He walked across the room to the small armchair by the window, where he sat down in silence. He did not look at them.
“Harriet,” Katharine said, but Harriet shook her own head stubbornly and said nothing.
During dinner no one spoke. The air was frozen, they could hardly breathe. The only sound was knife, fork, plate. Julia heard everyone swallow. Katharine closed her eyes while she drank from her water glass, her face a mask of grief. Julia would not be drawn in. She would not come to Harriet's public defense, when she had been so carefully excluded from Harriet's private plans. Julia hardened herself against her mother and her sister.
That night, when Julia heard Harriet come upstairs, Julia didn't open her door. Why had Harriet not told her? She heard Harriet go into her own room. Julia lay on her bed, listening, as Harriet moved quietly about. It seemed as though Harriet had deliberately jumped overboard, off the family ship, and now was being carried far out to sea. She was too far away to be saved, and it had been her own choice to jump.
As she heard the small noises of her sister, Julia's heart felt tight, compressed. She was furious at her sister for being so stupid—she agreed with Edward, Julia told herself. It was stupid to go to veterinary school, it was lowering your sights. Harriet was flying in the face of everything, and why should Julia take her side?
She felt virtuous and sensible about what she was doing, keeping herself quiet, keeping this distance between herself and the miscreant. But really she was hurt: Julia felt utterly betrayed by Harriet. She did not let herself admit this, nor did she admit that there was something terrible about what she had done.
Edward paid for Harriet's tuition at veterinary school, but he disparaged it. He did this lightly, as though he were only teasing, and in a way he actually was only teasing, but in a way he was not, and Harriet grew increasingly acerbic in response. Disapproving, resentful, Julia watched her defiant younger sister and kept her distance from both her and Katharine. She had taken sides, it would be dishonorable to renege.
Edward had triumphed that night, standing by the cold fireplace, and Katharine had been reduced to misery and silence. In a way this was familiar: Katharine was always in pain, and this was not to be discussed or even acknowledged, since there was nothing to be done about it. They put it from them, they had always done this.
It seemed that Edward's rationality was the way of the world, the way life had to be lived. Allying herself with her mother, her mother's pain, her mother's feelings, had been a part of Julia's childhood, but now she was pushing herself into adulthood. She disclaimed her younger, weaker self. She was trying to become adult, not to allow herself to be held by these terrible, painful chains of emotion. She began to withhold herself from her family, to keep a cool distance from all of them.
Harriet began to use the same acerbic tone to her sister that she used to her father. Harriet seemed scornful of every aspect of Julia's life—marriage, children, New York, teaching, the art world. Harriet did not get married, though she had a series of long-term boyfriends. Julia did not understand Harriet, who was so brisk and dismissive, so ironic and cool, so disengaged.
Now the sisters seldom saw each other, and when they talked, animosity seeped into their conversation like moisture into felt. Julia had dreaded calling Harriet, and it had been just as bad as she'd feared. It was strange, now, to remember the time when they were children, when they'd trusted each other, when they'd hidden together under the covers from their parents, thick as thieves.
After dinner they all went out to the back porch. Julia put the chairs in a row, and they sat watching the sky for shooting stars.
At first they could see nothing. The night around them was opaque, a dense and uninflected black. It held them muffled and sightless. Slowly their stares softened into gazes, and the nocturnal world emerged. The watchers became aware of the dark openness above the meadow, with the quiet shushing of the invisible water beyond, and gradually they could see the revelation of the starlit sky overhead, black, transparent, scattered with glitter, endlessly deep.
It wasn't possible, thought Julia, to imagine the sky as endless, whatever science said. You couldn't conceive of infinity. The mind balked and slid sideways—toward beauty, for example. She thought of painting the night sky, the problems of rendering the velvet quality, the depth. The transparency, and the endlessness: there it was again.
The air coming off the water was cool and damp, and Julia, shivering, went inside to get blankets. She brought out the heavy Hudson's Bays, which were coarse white wool with broad bold stripes of color. She liked these, liked them for both their actual substance and their romantic heritage.
The blankets had first been made in the eighteenth century by the English trading company. They'd been bartered for furs, in the northern reaches of Canada. Julia liked the picture: she imagined the Indians arriving at the trading post with their burden of supple, lustrous skins, and loading up with the heavy, handsome blankets, carrying them back into the silent forests. The green, glassy waters, the tall-masted ships dropping anchor in the wide bay. The stillness of that pristine landscape.
Now, of course, you were taught that any exchange between colonials and indigenous tribes was inequitable, but Julia chose to see the scene as benign. Blankets for furs was not a bad trade, and the blankets were heavy, warm, handsome. She chose to see the exchange through its beauty, and wasn't this the way you defined your vision of the world? In just such a private, fumbling, illogical way, freighted with emotion, dimmed by ignorance, fueled by conviction?
So Julia handed out the blankets, which came, not from a silent galleon on a silver lake, but from a mail-order company in Maine, and was reminded of an earlier sublime moment, which was possibly imaginary, but which gave her comfort.
She tucked striped blankets around her father and Steven. The best and the heaviest, with the rose-colored star in the center, she put around her mother. It was too heavy for Katharine's fragile shoulders, and Julia propped it around her like a tepee.
“Thank you, darling, that feels lovely.” Katharine's smile glimmered up at Julia in the dimness. She smelled of lavender.
Her mother's gratitude was like a tiny blow, an offer of intimacy against which Julia hardened her heart, though she did not know why. She patted the frail shoulder beneath the blanket. “You're welcome,” she said lightly.
Julia sat down between her mother and Steven. His body radiated warmth and maleness; she was surprised again by his size.
“You're nice and warm,” she said, leaning toward him. She had a right to the heat he gave off: he was hers, in a way, as she was his. She thought of Simon, who was not hers, nor she his. Possession was not a part of their relationship, at least not yet, but he liked to wrap his arms around her, and she liked this very much. Body heat: why was it so powerful? She sat in the glow of Steven's, grateful that he hadn't stormed off to his room, that he was not judgmental and moody but patient and forgiving.
“I think I see one.” Edward's head was tilted back, the blanket standing like a ruff around his face.
“Where?” Julia asked.
“Over there,” Edward said. “Gone now.”
“You can never show your shooting star to anyone else,” Julia said. “It's always too late.”
“But you can see one together,” Katharine said.
They sat in silence, wrapped in their rough blankets, heads tipped back, gazing expectantly up into the darkness. The salt breeze moved past them.
“I don't dare blink. I don't want to miss one,” Julia said. “My eyes are drying out.”
“Age,” Edward announced. “The older you get, the less fluid you produce.”
“Wizening,” Julia said. “We're all