said, he went to Harvard and then Harvard Law School, and he now occupied an office in some blueblood law firm or another, working his way toward the partnership, one dry, passive sentence at a time. Which might sound boring to you and me, but at least he was doing something, wasn’t he? Earning his own living, instead of idling his days atop the Monk department store fortune. Anyway, in the summer of 1951, Clayton Monk was all that was pink and well-scrubbed. Just looking at him made you feel clean, inside and out, like a wholesome breakfast cereal.
I smiled back and said, “I don’t mind a little squishing. My skirt’s all creased anyway.”
13.
ON THE WAY to the Monk estate, which was perched near the eastern tip of the Island, right next to the Winthrop Island Club and exactly opposite to Greyfriars, I asked Isobel whether she’d seen Joseph at church, because I hadn’t.
There was a little silence. “Joseph?” said Clayton, who was driving. “Joseph who?”
Isobel said quickly, “Don’t be silly, Peaches. Of course not.”
“Didn’t you say everybody goes to church on the Island?”
She started to laugh. “Darling, he goes to St. Mary’s, in the village. The Catholic church.”
“Oh, Joseph Vargas,” said Clayton. “I didn’t realize you’d met the locals yet.”
“Yesterday morning. He brought in another lobsterman who’d fallen overboard. And then last night—”
Isobel’s elbow met my ribs.
“What about last night?” asked Clay.
“Nothing.” I looked out the window, toward the sea. “Of course, the Catholic church. I didn’t think.”
Isobel sat between us on the front seat, tilting her long legs at an acute angle to fit them under the dashboard. Clayton, a tall man, had taken down the top, and the draft blew warmly over our hats and ears. Isobel rummaged in her pocketbook for a cigarette and lit it clumsily. “Here’s a funny thing about the Island, Peaches,” she said, as she tried to get the lighter going in the middle of the crosswind. “I think it’s telling. The Episcopal church only opens during the summer season, see, May to September, while the Catholic church runs all year round. Don’t you think that’s telling, Clay?”
“Telling what, darling?”
“I mean, the way things work around the Island. Who does what, and where, and when.”
Clay propped his elbow on the doorframe and tilted his head to one side, so he could rub his left eyebrow. His right hand gripped the wheel at twelve o’clock. “I don’t know what you’re trying to say, Izzy. Sure, most of the fishermen happen to be Portuguese around here. Portuguese folks happen to be mostly Catholic.”
“Exactly.”
“Well, you’re trying to make out like it’s some kind of crime, that’s all.”
“It’s not a crime,” she said. She’d finally succeeded in lighting her cigarette, and she now smoked it with a peculiar ferocity.
“Well, we all get along, don’t we? They’ve got their religion, and we’ve got ours—”
“And never the twain shall meet,” Isobel said softly.
“—and everybody respects each other. Nobody’s got a thing against Catholics, around here.”
I spoke up timidly. “I think what Isobel’s trying to say is that the summer residents, the ones with all the power and the money—”
“All right,” Clay said. “All right. Fine. Look, it’s a Sunday. Let’s stay away from politics for one day, okay?” He straightened and reached for the radio dial.
Isobel, looking out the side, past my nose toward the blurry meadows, the occasional house, said, “Have you noticed there aren’t any trees, Peaches? Old, native ones, I mean.”
“Now that you mention it.”
“It’s because of some hurricane.” She sucked on her cigarette. “Some hurricane, over a hundred years ago, that flattened everything. Now the Island’s like a Scottish moor or something. Or Ireland. One of those. Isn’t that right, Clay?”
“I guess so.” He was still working the radio dial.
“Do you get any stations out here?” I asked.
“We get a couple out of Providence, when the wind’s right. Sometimes Boston.” He turned the dial millimeter by millimeter, listening carefully to the pattern of static.
“Oh, why bother?” said Isobel. “Honestly. We’re almost there.”
I waved away a stream of smoke. “This might be a good time to mention that I don’t play bridge.”
“What’s that?” said Clay.
“She doesn’t play bridge!” Isobel shouted in his ear.
“Not play bridge? But I thought all you girls played bridge.”
“Miranda doesn’t. She’s an intellectual. Did you know she was named after a girl in Shakespeare?”
“Is that so? Now that’s grand. Which one? Which play, I mean?”
Isobel turned to me. “Which one, Peaches?”
“The Tempest,” I said, just as the car
