All children on the island, those from both families as well as any guests, were required to eat and sleep in the Cottage, a somewhat smaller and much less grand structure built for the warehousing of offspring. It sat by the water, against the forest, opposite the immense bulwark and the dock; the exterior was respectable enough, but inside it was a warrenlike arrangement of bunk rooms, bathrooms, and tables. To her mind, this type of separation was a terrible idea, but the tradition was entrenched and not open to debate. The boys especially would stay up all night, passing out on bare floors just to avoid the abject surrender of going to bed. They woke up late and missed meals, or, as happened yesterday, wonderful trips to see the eagles’ nest that Edward Peck the boatman had spotted along the shore of Baffin Island. Although the Old Man rarely came downstairs before noon, he was furious if he heard of anyone in any house asleep after eight A.M. Like thoroughbreds, he said, children must run fast to be of any use at all.
Looking back up the hill at the magnificent windows all lit up, Lila was sure that no one had ever imagined a better place for a house, for two houses, for a farm. For summertime. It made her happy to think that at some point all of this was a vast entropy of forest. She thought of the time, the unrelenting work it had taken even just to clear the timber from one little parcel at the start of it all, so many years ago—who had come, initially, to break the back of the wilderness? He would have stood not far from where she was right now, would have pointed and said here—and then swung the ax. That man could never have imagined everything that followed. He could not have foreseen that she, Lila Hillsinger, would be standing here hundreds of years later, barefoot in a summer dress. That first man would have had to hire teams, feed and shelter them, fight off mosquitoes, mill the lumber, survey, dig foundations, raise walls—finally!—and then, when that first house was built, only then would they have brought out the chairs and tables and other furniture, the sheets and pillows, all from the mainland, all brought on barges due to the shallowness of the harbor. And then, only once all of that was in place and the early fear and labor was forgotten or suppressed—only then could the fragile skin of civilization be stretched over it: the silverware and candles, the china sets, the mythologies, the endless bottles of wine. These dinners on Seven, she thought, were the desperate work of generations.
Lila walked slowly and stopped often, her mind floating, in love with the sensation of drift. She passed the small, sad, disused fountain by the water—one of Diana’s grand projects—and thought for the millionth time about that other night by a fountain, the one in Merion, years ago, when she had first met Jim. She knew that meeting down to the small details, like a poem one has memorized, and she returned to it often, as one does to scenes of early happiness: searching, weighing pauses and inflections, parsing the silence, trying to see if those first thirty seconds of their common life might not contain in embryo or coded form some prophecy, a liberating secret, if only she could understand it in the right way.
He had surprised her. She had not heard what he said at first, not really: some joke, an introduction; she had smiled, as she did, as much in defense as invitation. It had been a moment much like this: Lila separate from a crowd, her time unleashed, standing by the grass tennis courts that smelled like someone’s favorite thing about summer. Jim was confident, direct, handsome in the Classical manner like a Roman statue. And then he had another, more haunting quality, one whose impact was both more immediate and more devastating: he was aware of people watching, even when no one was there. It was not that he was disingenuous or somehow performing—in fact the opposite; if anything he was too authentic—but rather that his aura, his whole manner, implied an audience. He seemed convinced that every word and gesture would be noted and measured elsewhere, that they mattered, that even his actions here tonight—at the Merion Cricket Club, of all places—would have a distinct impact on the welfare of the universe. That, Lila had never seen. So to be chosen by him—and the choosing was understood right away, to his credit Jim was not ambiguous about that—was also for better or worse somewhat like being cheered by a multitude, a sudden and surprising thing that lived on the border between fear and joy.
That night, she had said no to nearly every question he’d asked. She’d lied about the color of her eyes. It was perverse, but somehow it kept her from being overwhelmed. She also refused to give him her phone number, despite finding herself outrageously happy, attracted, thrilled—fulfilled, almost, as in the sense of a premonition, as if here before her was the exact man she had been waiting for. Jim found out her number, of course, and soon the train was at full speed. Lila was delighted; her friends were delighted; her mother was delighted. Lila’s father knew people who knew Jim’s family, and the reports back were glowing, almost reverent. There was talk of destiny.
In the days and weeks that followed, some part of her did hold back; she had reservations, although small ones by any reckoning. The Seven Island connection was almost too close vis-à-vis her sister. Jim would say only, about what he did, that he worked for the government. There was, perhaps, something not entirely warm hidden beneath his wonderful charm. And yet he was so tall, she had thought, laughing at herself, and it became a sort of comic mantra, a patchwork over any half-acknowledged sins. As things progressed, Lila began to feel an unfamiliar sense of surrender, as if decisions were being made by forces outside her control. Surely everyone felt that way when they got married.
Off to her right, the pines sat impossibly high up on Indian Head. At the edge of the Seven harbor, the graceful curve of the shore rose into a hill and then became cliffs. Behind the cliffs, she knew, lay a long stretch of unbroken forest, and then eventually the gray Atlantic. Some part of the old, aboriginal silence remained in those far reaches of Seven, miles away from the houses, in the parts exposed to the open sea. There was something out there one never felt in cities, a monumental presence—a heartbeat without a heart—matched by an equally spectacular indifference. Lila had walked all the way out there on three occasions, alone, each time a commitment of several hours. Each time she had been afraid.
She stopped by the steps of the Cottage, hoping to hear before she went in one more gong from the harbor bellbuoy, her bellbuoy, the one to whom, when she had come here as a newlywed, she had laughingly assigned the keeping of her soul. She leaned forward to listen. The sea was flat; the bell was quiet. A low hum rose up from behind her, and at first she thought it was a stray goose or a trick of the wind, but no—it was something else. There was a faint rhythm of speech, the bare thread of a voice. It came from the Cottage, where all the children should have been asleep. Lila climbed the steps to the porch, and the low sound grew to a whisper. And then she knew whose voice it was.
6
December 1941
Park Avenue, New York City