really knows about Joseph? He always keeps his own mind.”
“That’s not an answer, Mrs. Medeiro,” I said.
“No, I guess not.”
I took off the sunglasses and folded them into my pocketbook. We had nearly reached the Greyfriars drive, and my fingers were shaking, shaking, my heart was thundering. I had thought, after so many years, I should approach the house like an old friend with whom you had quarreled long ago and since forgiven so far as to forget what the quarrel was about. But now I glimpsed the stone wall, crumbling to bits, and the gap through which I had walked so often, and the mighty, unkempt rhododendrons, and I was eighteen again—exactly half as old as my current age, now there’s symmetry for you—and knew nothing about keeping your emotions in check, your spirit under exquisite control. I gripped the handles of my pocketbook and counted the pulse of my breathing, as my husband had once trained me to do, yet still the flutter remained and worsened into dizziness.
“Is everything okay, Miranda?” asked Mrs. Medeiro quietly. “Should I stop the car?”
“No, thank you. Drive right on up to the door, if you don’t mind.”
We turned down the drive and the tires crunched on the gravel, bounced over the ruts, dove into the potholes. In earlier days, the Greyfriars drive was an impeccable thing, almost as smooth as asphalt, and Mrs. Medeiro, after one particularly bone-crunching jolt, was moved to apologize for the fall in standards, almost as if she had some responsibility for them.
“Things aren’t the same at Greyfriars, you know,” she said.
“I don’t imagine they are.”
“I think there is not much money now. You know they take in boarders.”
“Do they? I didn’t know that. Mother never mentioned it in her letters.”
“She is proud. They don’t call them boarders. It is—oh, what is it called? An artist colony.”
“Oh, of course. How lovely. Artists. Shame they aren’t gardeners, as well.”
We passed the last, the largest rhododendron of all, from which I kept my eyes carefully averted. The sun was gone now anyway, and everything had disappeared into shadow. Even Greyfriars, as it slid into view, was an anticlimax: just a long, dark shape containing a few specks of light. I found I was able to breathe again. Mrs. Medeiro pulled around the semicircle and brought the van to a rusty stop.
“Should I wait?” she asked.
“There’s no need.” I plucked my suitcase from the back and waved her away. She must have understood me, because she obeyed, and I waited until the headlights had disappeared around the corner of the rhododendron before I turned to stand before the front step. The light was off, or else the bulb was gone, and I couldn’t see much, just that the paint seemed to be peeling from that large front door, and I could no longer tell if it was black or green.
Then it swung open.
“My goodness! Who—”
Because of the light from the doorway, I couldn’t see the face of the woman who stood before me. But I knew who it was. There could be no Greyfriars without her, after all.
“Isobel,” I said. “It’s Miranda.”
1.
HE IS THE most beautiful boy she’s ever seen, more beautiful than Valentino or Errol Flynn or Lindbergh. She crosses herself when she sees him sailing his slim racing yacht up and down the Fleet Rock channel with Peter Dumont, because of the danger and because of the way the sun glints on his blond hair, an effect so brilliant she observes it all the way from the little bluff at the top of West Cliff Road, where she goes to watch them in the afternoon. In her imagination, the sun is anointing Mr. Fisher as its own, and only the devil himself could plant such a blasphemous thought in her head. So she crosses herself.
Today Tia Maria needs her in the store, however, so there is no need for guarding oneself against the devil. The Families have been arriving on Winthrop Island for the summer, one by one, by ferry and by private yacht, and so Bianca and her cousins must fill the shelves with the goods Tio Manuelo has ordered from the mainland: canned peas and canned peaches and canned sardines in olive oil, saltine crackers and Campbell’s tomato soup, Ivory soap and Clorox bleach, Ovaltine and Quaker oats and cornflakes, cantaloupe and pippin apples and bananas, Morton salt and Ceylon cinnamon, bags of flour and sugar and Calumet baking powder, Pond’s cold cream and Listerine and aspirin (lots of aspirin), gardening gloves and razor blades, distilled white vinegar that is really vinegar, distilled white vinegar that is not really vinegar but kept on a shelf behind the wooden counter for particular customers, whom Tio Manuelo serves himself.
The weather turned hot this week, the first week of June, and even though Tia Maria keeps the door wide open to usher in the salt breeze from the harbor, the atmosphere remains stuffy and smells of sawdust. Bianca stacks the soup cans in neat, long rows—tomato and vegetable and cream of mushroom—because canned soup is very popular with the Families, for some reason. She prefers the soups Tia Maria makes from scratch and simmers all day in an iron pot on the stove, full of herbs and vegetables and shellfish, whatever’s fresh from the sea, but the Families like their food bland, apparently. Bland and stale and rich, just like themselves. She crosses herself when she thinks this—the Families are the Island’s lifeblood, after all, and Tio Manuelo makes all his profit in the summer from cans of soup and boxes of saltine crackers—but it’s true.
Except for young Mr. Fisher, of course. There’s nothing bland or stale about him.
She knows all about him. He lives in a rambling house not far from the village, all by itself overlooking Fleet Rock, and so new that—in certain corners shielded from the weather, anyway—the cedar shingles haven’t yet faded to gray. The family is not quite so distinguished as those who live at the other end of the Island, the eastern end, where the Winthrop Island Club and its magnificent golf course stretch out over a hundred precious green acres. The Fisher money is too new, Tio Manuelo says sagely over dinner, but give it time. Money ages with remarkable speed. Already Mr. Fisher has been to Harvard, where he became friends with the sons of all the correct families, such as Peter Dumont. There’s even a rumor going about that Mr. Fisher became engaged over Easter to Peter’s sister, Abigail, but Bianca refuses to believe this. For one thing, Abigail Dumont is twenty-five, three years older than Mr. Fisher, and for another thing she’s tall and wide-shouldered and has no breasts, no feminine qualities at all, a loud, braying voice like a well-bred donkey. While the newspapers call Miss Dumont things like magnetic and incandescent, Bianca’s certain that Mr. Fisher has better taste than that. He spends his mornings on the cliffs between the village and Greyfriars—Greyfriars is the name given to the new Fisher house, for what reason nobody can imagine, other than the color of the cedar shingles as they fade—spends his mornings, that is, with his watercolors and his books, so beautiful that Bianca sometimes cannot even breathe when she sees him there, legs swinging dangerously over the cliff’s edge, his perfect brow compressed in concentration.
She
