The Summer Wives

by Beatriz Williams

Genres: Family Life; Historical Fiction; 20th Century Romance; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

New York Times bestselling author Beatriz Williams brings us the blockbuster novel of the season—an electrifying postwar fable of love, class, power, and redemption set among the inhabitants of an island off the New England coast . . .

In the summer of 1951, Miranda Schuyler arrives on elite, secretive Winthrop Island as a schoolgirl from the margins of high society, still reeling from the loss of her father in the Second World War. When her beautiful mother marries Hugh Fisher, whose summer house on Winthrop overlooks the famous lighthouse, Miranda's catapulted into a heady new world of pedigrees and cocktails, status and swimming pools. Isobel Fisher, Miranda's new stepsister—all long legs and world-weary bravado, engaged to a wealthy Island scion—is eager to draw Miranda into the arcane customs of Winthrop society.

But beneath the island's patrician surface, there are really two clans: the summer families with their steadfast ways and quiet obsessions, and the working class of Portuguese fishermen and domestic workers who earn their living on the water and in the laundries of the summer houses. Uneasy among Isobel's privileged friends, Miranda finds herself drawn to Joseph Vargas, whose father keeps the lighthouse with his mysterious wife. In summer, Joseph helps his father in the lobster boats, but in the autumn he returns to Brown University, where he's determined to make something of himself. Since childhood, Joseph's enjoyed an intense, complex friendship with Isobel Fisher, and as the summer winds to its end, Miranda's caught in a catastrophe that will shatter Winthrop's hard-won tranquility and banish Miranda from the island for nearly two decades.

Now, in the landmark summer of 1969, Miranda returns at last, as a renowned Shakespearean actress hiding a terrible heartbreak. On its surface, the Island remains the same—determined to keep the outside world from its shores, fiercely loyal to those who belong. But the formerly powerful Fisher family is a shadow of itself, and Joseph Vargas has recently escaped the prison where he was incarcerated for the murder of Miranda's stepfather eighteen years earlier. What's more, Miranda herself is no longer a naïve teenager, and she begins a fierce, inexorable quest for justice for the man she once loved . . . even if it means uncovering every last one of the secrets that bind together the families of Winthrop Island.

Release date: July 10, 2018

Publisher: William Morrow

Print pages: 400

Sample

Foreword: 1969

I RETURNED TO Winthrop Island on an unseasonably cold day in early May, one week after my tenth wedding anniversary. I missed the last ferry from New London—the schedule, not surprisingly, had changed in the eighteen years since I last climbed aboard—and hired an old tub of a fishing boat to carry me across from Stonington. I don’t think the fellow recognized me, but I can’t be sure. Fishermen are a stoic lot, you know. They don’t emote. I paid him twenty dollars cash, and in return he didn’t ask me any awkward questions, like my name and my business on the Island, though I wonder if it would have made any difference. What was he going to do, call the newspapers? Probably he’d never heard of me. Lots of people had never heard of me.

Because it was May, the sky was still light as we bumped across the few miles of Long Island Sound that separate the Island from Connecticut. I wore my sunglasses, which were black and extremely large, giving me the appearance of an exotic bug, and the spray soon coated the lenses with a film of salt. When I couldn’t properly see any longer, I took them off, and the strength of the draft on my face surprised me, and the smell. I’d forgotten about the scent of the Sound, which had its own particular tang, different from anywhere else in the world, the English Channel or the Mediterranean or the South Pacific—or maybe it didn’t, and that was all in my imagination. Still, it seemed to me as I stood near the bow of the fishing boat, leaning against the deckhouse, that the brine on that wind reached deep inside the wrinkles of my brain, penetrating the furthest regions of the hippocampus to lay its fingertip on certain tender memories therein. Bending over the stern of a lobster boat, hauling cages from a buoy line. Sitting next to a girl at the end of a midnight dock, sharing a bottle of cold champagne. Lying on a beach while the rain coursed upon me and a boy, kissing each other for the last time.

