We Shall Not All Sleep
Estep Nagy
Behold, I tell you a mystery: we shall not all sleep,
but we shall all be changed
1 CORINTHIANS 15:51
JULY 1964
Seven Island, Maine
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Seven Island has two houses, one for Hillsingers and one for Quicks.
John Wilkie had heard members of each family use this same odd formula when asked about the island, and it took him a long time to understand why. For many years, Billy Quick had invited him up to Seven every summer, but Maine was a long way from New York, Northern Maine felt doubly so, and with a busy life it was always easier not to go.
That equation had changed during a moment, now fifteen years ago, when he and Billy were for a time trying to repair their damaged friendship. Billy had offered a trip to Seven in a sort of spirit of reconciliation, and obviously to say no in that circumstance would have been cruel. The next day, a letter came from Billy’s secretary, asking him to report on a certain date and time to the dock at the end of a road in a remote part of the Maine coast, almost in Canada: he should wait there for Cyrus, the island manager, who would drive a boat called the Heron. He absolutely, positively must not be late.
As it happened, Wilkie’s flight was delayed and he got lost on the back roads east of Bangor, so it was two hours past his assigned time when he arrived at the dock. A note with his name on it was pinned to the first piling and it said that, due to the tides, the Heron could not come back until tomorrow morning, so he should spend the night at the motel in Jennings, which was twenty minutes away.
It was early that next morning, when he was less rushed, when the landscape felt more generous, that he noticed the salt air. Even if Seven Island were to disappoint, Wilkie thought, or if Billy’s lyrical memories should prove unreliable, it would still have been worth it to remember how the ocean smells in Maine. When the Heron came, Cyrus greeted him formally, and Wilkie’s bags were taken on board. He asked which way were they going, and the manager pointed straight ahead, toward a nondescript green portal up on the horizon, and Wilkie was disappointed. He had hoped the approach would have some drama. Was it possible, he wondered, that anything really exceptional could be reached by following a straight line?
The boat moved out of the harbor into the bay, past a color wheel of lobster buoys, past huge cloud formations, ever deeper, it seemed, into the salt air. Soon the island speck divided, clarified, gained contrast: from nowhere, miles of woods now extended in two directions. He couldn’t see where they ended, and it struck him that Seven Island was much bigger than he had imagined. A clearing emerged from the haze, then a dock from the clearing. Two houses, one white and one yellow, sat high up on a grassy hill. Outbuildings and a barn were scattered around, all of them painted that electric red that Wilkie had only ever seen in Maine.
When the Heron landed on the Seven dock and the lines were down, Wilkie stepped carefully out of the boat. Majestic cliffs rose up behind him. Birds called. A flock of sheep tumbled down the hill, and the smell of cut grass and smoke ran alongside or underneath the ethereal salt. The sun was hot, and the wind cool. He had never, in all his life, been anywhere so beautiful.
Against his better judgment, he decided that this place was real—and he was instantly and savagely nostalgic. Someday, he thought, you will have to leave this place. Wilkie was due to stay four nights, but it would never be enough. From the beginning, from that first step onto the dock, Seven Island projected you forward into a barren future without itself, a mainland world, and the only souvenir of the trip was this premonition of your fantastic loss. It would not be insane, Wilkie thought, to wish that you had never come at all.
Through no fault of the island, his reconciliation with Billy had failed. At Princeton they were thought to be inseparable, but their friendship had not survived Billy’s marriage, in part because Hannah, Billy’s wife, had undergone a political awakening sometime in college, and its real-world effects were all the more violent for being somewhat delayed. Not long after their wedding, Hannah had burned her ships entirely: she decided that their friends, their families, the whole rather lofty world of both her and Billy’s childhoods, were all irretrievably corrupt. They moved uptown to Harlem, where Hannah taught in the schools. She stopped speaking to everyone, and Billy let his old world and his old friends drift away. He was not an activist or a revolutionary, that part was certainly all Hannah, but Billy could have showed more spine. It was painful for everyone concerned.
Shortly afterward, as if in compensation, the world sent John Wilkie the Hillsingers. Lila Hillsinger and Hannah Quick were sisters, née Blackwell, and the irony of Billy Quick and Jim Hillsinger marrying into the same family was much discussed at the time. As a rule, the Hillsingers and Quicks each saw themselves as the embodiment of some true Seven spirit and the other family as relative barbarians. They mingled when necessary or appropriate, but rarely with any warmth. For his part, Wilkie grew up knowing quite a lot about Lila and Hannah Blackwell, although without knowing either especially well. The Blackwell sisters were famous in the small way that beauty sometimes makes girls famous at that age, and it had been more or less obligatory for everyone he knew to be in love with at least one of them at some point. After she married, Lila had sought Wilkie out to talk about her sister, since he was seen as an authority on Billy’s character. Wilkie had met and liked Jim, and had often stayed at the Hillsingers’ on his frequent trips to Washington. Hannah’s untimely death had drawn them even closer, and it was at the Hillsingers’ invitation that Wilkie was now, fifteen years later, once again back on Seven Island. This time there was no trouble with his flight, the directions, or the omnipotent tides. When he walked onto the dock, Cyrus had welcomed him by name.
At dinner that night, Lila had laughed easily and at everything, as if the world existed solely for her entertainment. Somehow the most hilarious of all was that on this trip John Wilkie would stay here with them, at the Hill House, which was only for Hillsingers, rather than at the New House, which was only for Quicks. It was unheard-of, she told him, for anyone to have slept in both houses.
Billy may have sent you as a spy, Lila had said, laughing, but we know you can be bribed.
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