The sons stepped behind their father. Robert had lost the habit of holding out his hand to shake, and as it turned out, a lot of people didn’t offer theirs either. Hamm Loose did, though, and Robert swiftly raised his own.
“Hamm Loose.” Hamm gestured to his sons. “Junior and Teeter.” He reached around and clapped Hamm Jr. on the shoulder.
“I’m Robert Circumstance.”
They all brightened—his name registered. They’d never called him for any landscaping. They knew him otherwise, probably as a criminal. He dropped his gaze and let them look him over. Then another check on Heidi. This time, she was looking over at him. That set off a chain of activity inside Robert’s body. He couldn’t yet see her across a distance without that happening. Emboldened, he said, “You’re not on the list.”
“We’re on James Wister’s list.”
Hamm wasn’t about to budge. Agnes had expected this, so Robert let them go in, afterward wiping his hand on his pants.
Maud noticed the Looses, too, but didn’t register who they were right away. She was preoccupied with tracking Clemmie’s trajectory across the field toward Robert, who was looking at her mother. Maud imagined she could see energy pulsing in the air between Heidi and Robert. Were they in love? No, it wasn’t that. Heidi could barely speak. What was it, then? Was friendship a big enough container? Polly said they were soul mates from way back. Maud had never liked that term, mostly because she had never felt it herself—true love. Not yet, at least.
“Robert!” Maud prompted and pointed. He followed the line of her attention and spotted Clemmie in time to hook his hands under her armpits and swing her high. Her father, Moses Silver, had done that. Maud rode up on his shoulders through Washington Square, and sometimes she flew parallel to the floor with his feet pressed into her stomach. An airplane. Clemmie liked to play with Robert’s hands, and that interest came back to Maud, too—working hard to undo Moses’s alligator watch band, and just as hard to break him with Indian sunburns. Learning by looking into his placid face not to show her own pain when the kids at school gave Indian sunburns to her. Counting the hairs on his wrist, pretending to shave the hairs on his leg with a twig, laying her head on his heart and listening to it lub dub, lub dub, lub dub. The male body like another country. Maud paced over the grass and peeled Clemmie off of Robert so he could go back to greeting his guests. Clemmie wanted to walk Hope around the field, and Maud agreed to that. Once again she showed Clemmie how to hold the leash. Clemmie tucked her chin and focused. They passed by the Looses, who paid no attention to the child or the dog, so Maud had no reason to pay attention to them. They passed by Polly, too, who had a ghastly look on her face.
A phrase came to Polly’s mind. She didn’t believe they would try it on. Edith Wharton. James hadn’t said anything about his plans to betray Agnes by collaborating with the Looses, but then he’d never said anything about what he planned for the future of the Point—they all knew. Still, Polly had hoped he’d change his mind. Hadn’t she taught James to love this place for what it was, or had she shared too much of her feeling with Agnes alone? She rubbed her arms and wished she had her sweater, which she’d left at one of the tables. She calculated the route she’d have to take to reach it and whether she could do so without having to encounter the intruders. For that was what the Looses were, even if James or Archie had invited them. Of course they’d come. People had no manners anymore, or even a notion of their utility—how good manners evened out the imbalances between personalities, how they bolstered the shy by making it clear what to do, and how they held the aggressive in check. Polly had lived her life by manners, and over time had boiled her philosophy down to one precept: in every minute make the world beautiful. She’d gotten bolder about saying this aloud. When she told the M girls, she squared her shoulders to absorb the expected laughter, but they’d nodded and said, “Yeah, that’s what you do.” Which gave her a boost. A person who lived by those intentions should surely be able to handle a conversation with the Looses on her way to get her sweater. But Archie rushed toward them and guided them toward the bar. Polly fetched her sweater and looked around for Agnes. There she was—slipping into the woods. Skipping out on her own party. That’s fine, Polly decided. Let her. She spotted a long-time-no-see friend and went over to chat.
At the end of the official stretch of Point Path, where the gravel gave way to the grass in an uneven line—like the kelp demarcation on the beach showing how far the cold hand of water had reached onto the land—Agnes removed her sandals. As long as she didn’t step on a snake, she’d be all right. Lachlan had taught the children to toughen up the soles of their feet as soon as they arrived in Maine every summer. Grace had met that plan with one of her thin-lipped grimaces, and Agnes had laughed along with her father when he said, “Grace, you’re pomping!” He’d invented that word for how Grace filtered her opinions through her snobbery. He was only teasing, but Grace never budged. The children sided with Lachlan and went out to the beach and toughened their feet by numbing them in cold water and then walking over the stones. Agnes still did so, every May.
She picked up her sandals and stuffed them under the waistband at her back. Her arches cupped over the tree roots, and the fallen fir needles pricked. But she was ready for them—her feet were hooves. When she and Maud and Heidi lay on the chaises on the porch after lunch, dozing and dreaming airy grilled cheese dreams, Clemmie played with Agnes’s feet, poking at them with her spoon and drawing on them with crayons, and sometimes Agnes played along and emitted a long howl that built in intensity to a high finish, making Clemmie chuckle like a Buddha. They’d all agreed, along with Dr. Goodman at Friends Hospital, not to rush Heidi. If pushed too hard, her memories might come too fast or become permanently lodged below the surface, and either way, she might… It was unclear what exactly, but it wasn’t good. So they waited. It was hard. If Heidi could grasp that she was a Reed, she could vote her share of the Fellowship, and Agnes could go ahead with her plan to give the Sank to a land trust. But Heidi’s health was more important, just as Robert’s freedom was more important. Still, the thought of the Point becoming a marina hurt Agnes’s heart. But she had to accept it. And no time like the present.
When no one had come down Point Path for a few minutes, Robert left his post and joined the party. Hope, still tethered to Clemmie, looked over at him. He nodded at the dog, who nodded back, a transaction not everyone present would agree was possible. Yet don’t the things that happened define what is possible? As Agnes said, humans had no right to believe they were the superior species until they figured out how to understand the languages of animals and plants. Robert thought that made sense.
He went over to retrieve Hope, but Clemmie wanted to stay with her longer, so Robert told Maud he’d watch them and she could be a free agent. He walked them over to the bar table and asked for a club soda for himself and a ginger ale for Clemmie. He’d have a drink when the party was over. He turned around and watched Heidi smile and pull her hair back from her face. She was graying now, as was he, adding to the demographic of what Agnes said was the state hair color of Maine. Robert liked looking at Heidi from a distance. No, he’d never believed she was dead. Nor had he given himself much leeway for grieving. He wouldn’t have known how. Children weren’t thought to take things to heart, and his attachment to Nan was a mystery anyway. No one discussed her disappearance from the Point with him. He pictured her in New York City living a life like Eloise. His family moved off the Point that spring, and it wasn’t for many years that he was back there with leisure time enough to walk around. To his shock, he came across a gravestone with Nan’s name on it, next to her father’s. Virgil Reed and Nan Reed. Recently Agnes had told Robert and Heidi that they’d had hot chocolate and cookies together often when they were small. Robert couldn’t remember, much less Heidi, but they were telling her little things like that. Agnes told them how helpful he’d been after Nan’s accident, how he figured out ingenious ways of getting her to exercise. He remembered a little of that—Nan in bed in a downstairs room, a situation he found foreign and enviable. He remembered playing with her, and how fun she’d been, and how determined. She still had her limp. He’d have recognized it anywhere. Heidi only said she always wondered why she limped.