Elena poked her cane into the sand and leaned on it, her face turned toward the sea.

"Have you ever noticed," she said, "how sometimes the sea seems famished? The waves come in with this craven appet.i.te for the sh.o.r.e, gobbling it up. And then, at other times, they seem completely satisfied, small, halfhearted, sort of playing with their food."

I a.s.sumed a mock-oratorical stance. "Yet winds to seas are reconciled at length, and sea to sh.o.r.e."

Elena smiled. "What"s that from?"

"Samson Agonistes."

She tucked her hand under my arm. "You always were a good quoter, William. Always had a very retentive mind. Would you believe it, I couldn"t quote a single sustained piece of verse."

"Not even your own?"

"Possibly a few of my own," Elena admitted. "But you know, Martha wrote me a letter a few days ago. She was asking about some interpretation of a line I had written. I couldn"t remember what the line was from. I had to look it up. It took me almost an hour to find it."

"Do you hear from Martha often?"

"When she hits a snag."

"Are there many of those?"

"A few."

"Perhaps she"ll make an enigma of you."

Elena said nothing. Instead she looked out toward the sea again, then left and right down the beach.

"Which way should we walk?" she asked.

"Whatever suits you."

She lifted the cane to the right.

"Let"s go that way, then. Toward the jetty."

We moved closer to the edge of the water, where the sand was more tightly packed and easier to walk on.

It was one of those curious coastal days when the sky, though clear, seems faintly overcast, the usual blue giving way to a strange light gray which somewhat darkens the air without detracting from its clarity. It was windless, and the bay was a sheet of smoked gla.s.s.

I held Elena gently by her arm as we walked. She seemed thinner than I remembered. Her shawl had given her a bulk she no longer possessed.

"How far along is Martha on the biography?" I asked casually.

"She"s at work on that period when you were off at college and I was home with Mother," Elena said. She tugged her arm from my hand. "I need it free," she said. "For balance."

"When does she think she"ll finish it?"

"I don"t know. Perhaps another two years or so," Elena said. She stopped and gazed out toward the bay. The monument at Province-town could be seen very hazily across the water. She seemed entranced by the look of it, the lean gray tower rising out of the sea.

"That time when I was away at college," I said. "Does Martha think it important?"

"I don"t know," Elena said.

We began walking again. Far ahead, the stone jetty stretched out into the water, then disappeared. It looked like the remains of some once-exalted dream, to ring the world with one rocky band.

"I remember the way you looked when the train pulled away from the station in Standhope," I said.

"And how did I look then?"

"Forlorn, my dear, terribly forlorn. But you looked even worse six months later when I came back."

"It had been rather difficult, those first months alone with Mother," Elena said.

"You looked very tired."

"I probably was," Elena admitted. "But you, William, when you got off that train, you looked like a new man."

"In a way, that"s what I was," I said. Which was true enough. Meeting Harry, Sam, and the rest of them had changed me quite a bit in a remarkably short time. I had gotten roaring drunk with Sam, criticized one of Tom"s poems, talked until dawn with Harry about the place of the patron in the arts, and given Mary a long, lingering kiss in a darkened movie theater.

Elena was looking out across the bay again. "It"s very beautiful when it"s calm. It could be anywhere in the world, some inlet off the China Sea."

"Yes, very beautiful," I said, but my mind was still on the day I returned to Standhope. "You met me at the station when I came back, remember? You brought me flowers, dandelions and daisies."

"A little girl"s offering," Elena said dully.

"I wouldn"t say so," I told her. "I was very touched."

Elena waved her hand. "Well, it seemed the least I could do, given Mother"s condition."

She had declined rather alarmingly during the last six months. I had left her on the porch, nibbling ice. She had been able to understand that I was going away and had even wished me luck, though she did not know exactly in what regard.

"She had that vacant look when I came back," I said as we continued walking toward the jetty. "A very vacant look. No information going in, no information coming out. It was like someone had pulled a plug."

"By then," Elena said, pulling her shawl around her shoulders more tightly, "she had begun to sink into herself completely. She never came out again."

I shook my head. "I think she should have run away, Elena, taken some wild Italian lover."

"Perhaps she might have, if we had not been born," Elena said. "She might have run off with someone like that, gone with him to an island in the Aegean Sea. Grown old there." She looked at me. "Grown old like us, and walked by the sea and dreamed of all she could have had if she"d just settled down in a small New England town and not madly run away with an Italian lover."

I stopped and looked at her closely. "You could have chosen Whit man House for her."

"I did, eventually."

"I mean at first," I said. "That"s what Father wanted from the beginning."

"But not me, William," Elena said. "I might have gone along with him, but then he started that business of moving me in with Aunt Hattie, moving to Pawtucket." Her eyes narrowed. "I knew one thing: mother might end up in Whitman, but her only daughter was not going to end up in Pawtucket."

"You still did your duty, Elena," I told her. "You stayed with her those four years."

