you say she’s not coming to visit the island this summer?”
“She never comes,” Webster Pommeroy said abruptly. “I don’t know why everybody keeps talking about her.”
That stopped the conversation. The threesome did not talk for a long while, and then Ruth said, “Mr. Ellis really came out here on April eighteenth?”
“He really did,” the Senator said.
This was unusual news, even astonishing. The Ellis family came to Fort Niles Island on the third Saturday of June, and they had been doing so since the third Saturday of June 1883. They lived the rest of the year in Concord, New Hampshire. The original Ellis patriarch, Dr. Jules Ellis, had started the practice in 1883, moving his growing family to the island in the summers to get away from the diseases of the city, and also to keep an eye on his granite company. It was not known to any of the locals what kind of doctor Dr. Jules Ellis was, exactly. He certainly didn’t act like a physician. He acted rather like a captain of industry. But that was during a different era, as Senator Simon liked to point out, when a man could be many things. This was back when a man could wear many hats.
None of the natives on Fort Niles liked the Ellis family, but it was an odd point of pride that Dr. Ellis had elected to build Ellis House on Fort Niles and not on Courne Haven, where the Ellis Granite Company was also at work. This point of pride had little actual value; the islanders should not have been flattered. Dr. Jules Ellis had chosen Fort Niles for his home not because he liked that island better. He had selected it because, by building Ellis House on the island’s high, east-facing cliffs, he could keep an eye on both Fort Niles and Courne Haven, right across Worthy Channel. He could live atop one island and watch the other carefully and also enjoy the advantage of keeping an eye on the rising sun.
During the reign of Dr. Jules Ellis, summertime would bring quite a crowd to Fort Niles Island. In time, there were five Ellis children arriving every summer, together with numerous members of the extended Ellis family, a continuing rotation of well-dressed Ellis summer guests and business associates, and a summer household staff of sixteen Ellis servants. The servants would bring the Ellis summer household necessities up from Concord on trains and then over on boats. On the third Saturday of June, the servants would appear at the docks, unloading trunks and trunks of summer china and linens and crystal and curtains. In photographs, these piles of trunks resemble structures in themselves, looking like awkward buildings. This enormous event, the arrival of the Ellis family, lent great importance to the third Saturday of June.
The Ellises’ servants also brought across on boats several riding horses for the summer. Ellis House had a fine stable, in addition to a well-cultivated rose garden, a ballroom, an icehouse, guest cottages, a lawn tennis court, and a goldfish pond. The family and their friends, on Fort Niles Island for the summer, indulged themselves in sundry forms of recreation. And at the end of the summer, on the second Saturday of September, Dr. Ellis, his wife, his five children, his riding horses, his sixteen servants, his guests, the silver, the china, the linens, the crystal, and the curtains would leave. The family and servants would crowd onto their ferry, and the goods would be packed into the towering stacks of trunks, and everything and everyone would be shipped back to Concord, New Hampshire, for the winter.
But all this was long ago. This mighty production had not taken place for years.
By Ruth Thomas’s nineteenth summer, in 1976, the only Ellis who still came to Fort Niles Island was Dr. Jules Ellis’s eldest son, Lanford Ellis. He was ancient. He was ninety-four years old.
All of Dr. Jules Ellis’s other children, save one daughter, were dead. There were grandchildren and even great-grandchildren of Dr. Ellis who might have enjoyed the great house on Fort Niles, but Lanford Ellis disliked and disapproved of them, and he kept them away. It was his right. The house was entirely his; he alone had inherited it. Mr. Lanford Ellis’s one surviving sibling, Vera Ellis, was the only family member for whom he cared, but Vera Ellis had stopped coming to the island ten summers earlier. She considered herself too frail to make the trip. She considered herself in poor