stand, there was no defense at all."

"In that same month last year, July, Callista took an apartment in Winchester, at 21 Covent Street."

"Another family is involved, a family now broken up by murder. When James Doherty, originally from Massachusetts, met and married Ann Pierce in Philadelphia, he was twenty-seven."

"Callista had a garden too; she poured ice-water in it." 

"Two rows behind Edith he saw without pleasure the angular haunted features of James Doherty, and the opaque calm of the black-clad man on Doherty's left."

"Those properties are on the outskirts of Shanesville proper. You go out Walton Road about three miles beyond the city line. There's a fork, and the right branch, Summer Avenue, reaches the village limits of Shanesville in a mile; Walton Road runs on south to Emmetville, Pritchett, other towns at the south end of the county."

"And that night, Warner remembered, the night of Ann Doherty's death and of Callista's longer and stranger ordeal, he had been at Mrs. Willoughby's discreet establishment on River Street, sharing a well-perfumed sheet with one of her young professionals."T. J. Hunter was still pausing over a drink of water. Warner remembered--old things mainly, their intensity dissolved by distance in time; remembered, under the illusion of detachment that can make existence appear truly like a river, yourself able to look back upstream at nearly forgotten vistas: trees, meadow and town, eddies, dubious shoreline, floating trash. Warner shielded his face with his hand, closing away even Callista, as he had found he must sometimes do.

Boyhood was the sound of ocean, medicinal reek of kelp washed in on the night tide to wait for bare feet and a poking stick. It was the breakers, green ridges advancing out of the ever-distressed Atlantic and growing a snowy froth, never pausing yet seeming to pause when the froth spilled over the crest. Then a toppling, crash, inward flow. A receding; a mysterious acceptance of an end, soft hiss and sigh and aftermath, swirl of light water become thin and harmless on the sand.

Boyhood was fishing boats and Montauk Light, gravely busy clam-diggers, Manuelo whom Cecil wasn't supposed to play with. It was the unseen journey of hollow-voiced titans in the fog; pressure and majestic riot of storm. It was an afternoon of watching the disappearance of an unknown sail over the southern curve of the earth. 

 Prev. P 17/264 next