Ahead of me, the Island made a dark, flattened parabola, growing larger by the second until it dominated the horizon and the specks on its surface took on the character of houses. I saw the cluster of buildings around the harbor, the scattering of estates along the shore. I couldn’t see Greyfriars from here—perched as it was on the southeastern corner of the Island—but I knew it still existed, overlooking Fleet Rock and its famous lighthouse. I knew this because of the letter in my pocketbook, which was written on Greyfriars notepaper and signed, in old-fashioned, reproachful copperplate, Your Mother. There was no mention of Isobel, but I knew she existed, too. There could be no Greyfriars without Isobel, could there?

Without thinking, I turned to address the fisherman, and his face went rigid with shock at the sight of me, now unhidden by sunglasses. “An accident,” I said, touching the bruised flesh around my left eye and my cheekbone. “An automobile accident,” remembering to use the American term—accident—instead of the British one, smash. A car smash, which is an interesting difference, you know. To call it an accident implies an absence of intent, nobody’s fault, a tragic mistake. A smash is just that. Makes no judgment on how the thing happened, or why.

“I’m sorry, ma’am.” He returned his attention to the direction of the boat. (Like I said, a stoic lot.)

“These things happen,” I said. “I was going to ask you a question, if you don’t mind.”

“Fire away.”

“Do you happen to know who keeps the Fleet Rock lighthouse, these days? I used to summer on the Island, many years ago, and I was just wondering.”

“The Fleet Rock lighthouse? Why, that would be old Mrs. Vargas,” said the fisherman, without changing expression, without turning his attention from the water before us.

“What about Mr. Vargas?”

“I’m afraid he’s passed on, ma’am. Just a few months ago. One winter too many, I guess.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“He was a good man. A good lobsterman.”

I laughed politely. 

 

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

He laughed too. “I guess it is, ma’am. I guess it is.”

We said nothing more, all the way into the harbor, and I gave him another five dollars to keep quiet about the woman with the black eye and the sunglasses who was asking questions about Fleet Rock lighthouse. He put the Lincoln in his pocket and asked if he could help me with my suitcase. I said no, I was just heading into the general store across the street from the marina. He wouldn’t take no for an answer, though, so I let him carry the suitcase anyway. Men sometimes like to make themselves useful that way, I’ve found, and you might as well humor them.

Inside the store, I absorbed the familiar, particular odor of dust and spices, and the scent gave me another jolt of exquisite pain to the solar plexus. There’s something about the smells of your childhood, isn’t there? Even when that childhood was short and flavored by bitterness and ended in catastrophe, in a disaster of devastating proportions, you still remember those small, sublime joys with an ache of longing. Because there’s no getting it back, is there? You can’t return to a state of innocence. So I waited patiently for the old woman behind the soda fountain to hustle and bustle her way around her shelves, her cabinets, her rows of merchandise, until at last she noticed my presence and apologized.

“It’s no trouble at all,” I said.

At the sound of my voice, her face changed, in much the same way as the fisherman’s had. Her mouth made a perfect hole of surprise. “Deus meu! Miranda Schuyler?” she said in wonder.

“The prodigal returns.” I removed my sunglasses.

“Oh dear! What is this thing that has happened to your face?”

“There was an accident. A car accident. I thought I might find someplace quiet to lick my wounds. I hope you don’t mind.”

Her voice was soft with pity. “No, of course. Of course not.” She paused delicately. “Do they know you are coming? At Greyfriars? Your mother, she was here yesterday, and she said nothing to me.”

“I thought I might surprise them. I don’t suppose your husband still drives his delivery van, does he?”

“Ah, poor Manuelo, he is gone now.”

“Oh! I’m so sorry. I didn’t think.”

“But I can drive you this far. My daughter Laura will keep the store for me. Laura! You remember Laura, don’t you?”

“Naturally I remember Laura. I remember everybody and everything. How could I forget?”

We exchanged a look of deep, futile understanding that lasted as long as it took for Mrs. Medeiro’s daughter, Miss Laura, scatter-haired and dumpy in a floral housedress, to emerge from some back room, clasp her hands, and express her absolute astonishment that the great Miranda Schuyler had returned to the Island at last, that she stood right here in the middle of their humble

store.

