Novella: “A Trick of the Light” (Part Three)

7.

The Second Visit 

Three days after Christmas, on what she believed was called the Feast of the Holy Innocents or something along those lines, Rosie saw the ghost of Margaret Clooney again. It—she—was not in the garden this time, but in the hallway outside Rosie and Mags’s bedroom. Rosie was watering a potted plant that Aunt Margaret had given them as a Christmas gift; it was early afternoon but the light that came through the bare trees in the front yard was thin and pale. Rosie saw something out of the corner of her eye that she thought was a dust mote dancing in a beam; then she realized that it was a woman’s dress. She looked up and there was the ghost as before, only now bearing a candle rather than wreathed in fireflies.

            “This visit with you, on my part, will be a bit more substantial than the last one, if that will be acceptable to you,” the ghost said with little in the way of prelude. “Similarly, your visit into this world—my world—will also be a bit more substantial. The light that I hold in my hand, this candle, is the light of understanding the past; you will notice that this time I am holding the light, unlike earlier, when you entered into summer and saw me with the fireflies.”

            “I will notice that, yes,” said Rosie, who thought the metaphor, if it was a metaphor, was a little blunt-force; she wondered idly, because of this, how good or how bad Margaret’s schooling had been when she was alive.

            “You’ll come with me?” the ghost asked. “Just for a few minutes, only for a few minutes; I have much to show you.”

            “I’ll come with you,” said Rosie, who, in spite of herself, was thrilled—was wanting very much to see what she could see, what part of the past the ghost now wanted to show her. Perhaps she would learn more about Horton Oldmeadow, or even Horton Baring; she had vague memories of having been promised that the last time they had spoken, two months ago—or was it one hundred and fifty-one years ago?

            “Go into your room, and turn about,” said the ghost. “Just go in, and turn about—you will see.”

            “All right,” Rosie said, and went back into her room, feeling thrilled, excited, uncertain, overwrought.

            She turned around, and she was in the same place. It was her bedroom—the almost-too-square shape, the old hearth, the windows too heavily shades by the trees outside—but not the way she knew it. The hearth, far from being boarded up, was roaring; the wallpaper was different and a much more exuberant pattern; in place of her bed was a small but heavy-looking table, with four or five people sitting around it poring over some books and papers. The men were whiskered and dressed in tailcoats; the women had their hair pinned up and were wearing hoopskirts and shirtwaists. She had always wondered how women had been able to sit in those things, exactly, but looking at the women sitting around the table she had some inkling that the hoops themselves compressed or distended to accommodate them.

            One of the women was Margaret Clooney, whom she had thought was standing behind her—only she was not a wraith wreathed in fireflies or holding a candle, in an unreal summer or any other unreal season; instead snow was falling, and she was sitting, flesh and bone, with her back to the fireplace, in a dress colored like Christmas. She was speaking to the others about a recent election, and the names that she was using were ones that Rosie dimly recognized from her old history classes as ones associated with abolitionism and the North in the Civil War.

            Rosie was awestruck by how unsurprising she found it all to look at, how natural. It felt as if the house, built in 1813, had in some sense been built so that it could exist in 1860, the way some people, such as her grandfather, seemed as if they were born to be old men. Margaret and the others, too, looking up at her, seemed unsurprised to see her in her tank top and cut-off leggings, housewear from an age of central heating. She wondered if, from the point of view of the people at the table, 1860 in this house had been made so that she could find herself in it.

            “Another newcomer!” one of the men said. He was tall and had a short blond beard. “What’s your name, my good lady?”

            “Rosary,” Rosie said. “Rosary Newgarth.”

            “Another Catholic!” the man said with a glance at Margaret. “That does our hearts good. When Margaret here first joined us we were afraid that she might have come here to ‘talk us down’ or to gloat about slave markets on Boston Common. I try not to judge one by one’s creed, young ladies least of all, but anything is possible with that man in the Vatican.”

            “Pope Pius?” Rosie asked, making an educated guess; she remembered that most of the popes in the century or so before Vatican II had been named Pius.

            The man nodded with a grave, frustrated expression on his face, and Rosie remembered, or thought she remembered, that that particular Pope Pius had been a real piece of work. “Come, sit with us,” the man said. “The fire will be hot for a while yet, and when it dies down we’ll roast potatoes in its coals.”

