It was not as though she noted clearly that her nephews had not been to see her for ten years, not since their last journey eastward to witness their Uncle Izaak being lowered into the rocky soil;
that aside from due notification of certain major events in their lives (two marriages, two births, one divorce), Christmas and Easter cards of the traditional sort had been the only thin link she had with them through the widowed years.
Her thoughts were not discrete.
But there was a look about her mouth as though she were tasting lemons.

She grasped the chair arms and brought her thin body upright, like a bird alert for flight.
She turned and walked stiffly into the parlor to the dainty-legged escritoire, warped and cracked now from fifty years in an atmosphere of sea spray.
There she extracted two limp vellum sheets and wrote off the letters, one to Abel, one to Mark.

Once her trembling hand, with the pen grasped tight in it, was pressed against the paper the words came sharply, smoothly, as authoritatively as they would dropping from her own lips.
And the stiffly regal look of them, she saw grimly, lacked the quaver of age which, thwarting the efforts of her amazing will, ran through her spoken words like a thin ragged string.
"Please come down as soon as you conveniently can", the upright letters stalked from the broad-nibbed pen, "I have an important matter to discuss with you".
To Abel: "I am afraid there is not much to amuse small children here.
I should be obliged if you could make other arrangements for your daughters.
You may stay as long as you wish, of course, but if arranging for the care of the girls must take time into account, I think a day or two should be enough to finish our business in".
To Mark: "Please give my regards to Myra".

She signed the letters quickly, stamped them, and placed them on the hall table for Raphael to mail in town.
Then she went back to the wicker chair and resolutely adjusted her eyes to the glare on the water.

"My nephews will be coming down", she said that evening as Angelina brought her dinner into the dining room, the whole meal on a vast linen-covered tray.
She looked at the girl speculatively from eyes which had paled with the years;
from the early evening lights of them which had first startled Izaak to look at her in an uncousinly way, they had faded to a near-absence of color which had, possibly from her constant looking at the water, something of the light of the sea in them.

Angelina placed the tray on the table and with a flick of dark wrist drew off the cloth.
She smiled, and the teeth gleamed in her beautifully modeled olive face.
"That will be so nice for you, Mrs. Packard", she said.
Her voice was ripe and full and her teeth flashed again in Sicilian brilliance before the warm curved lips met and her mouth settled in repose.

"Um", said the old lady, and brought her eyes down to the tray.
"You remember them, I suppose"?
She glinted suspiciously at the dish before her: "blowfish.
I hope Raphael bought them whole".

Angelina stepped back, her eyes roaming the tray for omissions.
Then she looked at the old woman again, her eyes calm.

"Yes", she said, "I remember that they came here every summer.
I used to play with the older one sometimes, when he'd let me.
Abel"?
The name fell with lazy affectionate remembrance from her lips.
For an instant the old aunt felt something indefinable flash through her smile.
She would have said triumph.
Then Angelina turned and with an easy grace walked toward the kitchen.

Jessica Packard lifted her head and followed the retreating figure, her eyes resting nearly closed on the unself-conscious rise and fall of the rounded hips.
For a moment she held her face to the empty doorway;
then she snorted and groped for her fork.

There's no greater catastrophe in the universe, she reflected dourly, impaling tender green beans on the silver fork, than the dwindling away of a family.
Procreation, expansion, proliferation -- these are the laws of living things, with the penalty for not obeying them the ultimate in punishments: oblivion.
When the fate of the individual is visited on the group, then (the warm sweet butter dripped from her raised trembling fork and she pushed her head forward belligerently), ah, then the true bitterness of existence could be tasted.
And indeed the young garden beans were brackish in her mouth.

She was the last living of the older generation.
What had once been a widespread family -- at one time, she knew, there were enough Packards to populate an entire county -- had now narrowed down to the two boys, Abel and Mark.
She swung her eyes up to the blue of the window, her jaws gently mashing the bitter beans.
What hope lay in the nephews, she asked the intensifying light out there, with one married to a barren woman and the other divorced, having sired two girl children, with none to bear on the Packard name?

She ate.
It seemed to her, as it seemed each night, that the gloom drew itself in and became densest at the table's empty chairs, giving her the frequent illusion that she dined with shadows.
Here, too, she talked low, quirking her head at one or another of the places, most often at Izaak's armchair which faced her across the long table.
Or it might have been the absent nephews she addressed, consciously playing with the notion that this was one of the summers of their early years.

