Creamy seafood chowder and warm scones for supper. Granny says grace, a short, quick one, with a moment of silence and then a few words Stella has never heard before. “Praise to Holy Mother Mercy. Praise the salt and earth, the fire and water. Bless the vulnerable. Bless the fragile. Bless the courageous. Give us strength. May the gatherings of the earth and the sea nourish us and sustain us. Praise be. And forgive us, Holy Mother Mercy, for any of our failings, if we have not served you properly. Praise be.”
“Praise be,” Cynthia echoes, in what sounds like a habit. Granny looks at Stella through the steam rising up from her chowder bowl.
“Dear, you look as though you’ve seen a ghost. I wouldn’t wonder. You’re the same as your grandmother. She had a way about her. My way is what I can find in the garden.”
Cynthia doesn’t say a word — her sole focus is eating. Stella thinks she’s wondering if Stella will decide Granny is completely senile, which she might be. Or maybe not. It’s hard to tell.
Granny’s mind is sailing around in time now, only gently tied to the shore of the present in which Stella met her, but the knots are already loosened, letting go. Stella remembers her mother once said that there comes a time when the body gets frail, older, weaker, when life wears on it, and that the mind will either follow the body or it won’t. But once it starts down the path of the failing body, it rarely comes back. She believes now, as she thinks of her faceless mother, that Granny is far down this path.
“So . . . how did my grandmother die, Granny Scotia? My dad never told me. He just said she died after Stella Violette drowned. Did my grandmother have tuberculosis? Is that why my father is so interested in old institutions?”
“My goodness, Stella, no one had tuberculosis. Your grandmother fell down the stairs. Just tumbled down. She was grief stricken, after Violette drowned. Didn’t your father tell you any of this? It almost destroyed him, so perhaps his approach, as it is with many people, is not to talk about it, to hide it away and pretend it never happened. He had to take a year off school when your grandmother died. And Franklin could never forgive me when his father died. He fell down Seabury Gorge. I was the one who found him. Franklin insinuated I’d pushed the man down there myself.” A look ripples across Granny’s face and is gone before Stella can decide if it was a smile or a frown.
Stella is still sorting through what Granny has said when the old woman bursts out with more family history Stella had no idea about. “Your father was in the institution, not your grandmother, for land’s sake.” Granny thumped her cane. “Nobody got put into an institution but your father, and I don’t think it was humane. He goes on about the old days of moral care but those days were gone by his time. His father didn’t even visit him, to my knowledge. We went down once on a Sunday. He couldn’t even speak. I don’t know what they did to him. That’s why he ended up studying these hospitals, the philosophies and theories of buildings and healing. Well, I’ll have you know that the mind is a structure, and when you compartmentalize and create rooms in it as your father did, it never goes well. But at some point he needed to face reality and make some choices. Instead, what does he do but lose himself in his work, wishing that there was a morality to healing and caring, that the mentally ill were not seen as pariahs but as the prophets he believed they were. You see, his work is his message. You really should know this. We need to know our family history. I can’t believe he’s kept it a secret. I expect your mother didn’t even know. Your grandfather just had a heart attack in his sleep. No one even knew he had heart problems. I had Frank take him over some special tea, to help him sleep deeply. He was having nightmares and that was no surprise, after the terrible life he led. Did your father tell you anything about that?”
“Just a bit. He said that my grandmother was married off to him after the lighthouse, that she was young and didn’t really have much choice.”
“Yes, that’s the truth. We were all married off in those days. My own family had me marry into the Seaburys. We were out of money, except for the land.”
Granny gazes over their heads. Then she looks at Cynthia and next at Stella, then back at Cynthia. “Cynthia, I think it’s time to take Stella Maris upstairs and show her our sitting room, don’t you?”
Stella climbs up the stairs behind Cynthia. She has said nothing about any of this shocking family story. She let Granny Scotia tell it without even a comment, only stirring to pull the black book from her backpack.
The stairs open onto an imposing landing with windows facing all four directions. Stella can see stars in the sky. It’s a widow’s walk, Granny explains as she leads them to an old door beside the western window. She takes out a skeleton key from her pocket and opens it. The house is quiet, so quiet Stella thinks she hears the beams creaking, the sound of the waves and the wind at the windows, murmuring, speaking to her. For once Stella’s head doesn’t
