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timeless as the pristine lakes, the rivers, the deep, silent forests. The country now was undulant valleys, streams, hills rising abruptly against a broad sky. The roads became smaller; at a crossroads by a shabby church, Caroline turned down a tar-and-gravel road where the arrow pointed to “Resolve Village.” A mile short of the town, she left the road, climbing a gravel path through woods that had once been pasture, until she reached the clearing that was still called Masters Hill.
    Caroline was only half aware of how slowly she drove. She was more alert to landmarks—the jagged boulder she once had climbed, the distant blue-gray view of Heron Lake—
    than to the feeling of the places, so familiar and yet from another life. And then, abruptly, she stopped. Stiff from driving, she stepped into the mist and rain. On a hillside, cleared from a stand of birch trees, was a white wooden church. The first Masters had built it one hundred fifty years ago, to serve his family and those nearby, and its spires and stained-glass windows were from another time. It was where he had taken first one wife and then another; where Betty and Larry had married, with Caroline as maid of honor; where Caroline herself had once imagined marrying. Caroline had spent most Sunday mornings of her youth here, seated with her parents and her sister in the first row, where the Masters family sat by tradition and by right. She could remember the plain wooden benches and sparse furnishings, the unvarnished services of a religion too established for hysteria. But although she knew that, by long practice, the church would not be locked, Caroline did not enter. Behind the church was the cemetery where the Masterses lay, generation after generation. Caroline circled the church and went there, face damp and chill. Encroaching birches blocked the light, crowded the weathered stones at the cemetery’s edge. The granite markers were worn with wind and rain and dirt. A stone—the marker of an infant long lost to memory—had toppled on its face. At the center were the markers of her own family. On the largest of them, a granite rectangle rising from their midst, were the names of its members: Channing Masters; Elizabeth Brett Masters; then Elizabeth Wells Masters. At the bottom were the words: “Caroline Clark Masters, b. June 1‘7, 1950.” Only for Elizabeth Brett Masters did the date of death appear. In front of this marker was another, set into the ground over the grave of Elizabeth Brett Masters, recording her for posterity as “Beloved wife of Channing and mother of Elizabeth.”
    Turning, Caroline walked to the edge of the graveyard. The marker here was dirty, covered with leaves. Kneeling in the rain, Caroline cleared them with cold, clumsy fingertips. Saw the inscription, “Nicole Dessaliers Masters, b. 1925, d. 1964.” Then read the stark words which were painful still: “Wife of Channing, mother of Caroline.” Face wet and cold, Caroline stood there, in silent apology for things she had not then known. Only as she left the grave did she notice that the rain had ceased.
    A half mile farther, Caroline stopped at the edge of the road. To her right, beyond a wood that gently sloped away, she could spot distant glimpses of the village of Resolve—a spire, a crossroads, white wooden homes from other centuries. And then only woods again. When she was a child, he would describe for her—until she could imagine it—a countryside of farms and stone walls, cross-stitched with the works of men. A time when New England throve, and the Masters who had lived here was a United States senator. Caroline turned, facing the house where she was born. Three stories and twenty rooms, it rose majestically to a domed octagonal cupola, from which the Masterses could see for miles. White-painted wood, arched windows, a massiveness unrelieved by ostentation or the fripperies of architectural fashion. The indulgences were inside: twelve-foot ceilings; seven granite