“Or must we call you Miranda Thomas?” she asked, pretending not to eye the shiner that disfigured the left side of my face.

“Just Miranda will do. I’m here unofficially, you understand.”

“Ah, I see.” She smoothed her hair with one hand and looked at her mother, and some communication passed between them, to which Mrs. Medeiro replied with a small shrug. Miss Laura picked up a dishcloth and put it down again. I was opening my mouth to speak when she burst out, “What was it like to kiss Roger Moore?”

“Laura!” snapped her mother.

I slipped the sunglasses back over my eyes. “Just exactly as you might think,” I said.

* * *

We were halfway to Greyfriars before I asked Mrs. Medeiro about her grandson, and she took her time to answer me.

“He’s well,” she said, “the last I heard.”

“He never did answer any of my letters. I wrote and wrote.”

“He thought this was best. There was no hope, you see.”

I set my elbow on the edge of the window, which was rolled down all the way to allow the May breeze inside the fish-smelling cab. I might have looked out toward the sea, which was darkening into a purple twilight, but I didn’t. I knew what was out there, the cliffs dropping away into the water, and Fleet Rock like a dream against the horizon.

Mrs. Medeiro changed gears to thrust the old van up the slope. “You have heard the news, yes?”

“That he escaped from prison? Yes, I heard.”

“Is that—” She bit herself off and rattled her thumbs against the steering wheel.

“Is that why I’ve come back, you mean? Because of Joseph escaping from prison?”

“I’m sorry. It’s your business, why you’re here.”

“It’s a logical question. I don’t blame you for asking. I mean, he’s bolted from his prison, and now I’ve—well, here I am, fresh from London.”

“So you are here for him?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Oh.” Mrs. Medeiro glanced at me. “I just—well, the police already came, the detectives, the marshals. I mean, they searched everywhere. They could not find him.”

“I don’t suppose you happen to know where he went?”

She shrugged. “Who 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 in 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.” 

 

June

1930 (Bianca Medeiro)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 knows many other things. She knows his exact height (five feet eleven and a half inches) and the color of his eyes (as blue as the Mediterranean Sea) and his prowess at sailing, of course, but also at hockey (he was the team captain at Harvard) and at golf, at which he won the Winthrop Island Club championship last summer, the first summer of the Fisher family’s membership. The Dumonts sponsored them. Bianca knows this because her cousin Laura happened to be stepping out with one of the Club caddies last year, at night and in secret, and he knew just about everything you ever wanted to know about the Families, because they, for some reason, thought the caddies had no ears in their heads except to receive commands. Or maybe they thought a ten-cent tip was enough to buy the loyalty of an impecunious college boy. (The Families were cheap tippers, it was part of their ethic.)

Not so Mr. Fisher. He once gave her cousin Manuelo a whole dollar for helping him push his Buick Battistini roadster back to Greyfriars from the village, where it broke down outside the ice cream parlor. How Bianca had envied Manuelo that magical day, as his manly shoulders strained side by side with Mr. Fisher’s shoulders, even though the road ascended some hundred feet in total before it reached the summit on which Greyfriars was built, and the effort must have been enormous. When Manuelo returned, flushed and sweating, she had asked him what they talked about, and his face went carefully blank and he said, Nothing. So she knew Mr. Fisher had confided some secret in Manuelo, and that made her doubly jealous.

In fact, Bianca’s thinking about that August afternoon right now, as she stacks her cans of soup in the hot, musty interior of the Medeiros’ general store on Hemlock Street, right at the harbor’s edge. She’s remembering how Mr. Fisher took off his linen jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, and how strong his back seemed as he bent himself over the graceful rump of the Buick, how his shoulders formed the broad side of a damp, neat triangle that narrowed and then disappeared down the slim waistband of his trousers. She sets down another can of soup and crosses herself, and at that exact instant, by some arrangement of the universe, she hears none other than Hugh Fisher’s young, enthusiastic, unmistakable voice calling out from the front of the store. The coincidence is so remarkable that at first she thinks she’s imagined it.

“Hullo!” he calls again. “Anybody there?”

