Just then Billy himself entered the Hill House living room, and everyone turned toward him. No one asked why he was in the wrong house, uninvited, holding a copy of A Field Guide to Birds.
“Ah, Billy—you’re an honest man,” the Old Man said. “Wouldn’t you agree—”
“Dad,” Jim Hillsinger said.
Hillsinger had silenced the Old Man with just the one syllable. This is promising, Wilkie thought. He happened to be looking at Lila when Jim spoke, and that one word had also called her back from some phantasmagoria of her own.
“Billy,” Hillsinger said, “I wonder if you can help us decide something.”
“Certainly,” Billy said. “Hello, John.”
“Hello, Billy.”
“Do you think, Billy,” the Old Man said, declining further silence, “that there is any benefit to be had from spending a night alone out on Baffin Island?”
Oh my God, Lila thought. Not this again.
Every year, at least once, the Old Man aired the idea of someone’s going to Baffin for the night. He never said who it would be or when they would go, although it was quite clear that it would never be him. These Baffin jags would then decay into wandering lectures on beaver habitat, the velocity of glaciers, or the sad state of the Spanish Left. The Great Lie of the Sino-Soviet split. Lila hoped that there would be less of this sort of thing when they were back in New York, where no one she knew had ever heard of Laos.
“Benefit who?” Billy said.
“Does it matter?” Hillsinger said.
“Absolutely.”
“Say a young man,” the Old Man said.
“Which young man?”
“Ah,” the Old Man said, in a poor imitation of spontaneous thought, “say someone young enough for the experience to be useful, and yet old enough to survive it.”
“Say Catta, for example,” Jim said.
Lila had not been listening; she was looking at the fire. Had they said Catta?
Baffin was the largest of the minor islands in the Seven archipelago. It lay close by, just across a wide channel from Seven, but despite that it was the most forbidding, wild, and neglected part of the chain. Alone among the islands, it had no open spaces, and the trees and undergrowth were said to be too dense for walking. According to Cyrus, it was the only one of the five islands never to be inhabited, that there were no buildings or ruins or shell heaps, no trails and no water. The children and some of the staff said there were ghosts. How so much was known, when apparently no one had ever been past the tree line, was a mystery to her.
In any case, that savage register of theirs, the talk of Baffin and force multipliers and psychological war, should all be saved for phantoms and the learned journals; they could not speak like that about her children, not even theoretically or in jest. Catta was a real boy, who bled when he fell down.
Lila had met Allen Dulles once, when he was still Director of the CIA. It was at a Christmas party, and Mr. Dulles, the great keeper of secrets, had been holding eggnog and a plateful of pink sugar cookies. The image had stayed with her. Your husband, Dulles had said, has remarkable and terrifying patience. Lila did not know what that meant, really—the Director had said it cheerfully enough—but, to her shame, it had frightened her. It made her think of sleeplessness and ropes, of drifts of snow.
“I think Catta could survive ten nights in the wilderness, or for that matter fifty,” Billy said.
“It’s a question of education,” Hillsinger said.
“What are we teaching?”
“Victory,” the Old Man said.
“The owls of Baffin,” Billy said, “have no army to speak of.”
Wilkie laughed out loud, and the Old Man exhaled pointedly.
“So, Billy,” Hillsinger said, almost offhandedly, “would you say we’re winning?”
That, Wilkie thought, was a dangerous question. In the somewhat arcane policy circles of Washington and certain parts of New York, the wrong answer to that question would be used to discredit everything a person might say in the future.
“Gah!” the Old Man said, seemingly unable to restrain himself. “Catta knows nothing. We need more men, better men. If we can’t find them, then we need to make them ourselves.”
Billy just laughed. He turned to the Old Man.
“Would you mind,” Billy said, “if I borrow your Audubon for the night? I have unidentified birds nesting in my porch.”
“Be my guest.”
Lila could not, for the moment, look at either her husband or Billy Quick. She focused all of her attention on the little ceramic owl that sat on the mantelpiece. It was amazingly ugly, with outsized eyes. She had tried several times to throw it away, but Diana Hillsinger harbored a misguided love for it.
“Mr. Hillsinger,” she finally said to the Old Man, adopting her most refined persona, her mode of unfeigned supplication. Billy Quick, who had risen to leave, stopped and turned back.
“I’m sure I’ve heard you say,” she continued, “that the gulag is better at manufacturing corpses than soldiers.”
“Far better, my dear,” the Old Man said. “But we shouldn’t confuse the vaccine with the virus.”
That was enough. Lila stood up and walked outside.
10
August 1953
Seven Island, Maine
Once John Wilkie had come to believe that Seven Island was impossible, he set about understanding why it was not. On that first trip fifteen years ago, he had spent a damp afternoon in the New House library with a pile of self-published histories of Seven Island written by family members at different points in time.
Most of them began with Elijah Hillsinger, one of the two quasi-founders of Seven Island. In the late 1760s, before the Revolution—when Maine was still a part of Massachusetts Colony—Hillsinger was a small timber merchant outside of Boston. He had a few rakish years before discovering God and his wife, Amity, at roughly the same time. Luther Shipley, a friend from his pagan days, had suffered gambling losses and needed ready cash, which the now-temperate Hillsinger gave him in return for Shipley’s title to timber grants near the small township of Jennings. Closer to Boston, both forests and workers were more expensive, and Hillsinger saw opportunity in the dual land-labor arbitrage.