Elena moved away from me. The tide was coming in. She dipped her cane into the water as she walked along.

"Martha wants to know a great deal about mother"s insanity," she said.

"Yes, I suppose she does."

"I feel very remote from all that, as if it were a part of someone else"s life."

"That"s what youth is, Elena," I told her, "the part that feels unreal."

Elena looked at me pointedly. "But it was real, her madness. You weren"t so detached the day you came home."

"I was furious," I said. Even at that moment, on so subdued a day, I could still feel the anger that had risen in me when I saw my mother. "She was so helpless by then, completely helpless. And he hadn"t even been back to see her more than once or twice. Just that check in the mail every Wednesday, with those notes, the ones you showed me. "Keep Smiling. Dad.""

Elena said nothing.

"Of course, I hadn"t come back either, had I?"

"No."

"But you hadn"t let me know how bad off she was, how much of a burden to you," I said emphatically. "He"d been back. He"d seen her. He"d seen you. He was a husband, and a father. He had responsibilities."

"And so you went to see him in New York," Elena said, "to discuss his responsibilities, to have it out with him, once and for all."

"Yes, once and for all," I said. "I was going to tell that b.a.s.t.a.r.d that he had to help you, and his wife." I kicked at a broken sh.e.l.l, sending it skipping across the sand. "We met in his room when I got back to New York. He was dressed - can you believe this, Elena - he was dressed in a smoking jacket. Lord of all he surveyed, that little room with the plaid curtains, the mock-colonial bed and desk, the chest of drawers with the rollers under each leg."

"He was given that room by mistake, William," Elena said.

I stopped. "He told you about it? About that meeting we had?"

"Yes," Elena said. "He said that the two of you had a talk in this dingy little room he"d been a.s.signed by mistake."

We began moving down the beach again. Elena allowed the tip of her cane to dance along the flattened sand.

"Well, he poured us both a little drink," I said. "Then he sat down on the edge of the bed and asked me how I was doing in school. I told him I was doing fine."

"Which was true enough," Elena said.

"Yes. And so we began to talk about life at the university and all that," I said. And I began to fall in love again with the life I had at college, with all my new friends, with the world that the university was opening up for me, and as I talked to him, it became very clear to me that I would do nothing whatsoever to endanger that life.

"And he enjoyed hearing about it, William," Elena said. "He told me he did."

"Yes, well, the problem is that I had not gone to discuss the life of the undergraduate in America," I said. "I had gone to talk to him about our mother, and about you, about the whole intolerable situation back in Standhope."

"Of course," Elena said lightly.

I glanced away for a moment, allowing my eyes to scan the bay. Then I looked at Elena.

"But of course, I never mentioned our mother once, or you, except in pa.s.sing, or Standhope, other than that I had had a pleasant trip home. That"s what I called it, Elena, pleasant trip."

Elena said nothing. She continued to walk steadily, her eyes latched to the jetty up ahead.

"And since you seem to know everything else," I said, "you probably know why I kept my mouth shut about the real reason for my coming to see him."

Elena was silent. Her cane tripped along beside her like a third, stiffened leg.

"Well, it became obvious that those little checks that arrived at Standhope every week were not the only ones he was writing. There were those other ones, too, the ones coming to me at Columbia, the ones that were making my current happiness possible."

Elena still said nothing. She kept her eyes straight ahead.

I stopped. "Well, do you want this to be a full confession?" I asked. "A real mea culpa, from my heart?"

Elena poked the tip of her cane at the water"s edge. "No need for such dramatics. I"ve always known what happened between you and Father."

"In every detail, evidently," I said. "Look, Elena, I know it wasn"t easy for you, cooped up with Mother. I knew it wasn"t easy, believe me. But to tell you the truth, I"m just too old for another bout of self-loathing. It would turn my bones all soggy."

Elena placed her open hand against my cheek. "You"re like the narrator of The Good Soldier, William, always telling sad stories, made all the sadder by your naivete."

I stepped back. "What do you mean?"

"You think being alone with Mother was a terrible burden for me?" Elena asked. "It wasn"t. It was a great release. Mother"s insanity gave me all the freedom I could have wished for in Standhope."

"You"re joking."

Elena shook her head. "No."

"But all the work, all that daily drudgery. What about that?"

"The freedom was worth it," Elena said firmly.

Suddenly I remembered that in one of Elena"s poems, "Nocturne," a young owl realizes with infinite delight that it is released, rather than constricted, by the night.

"But all the work fell to you," I insisted. "Just living in that house all the time, it must have been dreadful."

"I didn"t live there all the time."

"You didn"t?"

"No."

"Where on earth did you live?" I asked, astonished.

"I went traveling."

My mouth dropped open. "Traveling? With whom?"

"With Father."

"Traveling with Father? And what, if I may ask, did you two musketeers do with Our Lady of the Blank Stare during this time?"