Bianca waits behind the tall shelf while her heart pounds and pounds, not breathing, waiting for Tia Maria to reply, for one of her cousins to reply. But nobody does.

“Hullo? Francisca?

Anybody?”

He’s going to leave. She lifts her hand to smooth her hair, but there’s a can of soup stuck between her fingers, and she bumps her head with it instead. She shoves the soup on the shelf and darts out into the open, just as Mr. Fisher’s turning to the open front door.

“Hello! Mr. Fisher!”

He swivels back, and all at once he’s looking at her, her, Bianca Medeiro and nobody else, and the whole world lights up under the color of his gaze, the wattage of his smile.

“Well, hello,” he says. “I was hoping to buy a bottle or two of vinegar.”

2.

ANOTHER THING SHE knows about Hugh Fisher: last summer, he fell in love with her cousin Francisca, the third and the oldest of Tia Maria and Tio Manuelo’s children, who’s engaged to marry Pascoal Vargas in the autumn. Francisca, who was perfectly aware of Bianca’s infatuation, tried to keep the affair secret for her sake, but Bianca knew almost from the first, when Francisca made some excuse about taking a walk one night last July, and came back flushed and bright-eyed an hour later, smelling of a particular kind of masculine soap that Tio Manuelo doesn’t stock in his store. In truth, Bianca hadn’t really minded. Francisca going to meet Hugh Fisher at night was almost as close as Bianca herself going to meet Hugh Fisher, and when she heard the back door open and squeakily close, she imagined Francisca running up the slope to the cliffs under the moonlight, Francisca embracing Hugh Fisher while the phosphorescent sea pounded beneath them, in a way she couldn’t imagine Mr. Fisher embracing so distant an object as Miss Dumont. By touching Francisca’s skin the next morning, Bianca felt she was somehow touching Mr. Fisher.

And another thing. Last summer Francisca was fully grown, nineteen years old, lush and beautiful, and Bianca was only sixteen, her period had just started the previous winter, and her face was round and spotty and childlike. As she lay throughout July and August in the little bedroom she shared with her cousins, listening to their clandestine comings and goings, she was happier imagining making love to Hugh Fisher as beautiful Francisca than she would have been to actually make love to him as herself. It was safer and infinitely more pleasant.

Then came the end of summer, when the Families all returned to their houses in New York and Boston and Providence and Philadelphia.

including the Fishers. Francisca moped to devastating effect. She appeared at the dinner table tearstained and listless, eating nothing, and she completed her chores like one of those machines in a factory, without joy. When she accepted Pascoal Vargas’s proposal at Christmas, everybody thought she finally saw sense, because the color returned to her cheeks, and her hips reacquired their old sway, and she plunged herself into the assembling of her trousseau, the most elaborate and comprehensive trousseau in the history of the Medeiro women, because Pascoal Vargas had made a great deal of money in his lobster boat during the past few years, a great deal, and now he has just received the appointment to keep the Fleet Rock lighthouse come October. Francisca will live in luxury, almost, so what if her devoted husband-to-be is past forty years old and resembles nothing so much as a leathery, dark-haired gnome? Who cares about romance when you’ve got a fiancé with money in the bank and a steady, respectable job?

But Bianca’s not so sure.

Bianca hasn’t missed the new brightness of her cousin’s eyes, now that the Fishers have returned to Winthrop Island. She hasn’t missed the way Francisca makes excuses to go walking in the cliffs above the village, or offers to help her brother Manuelo make the rounds throughout the Island in their father’s old Model T delivery truck. And this summer is a whole new summer. Francisca’s engaged, she’s practically a matron, and Bianca has finally achieved that transformation of which young girls dream, from duckling into swan. Over the winter, her spots disappeared and her face became luminous and refined, her hair grew in thick and her small, dainty body rounded out in all those places men admire. As Easter passed and the blossoms came out and the harsh New England air turned soft and warm, as she prepared to graduate from the tiny Winthrop Island School and turn free, Bianca felt her hour had struck. Her blood sang in her veins, she woke restless every morning. She felt that something grand beckoned around the corner, the future for which she was destined.

All she needed was a sign.

3.

