The Three Weissmanns of Westport

two houses in Westport, I think.'

Miranda seemed mollified. 'Two houses,' she whispered, looking at the Sound with new respect.

'Zelda swam at Compo Beach,' Annie added encouragingly, realizing as she spoke that she could quit the Y in New York and save a little money, swim here herself. 'No waves, perfect length, up and down, and you've done your laps...'

'Oh, Annie. You and your laps.'

The cottage, on the other hand, was another story. Annie's heart sank when they pulled into the narrow dirt driveway beside the house itself. It was an unpromising sight, a slightly lopsided structure built in 1929, its shingles painted a dull, tired gray. A sunporch ran the length of the front of the cottage, its louvered windows quaint and outdated and yellowed. An overgrown hedge rose on one side of a dirt path leading to the louvered front door. With one corner wedged in the dirt, the rickety gate stood open, as listless as an idling bystander, unconcerned with, unaware of, the ramshackle house. The hard dusty path sidled shamelessly into the patchy crabgrass.

The cottage.

It was a shack, a hut, a garden shed of a thing, stunted and unwashed.

'Oh,' Annie said in dismay.

But her sister and mother were already out of the car and exclaiming with joy. It was so unspoiled! It was so old-fashioned, so perfectly old-fashioned! Think of all the barefooted children who had scampered up and down this path! The commuters in their fedoras, tired and grimy from the train! The two women were beside themselves.

'It's like camp!' Miranda cried.

'Girl Scout camp!' Betty cried in response.

Of course, Annie knew well enough that Betty would have tired of real Girl Scout camp the minute she wanted a hot bath and there was only a cold shower to be had, that Miranda would exclaim over the unspoiled nature of the cottage until the first hot night without air-conditioning. But Annie said nothing. She knew better than to confront her mother and sister when they were waxing poetic together. It would be like stepping into a dog fight. One had to wait, patient and quiet, until they wore themselves out.

Annie sometimes reflected that all those poor publishers who thought Miranda was bluffing or bullying had never understood Miranda's secret, which was supreme innocence. She was a good-looking woman: her face animated; her eyes, tapering at both ends, womanly and remote; and she had a slow, curling half-smile that people around her experienced as a moment of recognition, as if they'd been lavishly but secretly praised. When all was said and done, however, Miranda's greatest strength was a sublime ignorance that things could go other than she, in her benevolent excitement, had imagined them. She didn't worry about what the world thought of her or her tantrums, for the world existed only as imagined by her, and Miranda believed in her imagination the way others believed in God or capitalism: it was a force, and it was a force for good.

Annie, who was acutely aware of how the world viewed her, or at least of how she worried that the world viewed her, often watched her younger sister with wonder. Miranda was so unselfconscious that the older sister was deprived of even the bitter satisfaction of envy. In fact, Annie had always been proud of both her sister's beauty and her guileless, autocratic power.

On the other hand, Annie could not help but notice that her sister was extremely self-involved, and over the years, watching Miranda go through one disastrous love affair after another, she began to suspect that Miranda's preoccupation with herself was a kind of protection. Everywhere Miranda looked, she saw the world she insisted upon. This was her great tautological strength. It had fascinated and frustrated Annie since childhood. How could you ever win an argument with such a sister? How?

She asked herself this question again as they stood outside the cottage. The house hunched over the yard, shabby, uncomfortable, ill-tempered. Its closed windows, dead flies pressed like flowers beneath the heavy wood sills, were bleary, unseeing behind cataracts of grime. Large, smooth plots of pale dirt basked in the sun interrupted here and there by a few straggling, scratchy formations of crabgrass. There were two trees, one an evergreen brown and diseased at the top, the other a gnarled, barren fruit tree. The steps, two cracked concrete squares of faded gray, led up to the sunporch, several missing louvers of its jalousie windows gaping darkly.

Miranda, for her part, saw a tangle of dark green foliage and pale pink sea roses peeking from the side of the house. The roses were so small and jumbled, their flowers one petal deep, the yellow heart so exposed. Above them, a squirrel rattled a branch. Miranda looked up and watched the squirrel, a fat gray being balanced on delicate little toes. The white clouds of late summer flew by overhead, the sky as deep a blue as a daytime sky could be. She could smell the briny sea. On the chafed lawn, there was a patch of rich green moss in the shade from the house. Miranda took off her shoes and stood on the soft, cool moss. She touched the trunk of the old tree beside her, her fingers stroking the ridges of iron gray bark.

'We will be happy here,' Betty said.

Miranda smiled at her mother. 'We already are.'

Miranda and Betty were still exclaiming at the potential of the peeling hut, Annie's heart was still sinking in silent dismay, when there was a sudden commotion at the front door, which flung itself open to reveal a bald, pink- faced man dressed in bright golf clothes and holding a broom.

Cousin Lou handed the broom to Annie, apologized about the missing windowpanes, promised workmen and replacements. He then invited them to dinner that night. 'Don't disappoint me.' He shook his head, his pink jowls shuddering with alarm. 'Don't.'

He pointed to the mailbox.

'I ordered it just for you, but look how the idiots painted your name!'

The mailbox was a fat, new, shiny affair, and on both sides, in bold black letters, it said: the wisemen.

They did not go to dinner that night, despite the imploring swing of Cousin Lou's jowls. They waited for the moving van, then began to unpack the boxes. Annie and Miranda had the two bedrooms on the ground floor, their mother the large attic room upstairs.

'My childhood furniture,' Annie said, sitting on the mahogany sleigh bed Betty had gotten her at an auction when she was twelve. 'It's much nicer than my own furniture.' Still, over the years, Annie had acquired one or two pieces she was fond of. Would the visiting French professor and his wife leave cigarette burns on the arms of her chairs? Already, she could not wait to get back to her apartment.

Miranda, in contrast, was quite giddy. 'I feel like we're in a dollhouse,' she said. 'And we're the dolls.'

Annie shuddered.

'It's an adventure,' Miranda said.

'An adventure in claustrophobia.'

'You'll see.'

Miranda often said You'll see. Annie found it oddly comforting, as if Miranda knew what was coming, knew that everything would be all right, knew how to make it be all right.

'Do you think Mom seems a little shell-shocked?' Annie asked.

'We're our own dolls,' Miranda said, as if she had not heard Annie. 'In our own dollhouse.'

Upstairs, Betty was staring out the attic window. She could hear Miranda and Annie talking downstairs. The sound was soft and indistinct, but familiar, like a memory. So much seemed like a memory these days. This blue sky with its banks of white clouds was a memory. And this town: leaning against an old black Buick at the station, waiting for Joseph's train, the girls chattering just as they were doing now, that same sky arched high above them; the train chugging into sight, giving its great slow sigh as it braked. Then, out of its door stepped another memory: her husband. Her husband, Joseph.

'Can you see the water?' Annie asked, clumping up the stairs.

'It's beautiful.'

'Oh, look, a sailboat.'

'This is my widow's walk,' Betty said.

It would be worth everything, Annie thought, if her mother could be happy here. Betty's hair, a very pretty auburn created at great expense by an Italian colorist at Frederic Fekkai, was surrounded by a nimbus of light. Annie put her arms around her and rested her cheek on the auburn head. Outside, in the distance, gulls wheeled in the blue sky. 'Don't be sad,' she said.

'Oh no.' Betty patted her daughter's hand to reassure her. 'I'm a merry widow.'

This, to Annie and Miranda's surprise, turned out to be all too true. In the days to come, not only was Betty