            Rosie sat down, still dressed for modern times and still dressed for August, and greeted Margaret’s friends. The man she had been speaking to was named Hosea Oldmeadow and was probably an ancestor of hers; he was twenty-nine years old, recently married to a woman five or six years younger than that, and father to two babies, who were elsewhere in the house being watched by another friend of theirs. Hosea’s wife, Lydia Oldmeadow (“née Lydia Burroughs,” she said, with a note of early feminism in her tone of voice), was seated next to him. Lydia had black hair and was wearing a startlingly bright purple dress cut a little lower than Rosie would have expected from a new mother in 1860. There were two other men at the table, Martin and Lucius Burroughs, older brothers of Lydia’s, and of course the other woman was Margaret.

            “Margaret may be young but we’re glad to have her,” said Hosea.

            “I converted her to the cause of Lincoln and liberty,” Lydia said proudly. “She’ll tell you she is a convert to that as fervent as a convert can be, even though she has been the same religion all her life.”

            “I say it by way of a joke,” Margaret, the shockingly solid and this-worldly Margaret, said. She really did look almost exactly like her descendant, although now that Rosie knew that she was very young she could definitely see a little more kiddishness on her face than on that of the Mags she knew. “You’ll forgive me, I hope, for saying it is not a joke I think you can tell as well as I can, Lydia!”

            “Oh, I will forgive you,” said Lydia with a breezy laugh. “And you, Rosary? Where do you stand on the issues of the day?”

            “Yes, this is a political discussion, isn’t it?” Rosie said. “I support Lincoln, of course,” she said, although she had no idea if supporting Lincoln was really an of course yet in what seemed to be the Christmas of the 1860 lame duck period.

            “When he takes office he’ll put paid to those slaveocrats,” said Lydia. “Then the free labor of the free men who live up in these parts will be worth something again in this country of ours.”

            It surprised Rosie a little to hear Lydia go immediately to a self-interested economic argument rather than cite what she thought was the most obvious problem with slavery, which was that it treated human beings like property. She was about to say something like this, but Lydia solved the problem for her. She made a snide allusion to the slave states as a land that treated people like objects and objects (cotton gins) like people, and Rosie felt more comfortable with her.

            “An escaped slave came up this way about a year ago and Margaret, who was barely fourteen at that stage, prevailed on us to take her in for a few days until she could continue on north,” said Hosea. “We have this odd little side-staircase going up to our upstairs parlor; my uncle put it in when he built this place, for what I believe they call ‘reasons best known to himself.’ We were able to put it into service as a hiding-hole for seventy-two hours’ time. It was remarkable thinking on my young bride’s part, I must say.”

            “You’re only fifteen?” Rosie asked Margaret.

            Margaret smirked devilishly and said “I put my hair up a year early.”

            “I would have guessed you were eighteen or nineteen,” said Rosie.

            “Not yet she isn’t!” said Lydia. “Don’t give her suitors any ideas, Rosary; we’d hate to lose a friend like her to some farmer or shopkeeper quite yet.”

            Rosie glanced at Margaret again to see if she was blushing; it seemed like a natural thing to look for, and it turned out that she was, quite brightly. Some of it might have been from the heat of the fire roaring behind her but it did also look as if Lydia’s remark had embarrassed her somewhat. Martin and Lucius were chuckling at it.

            “I’m sure she would only have one of her own religion anyway, and there still aren’t very many papists out in these parts,” Lucius said. “I’m sure you’ll have her for a while yet, Lydia.” The way he said this made Rosie wonder if Margaret wasn’t so much a friend of the Oldmeadow family’s as “the help.” It made sense for a very young woman who had been born en route from Ireland, based on what Rosie knew of this time period; it was lucky that Hosea, in particular, seemed upstanding and that he and his wife both had a regard for Margaret’s wellbeing. Rosie hated to consider the possible alternatives to that.

            “You mentioned that your uncle built this house,” said Rosie. “Was your uncle the famous Asaph Oldmeadow?”

            “Is,” said Hosea. “He’s still alive, though very old and probably not much longer for this mortal coil. He lives with a cousin of his, likewise of advanced years, in town, on Federal Street. He gave my father this house as collateral on one of his debts; luckily his fortunes revived somewhat in later years.”

            “We’re all quite proud of Colonel Oldmeadow,” said Martin, “although I would not quite consider that he is famous, exactly; might I inquire where you have heard of him, Miss Newgarth?”

            “Just a local history,” said Rosie, keeping it as vague as possible even though she suspected these people knew that there was something odd about her appearance among them. “He was a colonel in the War of 1812, wasn’t he?”

