“It’s Willemina,” Billie answers, the name spooling off her lips in a pleased and practiced way.
“I named her for my mother,” I say, glancing at Thomas. He drains his wineglass and puts it on the table.
“My mom calls me Billie because Willemina is too old,” she adds.
“Fashioned,” I say.
“I think Willemina is a pretty name,” Adaline says. Her hair is rolled at the sides and caught at the back with a clip. Billie stands on her chair and tilts her head to examine the rolls and the way they seamlessly fold into the nape of Adaline’s neck.
Smuttynose is twenty-eight hundred feet east and west, and a thousand feet north and south. It consists of 27. I acres, almost all of which is rock. The elevation of the island is thirty feet.
Thomas is thin and stretched, and seems, physically, not to have enough leverage in life. I think that Thomas will probably be thin until he dies, stooped perhaps in the way some tall men become as they age. I know that it will be an elegant stoop. I am sure of that.
I wonder if Thomas is as sad as I am when he awakens in the mornings and hears Adaline and Rich in the forward cabin.
We are waiting for the check to come. Billie is standing next to me, coloring on a place mat. “Were you born in Ireland?” I ask Adaline.
“In the south of Ireland.”
The waitress brings the check. Thomas and Rich reach for it, but Thomas, distractedly, lets Rich have it.
“This assignment you’re on must be gruesome for you,” says Adaline. She begins to massage the back of Billie’s neck.
“I don’t know,” I say. “It seems so long ago. Actually, I wish I could get my hands on some old photographs.”
“You seem to have a lot of material,” Thomas says.
“It was foisted upon me,” I say, wondering why my voice contains a defensive note. “Though I must confess I find the accounts of the murders intriguing.”
Adaline reaches up and removes a gold hair clip from the back of her head. Her hair is multihued, a wood grain that curls slightly in the humidity, as does Billie’s. On the boat, Adaline most often wears her hair rolled at the back of her head or at the nape of her neck in intricate knots and coils that can be loosened with a single pin. Today, when she removes the clip, her hair falls the length of her back, swaying with the fall. The settling of all that hair, the surprising abundance of hair springing from a knot no bigger than a peach, seems, at the time, like a trick, a sleight of hand, for our benefit.
I look over at Thomas. He is breathing slowly. His face, which normally has high color, has gone pale. He seems stunned by the simple fall of hair from a knot-as though the image itself, or the memories it evokes, were unwanted news.
I do not have many personal photographs of Thomas. There are dozens of other pictures of him, photos of a public nature: book-jacket portraits, for example, and formal snapshots in magazines and newspapers. But in my own collection, Thomas has almost always managed to avert his eyes or to turn his head altogether, as if he did not want to be captured on any day at any place in time. I have, for instance, a picture of Thomas at a party at our apartment after Billie was born: Thomas is stooped slightly, speaking with a woman, another poet, who is also a friend. He has seen me coming with the camera, has dipped his head and has brought a glass up to his cheek, almost entirely obscuring his profile. In another photograph, Thomas is holding Billie on a bench in a park. Billie, perched on Thomas’s knee, seems already aware of the camera and is smiling broadly and clasping her tiny fists together with delight at this new activity, at this strange face that her mother has put on — one with a moving and briefly flickering eye. Thomas, however, has bent his head into Billie’s neck. Only his posture tells the viewer he is the father of the child.
For years I thought that Thomas avoided the camera because he has a scar that runs from the corner of his left eye to his chin — the result of a car accident when he was seventeen. It is