July, 1849
Believe me, reader, when I say, though it may seem to you unkind, the day I lost my cousin Cora is one of the fondest that I can remember.
My father and my mother and my mother’s brother Asa, and his daughter, my cousin, little Cora Christine, were camped along Nantasket Beach for the handsomer part of a long July day. Dinghies sawed atop the swells. Egrets and gulls skimmed for food in the shallows.
None so favoured as we five, arrayed beneath our little rampart of umbrellas, the elder ones tippled with afternoon sherry while Cora and I, at ten and twelve, roamed the bights and cliffs and grottos.
The Spirit keep my mother in her weakness: she drank laudanum. There were a couple of drops uncoiling at the bottom of her glass. But so do we all have our weaknesses. Yes? And so must we indulge them.
Earlier, in a grotto, beneath a fringe of wet moss, Cora had taken down her costume. I noted that Nature had not found the place between her skinny legs. She posed a moment, unashamed, then she lowered her chest and her groin to the earth, and pressed them there, into the sand, with her eyes resting on me incuriously. When she rose moments later caked in grey from the sand her boldness was imprinted there.
I stared at the ghost of the shape that she’d made and when it subsided again turned away.
Now she looked over, beneath her umbrella. Her costume was purple and flounced at the knees. She dropped her Godey’s Lady’s Book and her hair whipped away from her mouth in the breeze.
“Willy, come on,” she cried. “To sea!”
She raced down the beach, veering into the surf.
I gained some beach on running Cora, my belly shaking out before me, and cut her off on a pass coming in from the shore. Together we stumbled out to sea, our arms around each other’s shoulders, kicking the waves as we went.
When our feet no longer touched the bottom, we clung to each other, both paddling in place.
“You’re crowding me, Willy,” she said.
“I—oh . . .”
“And stop that poking thing you’re doing.”
“May I kiss you?” I said.
“To be sure, you may not.”
“Under what conditions may I kiss you?” I said.
“Conditions,” she said to herself, amused. “I will have to think on some.”
She launched from my arms, a victorious fish, and rafted away on her back.
“I will swim to . . . there,” she said. “And when I come back, you’ll have your kiss.”
“I will swim with you.”
“You will not.”
“I won’t?” I said.
She looked at me.
“From here to there is far,” I said.
This as she began to swim.
Long-legged for all that she was slight, my cousin began to kick and pull, a motion that took her ever further from where I watched her in the calm. How fast she seemed to swim away and yet through the warp of remembrance how slowly, her head, neck and shoulders, all working together, rising, then falling, then failing to rise.
Inconceivable? Yes.
Impossible? No.
In the space of that last breath she took, she was gone.
“Cora,” I cried. And cried. And cried. Not tears, but her name, said again and again. “Mother,” I begged of the shore. “Mother, quick!” And paddled about to face the beach.
But mother had been there all along. Mother, vague-eyed, had seen all.