The Whore's Child

he was astonished when his wife peeled off her bathing suit and stood naked before him, this woman who for years had changed into her nightgown in the bathroom. “Well?” she said.
    â€œWell what?”
    â€œLet me know if we have company,” June said, settling into her chair and putting on sunglasses. “Unless you’re embarrassed, that is.”
    â€œWhy should I be embarrassed?” he said, staring down at her.
    â€œGood,” she smiled, taking a book out of the bag.
    Snow set up his chair next to hers, realizing that a challenge had been issued and there was nothing to do but answer it. When he dropped his bathing trunks, she looked at him critically over the rim of her sunglasses. “I
beg
your pardon,” she said.
    The night before, having returned from dinner only to discover that he’d neglected to pack a book, Snow had slipped into a pair of Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt and padded downstairs in his bare feet to the library where tea had been served that afternoon. What he found was discouraging, if not surprising. Many of the volumes were Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, and as he scanned the shelves for something vaguely worth reading, he realized that there could be only one plausible explanation for such a bizarre collection: that the books had been purchased in bulk to provide the Captain Clement’s “romantic ambience.” Some were water-damaged, their brown, brittle pages stuck together, and others were upside down.
    Perhaps because it was one of the latter, Snow did not immediately recognize his book on Emily Dickinson. He had to remove it from the shelf to be sure, but there he was, twenty years younger, staring up seriously from the dust jacket. How strange, he considered, to discover himself in such a place. How had he come to be here, inverted, next to the far likelier Thomas Costain? He examined the book curiously, including the endorsement on the inside flap:
With steadfast scholarship, Paul Snow
penetrates the deepest secrets of one of literature’s most private lives.
    This was precisely the sort of criticism, of course, that his young replacement had scoffed at. A twentieth-century male scholar “penetrating” the secrets of a nineteenth-century female poet? Such effrontery, according to the new thinking, would reveal only the prejudices and assumptions of the author’s own culture and gender. How ironically vindicated, Snow thought ruefully, this champion of culture and gender would feel to learn that Snow’s best work had been consigned to the “the gentler elegance of a bygone day,” at an inn on its last legs. Instead of replacing the book on the shelf, he laid it flat on a table where Mrs. Childress would notice it in a week or two, and perhaps recognize her guest from the dust jacket photo.
    Returning to their room with a newsmagazine, Snow paused at the foot of the stairs, rooted there by the muffled, distant sound of a woman weeping. Although he had left June engrossed in a book, his first thought was that this grief, although sudden and unannounced, must be hers, and so he remained where he was, paralyzed in the dark, until he realized that the sound was coming not from above, but rather from behind the door marked PRIVATE. Indeed, June was safely asleep in their room, facing the window, its sheer curtains stirring in the warm autumn breeze. Still, though the grief he’d heard below was not his to share, it haunted him, and he awoke several times during the night to the sound of weeping carried upward along the ancient ducts and floor registers, and he lay in the dark for what seemed like hours, alert to the measured sound of June’s breathing and guarding against the possibility that some deep sympathy with another woman’s grief would reawaken her own. But she continued to sleep peacefully. Once she changed positions and murmured a word softly, and he noticed that she massaged her ring finger before rolling over again, but she did not wake and her sleep seemed untroubled. Since giving away her wedding ring, she’d refused to let him replace it, though he made up his mind to broach the subject again before they left the island.
    Perhaps because he’d slept so fitfully, he now fell dead asleep on the beach, drawn downward by the rhythm of the waves. When he woke, it was to the realization that he’d been sleeping for quite some time. He vaguely remembered that just before