            “That’s right,” said Hosea. “Gave Tecumseh what-for at Moravian on the Thames. He later became a friend to the Indians, of course—although my wife will tell you there’s no great honor in becoming a friend of someone you’ve beaten.”

            “I would not say there is no honor in it,” said Lydia. “I only believe it’s awfully easy once peace has already been made, and made to your benefit.” Rosie was beginning to wonder if Lydia might be, as they said, ahead of her time; she seemed more perceptive about her time and place than were some of Rosie’s friends and relations even in 2011. The other possibility was that Rosie had overestimated how stupid and prejudiced people had been in the past. Probably the only way to find out which was the case was to remain in present company for a while longer. She wondered if, like in Narnia, or Tír na nÓg in reverse, she could spend hours or days here, then go back to 2011 and find that only a moment had passed.

            The conversation continued along much these same lines—political, disorienting in its combination of high-mindedness and past prejudices, incorporating many jokes and little digs at one another—for at least another half-hour before Hosea, as man of the house, decided that enough time had passed and the fire had died down enough to start roasting potatoes in the coals. Rosie realized at this point that it was actually still early in the day; the conversation that she had walked into had been post-breakfast rather than post-lunch, and these potatoes would be had for lunch rather than dinner. Or perhaps, anyway, for dinner rather than supper; Lydia seemed to use these older and to Rosie’s ears more British-sounding words for the two meals.

            The person who had been watching the babies, a middle-aged woman whom Hosea addressed as Aunt Caroline, came into the parlor and helped Lydia set the little table for a somewhat cramped repast. Rosie was interested to find herself looking forward to that meal; however 1860 did baked potatoes, it would be an interesting story to tell Mags, assuming Mags’s belief in supernatural agency went so far as to believe a story about a time slip. Rosie would not have wondered this of anybody she knew other than Mags, but this was somebody who left saucers of milk outside at night at the edges of the Barings’ property and said some sort of prayer every time she got in the car. Her believing Rosie about this was actually a distinct possibility. Somehow that did Rosie’s heart good and made her feel that there was a connection between these people and those people, between Hosea and Lydia Oldmeadow’s household and Tom and Gertrude Baring’s, a steady and always-living bridge between the present and the past. Thus also between the future and the past; the edge of the present was always moving.

            “You’ll stay for dinner?” Margaret asked her, and it was the grave, ghostly Margaret speaking through the bright young living Margaret’s mouth. It was disorienting, more disorienting than any part of the conversation that had unfolded between the six of them.

            “Yes,” said Rosie. “I’ll stay for dinner quite happily. Thank you, Margaret.” And there were really many people whom she was thanking when she said this.

8.

The Road 

Grandma Baring had a spinster sister (her words), Phoebe Przybylski, who was a wash-ashore. Now a wash-ashore was a word for somebody who had not grown up on Cape Cod but nevertheless had come to live there year-round. There must have been tens of thousands of such people, said Aunt Margaret, because the Cape’s census population was over two hundred thousand and only about one-fifth of its households had children in them.

            “Is there any particular reason you can rattle off those stats off the top of your head, Aunt Margaret?” Rosie asked her when she told her this. It was not at all uncharacteristic of Aunt Margaret, but there was still something a little bit remarkable about it.

            “Franklin and I got curious once how many people like our aunt there were on the Cape,” said Aunt Margaret. “So we looked it up.” And that seemed a reasonable enough explanation as far as Rosie was concerned.

            “Oh, we’re discussing Great-Aunt Phoebe and the wash-ashores already?” Mags asked. “I guess it is that time of year again, after all.”

            “That time of year?” Rosie asked Aunt Margaret.

            “We usually send down a delegation of people from this home to visit my aunt in the Cape’s off-season,” Aunt Margaret explained. “There can be some traffic getting to the Cape around the big winter holidays too so we like to wait till late January or February.” It was on January 20 that they were having this conversation.

            “Oh, so that will come up pretty soon, yes; Mags is right,” said Rosie, probably unnecessarily. “Well, I’m happy to go down with the, sorry, the ‘delegation’ this year if anyone wants me to. I’ve never been to the Cape before, at least not to my recollection.”

            “Sure, we’d be happy to send you on down,” Aunt Margaret said. “You can work with Mags and your grandfather planning the details. I’ll stay here for a few days and make sure we can still host a guest or two while some of us are gone. Sound good to you, Rosie?”

            “Sounds good to me,” said Rosie, legitimately excited.