IS THIS THE sign? Hugh Fisher standing right there in the front of the store, a foot or two away from the wooden counter with the vinegar-not-vinegar hidden inside, wearing a blue seersucker suit that made his eyes even bluer than she remembered? Already his skin is golden with sunshine and pink with heat, and his shiny blond hair reminds her of the helmet of Apollo. (She will cross herself later.)

Bianca tucks a loose strand behind her ear. Tia Maria won’t let them bob their hair, she absolutely refuses to let her girls turn fast like all the others, so Bianca arranges hers in a loose knot at the back of her head and then pulls out the dark, curling locks at the sides, so that the silhouette approximates that of Clara Bow.

“What kind of vinegar do you need, sir?” she asks politely, though her heart knocks like crazy next to her lungs, making speech difficult.

His smile turns sheepish. “Well, now. I’ve heard you stock a special kind of vinegar here, and I’m all out. Fellow was supposed to make a delivery at the Greyfriars boathouse last night and he never turned up.”

Bianca glances anxiously

at Tio Manuelo’s sacred counter and back to Hugh Fisher’s lips. (She can’t quite meet his gaze, not until her nerves stop jumping like this, not until she can keep her eyes from filling with tears at the perfection of his beauty, so close as to be within reach.) “I’m afraid I don’t know much about vinegar,” she says.

“No, of course not. A sweet young thing like you. Is your father here?”

“My uncle,” she says, hot with shame. A sweet young thing! Hasn’t he seen she’s a woman now, a swan? Hasn’t he noticed her luminous skin and her shining hair, the glorious new curves to her breasts and her hips? All the boys are noticing her now, the men too, but she hasn’t looked back at any of them, not one. This blossoming beauty of hers is meant for only one man in the world, and he stands before her now, and he won’t look, he won’t see.

“Your uncle. If he’s in the back, I can find him.”

“He’s away.”

“There’s nobody else here? Just you?”

“Yes,” Bianca says, though she’s not quite sure on this point. Laura and Tia Maria were both here a moment ago. Where have they gone? Into the back garden to sneak a cigarette or two?

“I see.” He looks at her kindly, as if she’s a simple child, as if she’s nothing more than the sweet young thing he called her, and reaches into the inside pocket of his seersucker jacket. “Then perhaps you can give him my card. Here, I’ll write my telephone number on the back. Can you give this to him for me?”

He sticks the pencil stub back in his pocket and holds out the card with his strong, smooth fingers. Bianca reaches out and takes it, and when her fingertips inevitably brush against his fingertips, the sensation travels all the way up her arm and down her ribs and her stomach to her legs. She breathes in deeply to smell Mr. Fisher’s particular shaving soap, which doesn’t belong to any of the soap Tio Manuelo stocks on his shelves. The scent is like magic to her. She even wavers on her feet, so intoxicating is this flavor.

“Are you all right?” Mr. Fisher asks, in a voice of true concern.

“Yes, I’m all right.” Fully drunk now, she opens her eyes, which were closed in appreciation of Mr. Fisher’s soap, and this time she meets his gaze, his dazzling blue eyes, and she watches in triumph as they widen, like the flare of a match.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t believe I know your name.”

“It’s Bianca. Bianca Medeiro.” She tucks the card into the pocket of her pinafore apron. “And I think I know where to find your vinegar, Mr. Fisher.”

4.

HUGH FISHER WALKS away with two bottles and an order for more, whatever Tio Manuelo’s got, and Bianca promises to deliver this merchandise herself. To the boathouse, he says. There’s a hatch

door on the ceiling, you’ll find it. Before he leaves, he takes her hand and kisses it, first on the back and then—turning it reverently over—in the middle of her palm.

He curls her fist to trap the kiss inside, and he says, in a voice of deep sincerity, “It’s been a pleasure, Miss Medeiro. Until we meet again?”

“Yes,” she answers breathlessly, and for the rest of the day, at least six inches of air exist between Bianca’s feet and the ground beneath them. When she settles into bed that night, she cannot sleep. She presses her palm to her lips—she hasn’t washed that blessed hand, of course not—and thinks, At last, at last, it’s the sign that my life has truly begun.

