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laboring people. The disposition of family business—the links and chains of history—absorbed them both. They loved nothing better than talking over their investments in an unpretentious restaurant, over cocktails and a cod.
    Olympia’s arguments poured out in long, uninterruptible loops. There was so much of her to take in—the rich, full-throated voice, her baronial appetite, her extraordinary figure. Her cause consumed her, filled her with a ravenous energy.When not traveling, she worked in the Byrd Brothers factory, arranging shipments of vulcanized rubber caps to women in Boston and beyond, or inciting halls full of women to demand sexual pleasure. Every word she spoke was charged with passionate intensity about one subject:
Children were avoidable
. Her lectures and demonstrations drew crowds. God’s father had once remarked, “People love to listen to your aunt. She has a magnificent bosom.”
    Olympia sowed one thousand of her caps across five states in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the way other women massed Dutch bulbs around their birches. Even as a young boy, Goddard was drawn to his aunt, especially in the absence of his mother, who died at eighteen from one of the usual causes—a childbirth infection from a doctor’s friendly, filthy hand.
    When Goddard turned twelve, his father, concerned that this live-in aunt might exert too strong an influence, took him aside. “Olympia,” he explained, “has worked all her life to make sexual union safer for women, so that one day females might undertake congress from healthy desire as much as from duty.” (His father’s conversation bloomed with legislative metaphors.) Because of Olympia, God always recalled that he’d come himself from a line of revolutionary thinkers and reformers.
    As a boy, Goddard studied letters (bound in ribbons) written to Olympia by women whose admiration seemed almost physical in its intensity, as well as intimate objects that moored her to her time and sex: a girdle, a hot-water bottle and siphon, products made possible by Byrd Brothers India Rubber and by his grandfather’s work in chemistry, and especially by Charles Goodyear’s refinements to latex. Young Goddard occasionally came across Olympia’s teeth soaking in a glass of water on her bedside table, resting from their oratorical labors.

    He glances up now, across Penzance Point. Has he walked eight miles? He has. (Vitality, longevity!) The moon has risen; water and sky are welded together in glossy black. In the center of the town square, visible from every front-facing window in every house, the original pre-Revolutionary stocks still stand, twin monuments to Cape Wilde’s stern views on deviance. The town’s civic leaders have since ordered azaleas, lobelia and astilbe to soften extreme impressions left by history. In this season, though, and at night, the square appears austere. God remembers what he must still do. Reread
Heart of Darkness
. Speak up publicly—a letter to the paper? a chapel talk?—about integration and boys. Taste again that roast squab and succotash at the East India House that brought tears to his eyes.
    Past midnight, he arrives at his front door (Federal), which is boldly painted red. The house has a date—1732, an old and unimpeachable lie—inscribed on the lintel. God thinks, as he always eventually does, of his wife, of the patient way she bears her impatience, the patina of irritation that brings a glow to her cheek.
    She was devoted to him once; he has been, well, faithless. (His forebears were what God’s wife calls “rubber barons,” but that money has dwindled, and as head of the Goode School, he earns a modest seventeen thousand dollars a year.)
    What he reveals now will depend—on her. He’ll describe the bomb, the explosion, the confusion, his innocent presence in town. At the proper moment, he will ask for a small glass of gin, which she’ll bring to him in a juice glass. Later, she’ll make his