            She spent the next couple of days alternating between managing the food budget for guest breakfasts and reading about Cape Cod online. Apparently it had actually been the Pilgrims’ first landfall almost four hundred years before; they had hung around in what was now Provincetown for a bit before moving on to Plymouth. There was an Upper Cape, Mid Cape, Lower Cape, and Outer Cape, delineated by progressive distance from Boston; Grandma’s sister lives in the Lower Cape, in a town called Harwich, in a house about ten minutes’ walk from the beach—for whatever that was worth this time of year.

            “Are you a bikini girl or a one-piece girl?” Mags asked Rosie abruptly one evening while they were trying to figure out what they were going to pack.

            “…why are you asking? It’s January. Not even Mattie—”

            “There are indoor pools on Cape Cod, you realize. A friend of Great-Aunt Phoebe’s used to work at one. I try to go every time I’m down there, for old times’ sake.”

            “Old times’ sake?”

            “I used to go as a kid. I actually went down there once with Zachary, when we were ten; a good memory. I would never want him to see me in my swimsuit now, of course,” Mags finished bafflingly.

            “You’ve been dating him for about six weeks now, yes?”

            “That’s right.”

            “You’ve been dating him for six weeks and ‘of course’ you would never let him see you in your swimsuit? Really, Mags?”

            “Is there something the matter with that, Rosie?” Mags asked.

            “There’s nothing the matter with it, no—it just—I don’t know,” Rosie said. “You can have your relationship however you like, I just find it a little mystifying. Whatever.” Mags was looking at her with that probing, slightly judgmental expression of hers. “I wear a bikini, since you asked, but nobody’s going to see it till at least May since I don’t want to swim in the middle of a New England winter even if it is in an indoor pool.”

            “I wish I was comfortable in bikinis,” said Mags. “Not even comfortable in the sense of thinking I look okay; I’m enough of a feminist not to really be worried about that. Physically comfortable. But I always end up feeling like something is going to fall off or fall out. Go figure. Do you have the time, by the way? My watch needs a new battery and I can’t find my phone.”

            “Uh, it’s seven-thirty-three,” said Rosie with a glance at her own phone. “So I guess it’s been about fifteen minutes since dinner.”

            “Huh,” said Mags. “I’m not sure why, but somehow it feels like it’s been longer than that to me.”

            “It sure does.”

            “What exactly do you mean by that?” Mags asked this with a slight suspicion or a slight worry about rejection, perhaps, in her eyes. It had been far from Rosie’s intent to make her feel spurned, and looking at Mags’s eyes now made her feel a little guilty.

            “Just that this has been a tiring conversation to me,” Rosie said, honestly. “I’m sorry; I don’t mean that as an attack on you at all, I hope you realize.”

            “I do so realize.”

            “I’m sorry,” Rosie said again. “I feel like we’ve occasionally been at odds these days, mostly over your life. I don’t want that to become a regular thing between us. Forgive me?”
            “Of course,” said Mags. “It’s really no great shakes.”

            “You know, I’ve never quite understood what the phrase ‘no great shakes’ actually means,” Rosie said. “Any chance you can explain it to me?”

            “I read it in some book. Mostly when I say it I use it to mean whatever it sounds to me like it ought to mean.” She rolled her shoulders. “Sorry I can’t be of more help,” she said.

            “It’s really not that big a deal,” said Rosie. “It was just something I was wondering about, that’s all. Anyway, like I was saying, I would like it if we could go back to being a bit more generous with each other.”

            “Let’s,” said Mags. “I’d like that—that would be important to me, even—too. In any case, I think you’ll enjoy the Cape. I think you and Great-Aunt Phoebe will get along very well, and I look forward to introducing you or to seeing your grandmother introduce you.”

            “Isn’t Grandpa coming too, or is it just Grandma?”

            “Your grandfather I believe has decided to stay home keeping the place up with Aunt Margaret and Uncle Franklin,” said Mags. “So it’ll just be the three of us, plus maybe Mattie and Ellie.”

            “Why Mattie and Ellie?”