This time, she does not cross herself.

1951 (Miranda Schuyler)1.

ON THE MORNING of my mother’s wedding, I watched a pair of lobster boats crawl across the sea outside my bedroom window, setting their pots while the sun rose. They were some distance apart, one to the east of the Flood Rock lighthouse and one to the west, and I wouldn’t have known they were lobstermen—I knew nothing about fishing in those days—except that I had a pair of binoculars, and I saw them dropping the pots, one by one, from the sterns of their boats. Each pot was attached to a rope, and at the end of the rope was a colored buoy that bobbed cheerfully in the water as the vessel pulled away.

Behind me, my mother stirred. “Is that you, Miranda?” she asked, in a slurred, sleepy voice.

“Yes.”

“What time is it?”

“Only five thirty. Go back to sleep, Mama.”

“What”—mumbling—“so early?”

“Watching the lobster boats.”

She sighed and grunted, the way you do when you’re still half-asleep, and you settle yourself gratefully back on a pillow and close your eyes. “Strange girl, Miranda,” she muttered.

I wondered if she remembered she was getting married today. Sometimes when you sleep deeply enough, you forget everything you ever knew, even your own name, and Winthrop Island is possibly the quietest place in the world at night, except for the pulse of the ocean: so black and velvet that sleep comes as easy as that, as closing your eyes. You fall and fall, like an anchor that finds no bottom, and I don’t believe I have ever again slept as I slept throughout that summer of 1951, in my bedroom at my stepfather’s sprawling house on the Island.

Except, on that morning at the beginning of June, the morning of Mama’s wedding, Hugh Fisher wasn’t quite my stepfather. The fateful summer still lay before me, a reel of film waiting to unspool, and how could I know that I was right now witnessing its first momentous scene? I mean, you never do suspect what inconsequential event will change the course of your life. This particular morning, I only thought about the wedding to come. That was the affair of the day, wasn’t it? The great occasion? Instead of sleeping deeply, I’d woken at dawn after a restless night, and now I knelt by the window, holding the binoculars to my eyes as the lobstermen labored on the water, and the sun climbed drowsily above the ocean.

I watched the lighthouse change color, from violet to palest pink to gold, and the surrounding rocks emerge from shadow, and the little buoys multiply in long, bobbing lines behind the boats. I watched the lobstermen shift about. In the easternmost boat, there were two of them: one short and broad-shouldered, wearing a striped shirt and a knitted cap; the other taller and leaner and bareheaded, hauling the wooden cages into the water while his shipmate baited them.

In the second boat, the one to the west, there was only one old man. He moved slowly, dropping maybe one trap for every three from the other boat, and as the light grew I saw the bulge of his tattooed arms, the silvery beard that grizzled around his face. He was nearly bald and chewed a pipe, and in my head I named him Popeye. I thought there was something awful and tragic about the way he baited each pot, attached line and buoy, and dragged it over the edge of the boat. Or maybe I only endowed him with those qualities in retrospect. Memory’s funny that way. At any rate, the eastern boat ran out of pots or something, because it turned around and started back for the harbor, disappearing behind the Flood Rock lighthouse for an instant or two and then reappearing, its white sides brilliant in the glare of the sun. At the same time the boat flashed back into view, Popeye was swinging another lobster pot over the side of his boat, and maybe a wave jogged him, or maybe he lost his footing, I don’t know. I’d returned my gaze to the other boat by then, and the lithe, bareheaded, carefree man who now stood at the wheel—a young man,

 arms and face richly tanned, curled hair whipping in the draft—so I never knew why Popeye went flying into the sea. I just saw the young man jolt, saw him turn his head and yell at his shipmate, saw him bend and yank off his rubber boots, and the next thing I knew he was diving into the water in a long, clean arc.

Now, I’ve heard many times that most fishermen don’t know how to swim, as a matter of superstition or something. If that’s true, this particular fisherman wasn’t the superstitious kind. A hundred yards is a long way to swim, especially in the cold northern waters of early June, but he swam them just like he was stroking laps in the YMCA pool, ...