Chapter One

One Afternoon, in early November, the sky slowly began to change color. Although daylight saving had ended a week before, I was still not used to coming home from work in the dark. Now I sat in the parlor of my aunt's house, waiting for the phone to ring. I looked out the window, through the lace curtains, but I wasn't really watching the harbor or the horizon. I was imagining Fishers Cove as it was that first year my parents and I drove out from Manhattan. That summer was so hot that the pavement buckled beneath the tires of our old car. Twenty years ago the harbor was clean, we could see all the way to Connecticut even on hazy days, as we sat on the porch of Aunt Minnie's boarding house surrounded by the odor of sea lavender and clams.

In those days the house was full of boarders every summer. All of them bore the name Lansky, and no two of them looked alike. There were blond Lanskys and brunette ones; Lanskys who had known Aunt Minnie as a girl in Russia and those who had never met her until they stepped off the boat in New York, even though their passage had been paid for by Minnie alone. Some of the Lanskys were directly related to Minnie; others were related to her husband, Alex, himself a Lansky, a cousin twice removed through divorce and death. Even then I was not quite convinced that Minnie and I were kin–I was the only relative who refused to eat the vegetarian meals Minnie cooked for all the summer Lanskys; I was the one who refused to be a part of the Lansky chain letters–letters petitioning congressmen and governors to vote her way on certain propositions and laws. Still, I had spent as much time as any Lansky in Minnie's house, watching the August constellations through Uncle Alex's telescope set up on the wooden porch; Fishers Cove meant summer and long evenings, squash cooked with wild mushrooms, arguments, chess games, and beaches lined with green rocks.

But now Fishers Cove had been deserted by the summer people; they had begun to move farther east–to Orient Point, to the Hamptons and Montauk. If Fishers Cove had remained the same, Minnie might not have responded so quickly to my letter requesting a room, no matter how difficult it was for her to resist a correspondence. In other years there had never been a problem finding boarders, even in winter. The wooden floor at Minnie's glowed, the tea brewed at breakfast was a Russian blend sweetened with cinnamon and honey, there was a harbor view from every bedroom window. There had always been nurses from the Veterans Hospital or divorcees in need of temporary lodgings, there had even been an artist from Manhattan who returned for the deep sunsets in October and May.

When I arrived at Minnie's I found just Beaumont was left. Her sole boarder was the thin old man who had come to Minnie's after his stay at the V.A. Hospital in 1956. Beaumont had refused a bedroom with a harbor view and had moved into the basement, where he collected pots and pans and matchbook covers sent to him by all of the Lanskys who fondly remembered him, the boarder who came out only at night.

No one came to Fishers Cove anymore, not even the Lanskys; even they could afford summer places at Montauk or the Jersey Shore. And just as the town was forgotten by some, it was discovered by others. A series of builders had circled the area; the original port town had been surrounded by housing developments. There were two Fishers Coves now–the lower section near the harbor was ringed with the same huge Victorians that rested in the sun like colored lizards; but up above there was Harbor Heights, a line of tract houses which had replaced the marshes and fields. And on Angel Landing, the point jutting out from the far side of the harbor, where there had once been thousands of shells called false angel wings, a nuclear power plant was being built. The metal scales of Angel Landing III now rose into the sky with the terrible force of centuries.