            “They haven’t been to the Cape in years and Great-Aunt Phoebe has a hospitable streak,” Mags said. As she said this she went over to her work desk and started fiddling with a bracelet that she was making for Neuromancer by William Gibson, a book that Rosie had read and liked on her say-so. The bracelet was silver and red and had charms depicting, among other things, a computer keyboard, an artificial satellite of some kind, a pair of sunglasses, and a katana. Rosie could not remember if katanas figured into the plot of the book in any significant way or if it merely felt as if they ought to have. It did feel very much as if they ought to have. “I’m in favor of bringing them along,” Mags went on, still talking about Mattie and Ellie. “Why? Do you have some kind of qualm with the idea of doing that?”
            “No, I don’t have a qualm with it. It’s just that I didn’t quite get why that was part of the plan. I was curious, that’s all. Thank you for explaining it to me.” This was beginning to feel like a child’s misunderstanding of what having a conversation was about. Mags probably felt the same way about it, for they both let it more or less drift off after that, and went about their evenings quietly thenceforth.

            The day of the drive to the Cape came. Mattie and Ellie would be coming after all and Rosie and Mattie would be sharing the driving. “Are you comfortable getting us out towards 495?” Mattie asked Rosie as they were about to take off.

            “Uh, sure, I suppose,” Rosie said.

            And so she drove them out on Route 2. They passed north of downtown Greenfield, going in roughly the same direction as Bernardston, then past the waters of Barton’s Cove, across the Depression-era French King Bridge from which Horton Baring had fallen to her fate, and up the hill called Weatherhead. Where the road passed over the hilltop there stood, postmodernly, a convenience store and a bowling alley. They stopped in the convenience store for some coffee and other provisions, which they would have in addition to the sandwiches that Mags had already made and packed for them. Rosie and Mattie went in, and when they got back out Ellie and Mags were scandalizing Grandma with an obscene singalong of some description. Rosie tried not to laugh as she sipped at her coffee and pulled out onto the open road again. Soon they passed along the fast Miller’s River where it flowed between snowy banks, through the little town of Erving, and past the turnoff to the somewhat more substantial town of Orange. And then, past Orange, the road turned to a limited-access highway, passing between stands of snowy conifers, and rose up into the hilly regions of Central Massachusetts, the Pack Monadnock Range, the Worcester Hills.

            They stopped for a “pee break”—the phrase was conventional enough but Rosie felt mildly unsettled to hear it come from her grandmother’s lips—just short of Interstate 495, after an hour or two of driving eastward. From the gas station where they did this they found it a little tricky to navigate back out onto the highway, but in the end Rosie did manage it. She had already gotten onto 495 when she remembered that she and Mattie had initially decided between themselves that they were going to share the driving.

            “Weren’t we going to trade off the driving, Mattie?” Rosie asked her.

            “We were!” I’m so sorry; I had completely forgotten.” Mattie sounded genuinely beside herself to have imposed on Rosie like this.

            “Well, it’s probably too late to switch out here,” said Rosie, a little annoyed in spite of herself.

            “Probably,” said Mattie with a sigh. “I really am sorry, Rosie. If you’d like me to drive us the whole route on the way back, I’m happy to.”

            “Look, please don’t worry about it, Mattie. There isn’t much traffic and I actually enjoy driving.” And this was true; when Rosie had been home on break from Binghamton she had often gone on long drives all the way down Long Island and back, radio on, shore birds calling outside as she got down towards the Hamptons or sometimes even towards Montauk. It had been a way of putting herself in heartsore communication with the world, with the world that was always passing around her. Often she had had Madison as a passenger, sometimes Caroline, sometimes Hernan; these latter two were friends of hers from Binghamton whose families lived near hers. Hernan was from a Puerto Rican family in outer Queens, Caroline from a Jewish family in Hempstead. They were often together, the three of them, three good friends, with a personality to them and to their togetherness. It was a personality, a collective selfhood, that Rosie was surprised to realize she now felt with Mags, Mattie, and Ellie—and not with them only but also with Margaret Clooney, and Hosea and Lydia Oldmeadow, and the Horton Baring all about whose life and death she kept hearing from the living. “What is it you two are planning to do on the Cape?” she asked Mattie and Ellie, and they told her that historical sightseeing was what they were most fondly looking forward to. That put Rosie in an even better humor. She was surprised to find herself feeling quite that favorably about it, but there it was. It inspired something of a prayerful feeling in her, in she who seldom prayed.

            Soon they came to what was called the Sagamore Bridge. It was a suspension bridge over a canal that according to Grandma had been dug in the early part of the last century to spare ships the trip around the Cape. In the Cape’s busy seasons it was, again according to Grandma, quite a pain to get over; at times it was almost impassable. But today it was easy enough, and then they were on the ample Mid-Cape Highway, and they could smell sea air, and the world was open, and Rosie felt free.

            “Are you happy?” Mags asked Rosie. “You look really happy. You’re grinning, and you’re humming to yourself even though the radio isn’t on.”

