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Shelter Island Yacht Club on Chequit Point, and when he wasn’t on the water with the yawl, Albert made himself a hearty regular at the yacht club, slumping with highballs and new friends in the stout wicker rocking chairs on the piazzas overlooking Dering Harbor, gladly accepting invitations for deep-sea fishing and helping out like a mate on the boats, even agreeing to race his yawl in the August regatta.
    Ruth and Lora stayed to themselves, hunting seashells and clams on the shore, reading children’s books together in the Adirondack chair under the wide shade of the hemlock tree, finding a beach far away from the crowds where they could swim in their matching Jantzen tank suits and mobcaps until the knitted black wool became too heavy for them to freely stroke and they would fall back on sand as warm as toast and giggle over nonsense rhymes as the hot sun dried them.
    Each evening when Albert got back to the cottage, all three of them would dine outside in the cool air, barbecuing fresh corn on the cob and filets of the fish he’d caught, and Ruth would watch him laughing with Lora in his white Top-Siders and white flannel trousers, and he would look every inch a yachtsman and seem so manly, dashing, and fun to be with that Ruth felt she could fall in love with him all over again.
    On July 24th, 1925, she got a sitter for Lora and the couplecelebrated their tenth wedding anniversary at a nightclub on North Ferry Road. Ruth gave him Shutz prism binoculars; Albert gave her a French, floral-beaded, silk evening bag with a matching compact. She kissed him and told him he had excellent taste; he agreed. Albert was in his white dinner jacket, drinking martinis in the 1920s formula of half gin and half Martini & Rossi vermouth, and as soon as he finished one he’d shield his bottles from fellow diners and the waiters as he mixed another. Because he was deaf in his right ear, she sat to his left, but still he sometimes seemed not to hear her. She noticed again that his tawny hair was receding from his temples, that his jacket was getting tight on him, that he wasn’t fat but had the broad shoulders and fullback torso of a man who ought to have been half a foot taller. The orchestra was playing songs the Paul Whiteman Orchestra popularized: “Rhapsody in Blue,” “Somebody Loves Me,” “Linger a While.” She wanted to dance; Albert didn’t. The sun that had tanned him had also tired him. She filled his silence by mentioning a friend she’d just made on Shelter Island and how her husband, a Wall Street stockbroker, would be racing in the regatta with a ketch just like theirs.
    Albert glanced up. “But that’s impossible, isn’t it, Ruth?” And in the overly calm, patronizing tone he used for all his instructions, he said, “A ketch cannot be like a yawl because they are
dissimilar.
A ketch is a sailboat with the same mainmast, yes, you are so very right to notice this, but it is rigged aft with its mizzenmast stepped forward of the rudderpost. A
yawl’s
mizzenmast is stepped abaft the sternpost.”
    “And blah, blah, blah,” she said.
    Albert lifted up his martini. “But how can I expect you to know these things when you take so little interest in my hobbies?”
    “Oh, are they hobbies? I thought they were just chances for you to yell at me.”
    Albert sipped the martini, slanting a little off balance eventhough he was sitting, so that his free hand had to hastily seek the chair cushion. “You and your disappointing education,” he said. “You give me so many opportunities for—what is it?—
keen
and
pitched
correction.”
    “You know everybody is ignorant, it’s just the subjects that are different.”
    Albert sneered. “With you there are not subjects, there are
chasms.”
    She felt her mouth tremble. She looked away as her vision blurred.
    “Are those tears?” he asked. “Aren’t you used to my teasing by now?”
    She felt his hard, callused hand fall onto hers and she turned. “You hurt my