She thought again of her children, those two who had died young, before the later science which might have saved them could attach even a label to their separate malignancies.
The girl, her first, she barely remembered.
It could have been anyone's infant, for it had not survived the bassinet.
But the boy the boy had been alive yesterday.
Each successive movement in his growing was recorded on the unreeling film inside her.
He ran on his plump sticks of legs, freezing now and again into the sudden startled attitudes which the camera had caught and held on the paling photographs, all carefully placed and glued and labeled, resting in the fat plush album in the bottom drawer of the escritoire.
In the cruel clearness of her memory the boy remained unchanged, quick with the delight of laughter, and the pain with which she recalled that short destroyed childhood was still unendurable to her.
It was one with the desolate rocks and the alien water on those days when she hated the sea.

The brothers drove down together in Mark's small red sports car, Mark at the wheel.
They rarely spoke.
Abel sat and regarded the farm country which, spreading out from both sides of the road, rolled greenly up to where the silent white houses and long barns and silos nested into the tilled fields.
He saw the land with a stranger's eyes, all the old familiarness gone.
And it presented itself to him as it would to any stranger, impervious, complete in itself.
There was stability there, too -- a color which his life had had once.
That is what childhood is, he told himself.
Solid, settled lost.
In the stiff neutral lines of the telephone poles he saw the no-nonsense pen strokes of Aunt Jessica's letter.
What bad grace, what incredible selfishness he and Mark had shown.
The boyhood summers preceding their uncle's funeral might never have been.
They had closed over, absolutely, with the sealing of old Izaak's grave.
The small car flew on relentlessly.
The old woman, stubbornly reigning in the house above the crashing waters took on an ominous reality.
Abel moved and adjusted his long legs.

"I suppose it has to do with the property", Mark had said over the telephone when they had discussed their receipt of the letters.
Not until the words had been spoken did Abel suddenly see the old house and the insistent sea, and feel his contrition blotted out in one shameful moment of covetousness.
He and Mark were the last of the family, and there lay the Cape Ann property which had seemed to have no end, stretching from horizon to horizon, in those golden days of summer.

Now Abel turned his head to look at his brother.
Mark held the wheel loosely, but his fingers curved around it in a purposeful way and the deliberate set of his body spoke plainly of the figure he'd make in the years to come.
His sandy hair was already beginning to thin and recede at the sides, and Abel looked quickly away.
Mark easily looked years older than himself, settled, his world comfortably categorized.

The vacation traffic was becoming heavier as they approached the sea.
"She didn't mention bringing Myra", Mark said, maneuvering the car into the next lane.
"She's probably getting old -- crotchety, I mean -- and we figured uh-uh, better not.
They've never met, you know.
But Myra wouldn't budge without an express invitation.
I feel kind of bad about it".
He gave Abel a quick glance and moved closer to the wheel, hugging it to him, and Abel caught this briefest of allusions to guilt.

"I imagine the old girl hasn't missed us much", Mark added, his eyes on the road.
Abel ignored the half-expressed bid for confirmation.
He smiled.
It was barely possible that his brother was right.

He could tell they were approaching the sea.
The air took on a special strength now that they'd left the fecund warmth of the farmland behind.
There was the smell of the coast, like a primeval memory, composed of equal parts salt water, clams, seaweed and northern air.
He turned from the flying trees to look ahead and saw with an inward boy's eye again the great fieldstone house which, built on one of the many acres of ancestral land bordering the west harbor, had been Izaak's bride-gift to his cousin-wife as the last century ended.

Mark's thoughts must have been keeping silent pace beside his own, climbing the same crags in dirty white sneakers, clambering out on top of the headland and coming upon the sudden glinting water at the same instant.
"Remember the Starbird?"
Mark asked, and Abel lifted his eyes from the double lines in the middle of the road, the twin white ribbons which the car swallowed rapidly as it ascended the crest of the hill and came down.

"The Starbird," Abel said.
There was the day Uncle Izaak had, in an unexpected grandiose gesture, handed over the pretty sloop to Abel for keeps, on condition that he never fail to let his brother accompany him whenever younger the boy wished.
The two of them had developed into a remarkable sailing team all of this happening in a time of their lives when their youth and their brotherhood knitted them together as no other time or circumstance could.
They seemed then to have had a single mind and body, a mutuality which had been accepted with the fact of their youth, casually.
He saw the Starbird as she lay, her slender mast up and gently turning, its point describing constant languid circles against a cumulus sky.
Both of them had known the feeling of the small life in her waiting, ready, for the two of them to run up her sails.
The Starbird had been long at the bottom of the bay.

They came unexpectedly upon the sea.
Meeting it without preparation as they did, robbed of anticipation, a common disappointment seized them.
They were climbing the hill in the night when the headlights abruptly probed solid blackness, became two parallel luminous tubes which broadened out into a faint mist of light and ended.
Mark stopped the car and switched off the lights and they sat looking at the water, which, there being no moon out, at first could be distinguished from the sky only by an absence of stars.