            “It barely has to do with being happy,” Rosie said. She was not sure if she wanted to say what came to mind next, so she did. “This might sound silly to you, but it feels a little bit like being in love.”

9.

The Cape 

Getting to Great-Aunt Phoebe’s house in Harwich was a little tricky because once one left the Mid-Cape Highway seemingly every other road on the peninsula was some sort or another of winding residential or semi-residential street. Much of Cape Cod would appear to have been very heavily suburbanized after World War II; Grandma remarked that the Outer Cape, the end of the peninsula out beyond Harwich, was “the way the whole Cape used to be”—strange and wild, sparsely inhabited, dominated in terms of landscape by sand dunes and short scrubby trees. Mags suggested that they take a drive up in that direction the next day; even if none of them were interested in going in the sea, it was nice to walk along the beaches, and there was history too. Mattie mentioned Marconi Beach, from which the first trans-Atlantic radio broadcast had been made; Ellie mentioned the Three Sisters, a series of famous lighthouses.

            “My sister rarely leaves Harwich, regrettably,” Grandma said. “Last time she went any further than Orleans was a trip to Provincetown in the winter of 1985, when the most prodigious snowstorm struck the Cape and she wanted to see the drifts of snow piled up along the beaches.”

            “Your sister hasn’t been to the Outer Cape in twenty-seven years?” Ellie asked, a little startled.

            “I know; it surprised me too when she mentioned it to me. You’d think that living in Harwich she would have at least made it up to Eastham or Wellfleet; it’s not as if she’s in Falmouth or Hyannis.” Rosie had very little idea where any of these places were or why it was significant which of them her great-aunt lived in, but she did not want to interrupt the conversation by asking questions. It was a conversation in which all of the New England natives in the car seemed very interested. “I suppose everything Phoebe needs or thinks she needs she can find in Harwich or Chatham,” Grandma continued. “In a way, I admire that; it seems nice to have that level of security in one’s surroundings.”

            “You don’t travel very much either, do you, Great-Aunt Gertrude?” asked Mags. It was the first time in almost half a year of living up here that Rosie had heard Mags address Grandma by any version of her name, and it placed another piece into the Horton Baring and Carl McNulty puzzle. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you go on a trip, even as far as Quechee Gorge or the White Mountains the way Great-Uncle Tom sometimes does.”

            “I don’t get out or around very much, no; I admit it,” said Grandma. “I’m a dull old lady.”

            “You’re hardly dull,” said Mags.

            Conversing along much these lines, they reached Great-Aunt Phoebe’s house. It was a saltbox house with greyish wooden siding and a brownish shingled roof, livened up by a lawn flamingo and a few garden gnomes; Grandma said that during the warmer months there were potted flowers out front as well. The lawn flamingo had a little snow on it, an odd little crown clinging to its pink head. Behind the house rose a long yellowish dune, and beyond that Rosie could hear the sea.

            Great-Aunt Phoebe came out and greeted them. She was a tall woman a little younger than Grandma, and she shared Grandma’s distinct resemblance to Aunt Margaret; she even shared Aunt Margaret’s midcentury-librarian hairstyle. “It’s so good to see you, Gerty!” she said to Grandma with sincere enthusiasm but an odd underlying reticence that was only barely audible. She pulled Grandma into a loose hug, then, to Rosie’s wonderment, pinched Mags’s cheek. Introductions were made to Rosie, Mattie, and Ellie, and they were shown to their rooms. Rosie and Mags would be sharing a room; Mattie and Ellie would be sharing the living room, which had two usable couches; Grandma would be sharing her sister’s room. Great-Aunt Phoebe seemed to live alone, but the guest room that Rosie and Mags ended up in seemed much-used and much-loved. It had an old, probably nonfunctional CRT television, a bookcase filled with mostly local-interest books, and two small beds arranged next to each other and parallel like a husband’s and wife’s beds in a prudish 1950s sitcom.

            Mags unpacked her toothbrush and toothpaste, two or three of her old pulp paperbacks, and the jade-green maillot that she was planning to wear to that indoor pool, wherever it was. Rosie unpacked her portable CD player, a copy of The Idiot that she had decided on a whim to try plowing her way through, and a dress that she was planning to wear to a nice restaurant Grandma had made vague noises about taking them to tonight. “It seems like we have different ideas of what the rest of this day is going to look like,” Mags observed. “I suppose that’s just as well; whenever we visit down here we normally go our separate ways for a few hours on the afternoon of the first day anyway. Do you mind if I take the car?”

