The Corrections

was this little boy in him. Maybe all the love she’d given Chipper and Gary, all the love for which in the end she’d got so little inreturn, had merely been practice for this most demanding of her children. She soothed and berated him and silently cursed his addling medications for an hour or more, and finally he was asleep and her travel clock showed 5:10 and 7:30 and he was running his electric shaver. Not having gone properly under, she felt fine getting up and fine dressing and catastrophically bad going to breakfast, her tongue like a dust mop, her head like something on a spit.
    Even for a big ship the sea this morning was poor footing. The regurgitative splats outside the Kierkegaard Room were almost rhythmic, a kind of music of chance, and Mrs. Nygren informatively brayed about the evils of caffeine and the quasi-bicamerality of the Storting, and the Söderblads arrived damp from intimate Swedish exertions, and somehow Al proved equal to conversation with Ted Roth. Enid and Sylvia resumed relations stiffly, their emotional muscles pulled and aching from last night’s overuse. They talked about the weather. An activities coordinator named Suzy Ghosh came by with orientative tidings and registration forms for the afternoon’s outings in Newport, Rhode Island. With a bright smile and anticipatory noises Enid signed up for a tour of the town’s historic homes, and then watched in dismay as everyone else but the Norwegian social lepers passed along the clipboard without registering. “Sylvia!” she chid, her voice shaking, “you’re not going on the tour?” Sylvia glanced at her bespectacled husband, who nodded like McGeorge Bundy green-lighting ground troops for Vietnam, and for a moment her blue eyes seemed to look inward; apparently she had that ability of the enviable, of the non-midwestern, of the moneyed, to assess her desires without regard to social expectations or moral imperatives. “OK, yes, good,” she said, “maybe I will.” Ordinarily Enid would have squirmed at the hint of charity here, but she was waiving the oral exam for gift horses today. She needed all the charity she could get. And so on up the day’s steep inclineshe labored, availing herself of a complimentary half-session of Swedish massage, watching coastal leaves senesce from the Ibsen Promenade, and downing six ibuprofens and a quart of coffee to prepare for her afternoon in charming and historic Newport! In which freshly rain-laundered port of call Alfred announced that his feet hurt too much to venture ashore, and Enid made him promise not to nap or he wouldn’t sleep at night, and she laughingly (for how could she admit that it was life and death?) implored Ted Roth to keep him awake, and Ted replied that getting the Nygrens off the ship ought to help with that.
    Smells of sun-warmed creosote and cold mussels, of boat fuel and football fields and drying kelp, an almost genetic nostalgia for things maritime and things autumnal, beset Enid as she limped from the gangway toward the tour bus. The day was dangerously beautiful. Big gusts and related clouds and a fierce lion of a sun blew the gaze around, agitating Newport’s white clapboard and mown greens, making them unseeable straight on. “Folks,” the tour guide urged, “just sit back and drink it in.” But that which can be drunk can also drown. Enid had slept for six of the previous fifty-five hours, and even as Sylvia thanked her for inviting her along she found she had no energy for touring. The Astors and the Vanderbilts, their pleasure domes and money: she was sick of it. Sick of envying, sick of herself. She didn’t understand antiques or architecture, she couldn’t draw like Sylvia, she didn’t read like Ted, she had few interests and no expertise. A capacity for love was the only true thing she’d ever had. And so she tuned out the tour guide and heeded the October angle of the yellow light, the heart-mangling intensities of the season. In the wind pushing waves across the bay she could smell night’s approach. It was coming at her fast: mystery and pain and a strange yearning sense of possibility , as though heartbreak were a thing to be sought and moved toward. On the bus between Rosecliff and thelighthouse, Sylvia offered Enid a cell phone so she could give Chip a call. Enid declined, since cell phones ate dollars and she thought a person might incur charges simply by touching one, but she made this statement: “It’s been years, Sylvia, since