            “You mean to go to the pool?” Rosie asked. Mags nodded. “No; go ahead. I can go for a walk in the dunes if I really need to get out of the house.”

            “Sounds good,” said Mags. A few minutes later she took off. Rosie sighed, sat on her bed, and looked out the bedroom window, through which she could see the sea as a grey-blue line beneath a white-grey late-winter sky. It seemed that there was something enormous in that sea, something morally indeterminate; an ambivalence, a fascination. It was an oceanic logic, a logic that was almost but not quite a person, something that said something about Rosie’s own life. It said something about love, insofar as it said something about gender; it said something about gender, insofar as it said something about death. There was the kind of wildness to it that Mags sometimes pressed to her service and that Horton Baring once had pressed to hers, the kind of wildness that revolved in and out of a sheriff’s office and sent a car over the speed limit on an ice-slicked interstate. It had something to say to Rosie, or about her; it was an entity that watched her and loved her, or loved her because it watched her.

            Almost without realizing it, she found herself with her jacket and scarf back on, standing on the dunes with the house behind her. There was a horizontal striation of the view before her: yellow beach, then white surf, then sea, then sky. The sky was darkening and wilding; somewhere out on the Atlantic a storm was rising, a danger and woe to mariners. The storm changed the light of the day, and somehow in the change of the light Rosie thought for a second that she could see, or even somehow could hear, the dead beginning to speak to her. It was clear enough to her, the sea being that it was, that there were more than enough dead in these parts.

            She went back inside ahead of the storm, which commenced to rock the house. “Is Mags still at the pool?” she asked Mattie and Ellie, who were sitting in the living room huddled with hot cocoa.

            “Must be,” said Ellie. “Or anyway, she hasn’t come back yet.”

            Rosie sat worried with them until Mags did come back. She heard the door slamming open and saw her cousin marching in, drenched for two separate reasons. “It’s bad out there,” Mags said simply, and after taking her coat off, went upstairs. Rosie went up after her.

            “Once you dry off would you like to come down for hot chocolate?” she asked.

            “Of course,” said Mags, “but it’s going to take me a while to dry off. It’s a wintry mix out there; you know how it is.”

            “I certainly do. You smell like chlorine.”

            “And you smell like salt. It’s funny,” said Mags, “in any other season, you’d expect me to go out and do something half-wild on the beach and you to play it safe and occupy yourself indoors.”

            “I was playing it safe and occupying myself indoors for a while,” said Rosie. “Something about the day—about the sea—called me outside. I’m sorry; that probably doesn’t make any sense to you.”

            “On the contrary,” said Mags. “It makes quite a bit of sense to me. It’s precisely the sort of thing that does make sense to me. If you and I weren’t peers then I might even say I was proud of you.”

            “You’re allowed to be proud of me. I might actually like to hear you say that you’re proud of me,” said Rosie.

            “Okay then,” said Mags. “I’m proud of you, Rosie.” She stepped into the bathroom through which the guest room and Great-Aunt Phoebe’s room communicated. “I’m sorry to cut this conversation short but I really do need to wring out my hair,” she said. She tossed her swimsuit over the side of the bathtub, picked up a towel from a stack near the shower, and started drying her hair vigorously. “I’ll meet you downstairs if you want to get back to the fun.”

            “By all means,” said Rosie.   

            She went downstairs. When she got back to the living room Mattie, Grandma, and Great-Aunt Phoebe were gathered around Ellie, who was animatedly telling yet another dirty joke. “…and then Salma Hayek says to the Pope, ‘these aren’t buoys!’” she finished, to raucous laughter. “Oh. Sorry you missed the setup for that one, Rosie.”

            “I think the setup for that one is pretty self-explanatory, Ellie,” Rosie said. “Is there still enough hot chocolate left for one more?”

            “Sure; it’s in the saucepan,” Great-Aunt Phoebe said. “Front left burner of the gas stove. Miss Greer here whipped it up for us,” she said with an avuncular, or feminine-avuncular, smile at Mattie.

            “I haven’t been called ‘Miss Greer’ in years, Ms. Przybylski,” said Mattie with a bashful adjustment of her glasses and a slight flip of her long black hair. “I appreciate it, somehow.”

            Great-Aunt Phoebe shrugged. “Airs and graces, airs and graces,” she said. “Definitely easier to find here and there in this world of ours when I was a girl.”

            And so the evening—and the storm—passed convivially. There were a few brownouts but at no point did they completely lose power. Great-Aunt Phoebe led several of them in a marathon series of gin rummy games for two or three hours, and for dinner, instead of going out to a restaurant, they had breaded cod and a rice dish that tasted delicious but stuck to their spoons in a way that made Rosie a bit queasy to look at.

            The next day was clear and unseasonably warm so they dressed relatively lightly for their drive up the Outer Cape. Rosie and Mags walked for a while together along the beach beneath Nauset Light, which was the lighthouse that appeared on the bags of the potato chip brand Uncle Franklin ate. The sea was a little less overpowering today, but held no less of a fascination for Rosie. She took her shoes off and dipped her feet into the surf; it was powerfully cold even though the air was mild, and out of the corner of her eye she saw Mags suppressing what looked an awful lot like a little laugh at her.

            They drove almost all the way up to Provincetown, but not all the way. They had a chilly picnic on Marconi Beach, below the dunes, among seashells and sea glass. The picnic was more of the sandwiches that Mags had packed for their drive to the Cape the previous day; Great-Aunt Phoebe was, “as always,” impressed with Mags’s preparation of them. Most of them were turkey sandwiches very much like the ones one could get at some delis in New York, but some were vegetarian, and it was the vegetarian ones that Mattie and Great-Aunt Phoebe mostly ate. The sky now was almost exactly the blue-grey shade of the sea, distinguished from it only by its equanimity and lack of choppiness or imposingness. Rosie tucked away two and a half of the sandwiches, then went for another walk, this time with her grandmother.

            “Are there any little towns, places to buy antiques, house museums, things like that, on the Outer Cape?” she asked her grandmother. “Or is most of the history here the history of the wind and the sea?”

            “There are a few such places, yes, mostly in Provincetown,” said Grandma, “but a few in Wellfleet or Eastham; there was an antiques emporium along the road up here, if you missed it. But keep in mind that the wind and the sea have quite a lot of history all their own, just as the woods and the mountains do.”

            “That sounds like something Grandpa would say,” said Rosie.

            “It is. He would say that to me all the time back when he and I were young and even more in love.”

            “You must miss those days, sometimes.”

            “Well, don’t we all miss our youth, sometimes? Or almost all of us, anyway.”

            Rosie thought back to her own youth. Just as, when contemplating moving to Greenfield, she had thought of the vacations of her childhood, now that she was ensconced in New England she thought of the non-vacations, of ordinary life at school and at play on Long Island. She remembered when Madison was born, her jealousy; she remembered her first kiss, a truth-or-dare kiss, at her eleventh birthday party; she remembered when she had hit eighth grade and her grades had suddenly, dramatically started to improve. She supposed there was something of wind and sea in that history, too, and in everybody’s history. Thinking of it that way came as more of a comfort to her than she would have expected.

            And that was the second day of the Cape visit. The third day, which was Sunday, she and Mags had a brief dispute about what church to go to. She was interested in a church that was in a tourism brochure, but Mags informed her that she had it on good authority that the denomination that ran that church was, first of all, not Catholic, and, second of all, some sort of cult. Mags was interested in a Catholic parish all the way in Woods Hole, for some reason, but Rosie was not willing to schlep that far on a Sunday morning. It was a bit mysterious to Rosie how and why they had reached the decision to go to church together at all; it wasn’t exactly an important holiday Sunday. Eventually they decided on the place in Woods Hole. Rosie did not have a good time getting there, but Mass itself was fine. She even went to confession afterwards, more or less on a whim. It was less like pulling teeth than she remembered.

            For their last afternoon on their weekend getaway, Great-Aunt Phoebe cooked for them again. They had a big midday meal of a kind that Rosie associated with the days before beepers, cable news, and half-hour unpaid lunch breaks. Great-Aunt Phoebe actually waxed nostalgic about Massachusetts’s old blue laws, where after going to church on Sunday morning you had nothing to do for the rest of the day but eat and, if relevant, visit with family. It wasn’t at all clear to Rosie how, for instance, observant Jews would have fared under the system that her great-aunt was describing, but she did not want to start a conversation about that that might have turned into an argument.

            On the drive back to Greenfield that evening, a drive that she did end up palming off on Mattie in recompense for the drive down, Rosie found herself in a sort of waking dream. The car was a ship, but the road was not a sea; the ship was passing over land, or perhaps even through the halls of the sky, and Massachusetts was underneath Rosie, like a land of counterpane for her to look upon. She felt as if she could jump over the moon.