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One of my duties was to carry packages home for the ladies who shopped with us, and I enjoyed this, for it gave me back a bit of my independence. Sometimes the ladies presented me with a coin, which I saved up, hoping for a box of pastel chalks. Once I carried the groceries of a Madame Halevy, a very old woman who barely looked at me. She was a bit terrifying, like the old lizard in the garden of my grandfather’s house. When we got to her home, a huge stucco mansion painted firefly yellow, she told me she wanted me to bring the packages inside. Then she demanded that I put the flour and molasses and ground sugar in the pantry, where such things were kept away from beetles and stinging ants. She had both an indoor and an outdoor kitchen, and I wondered if she was so rich she had two of everything. She sat at the table and studied me as I worked, calling out where the items should be placed. When I was done she told me to sit across from her.

I saw the folds in her skin, the white film over her pale eyes. I found all of this very interesting. One of her hands had a tremor she couldn’t control, and I had the notion she might grab me and shake the life out of me there in her kitchen if she disapproved of anything I did or said. Yet I was more curious than I was frightened. She took off her thick white gloves; they were an old-fashioned accessory that only the very old ladies on the island kept to anymore. It was far too hot for gloves. I would have loved a glass of limeade, but I didn’t ask for anything.

“Would you like to know the truth about your family?” she asked.

I made a face. “Truth is different things to different people.” Frankly I was parroting Jestine, who had told me this.

Madame Halevy laughed. “It’s one thing when your mother sleeps with a nephew young enough to be her son, then marries him when the congregation denies the union, and yet another when she still thinks she’s better than everyone.”

“Maybe she is.” I might have been ten, but I was sly. My mother and I had our problems, but that was private. All the same, I was glad to be told information I had mostly guessed at before.

Madame Halevy laughed again. I could tell she had taken a liking to me despite herself.

“Would you like to come to our school and learn Hebrew?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I’m not much of a student.”

“Well then, would you like to know what happened to Jestine’s daughter?” she asked.

I was stunned by this offer, and it must have showed in my face. The old lady smiled. She had my interest now. I realized that other than her maid, who sometimes came to shop at our store, Madame lived alone. Her husband and children had passed on, aside from one daughter, who I’d heard had gone to America. Perhaps she was lonely and wished to speak freely to someone. What danger was a ten-year-old child?

“Come to tea tomorrow,” she said.

At dinner with my family that evening, I mentioned that I had carried Madame Halevy’s groceries to her house.

“That witch,” my mother said. She spat on the floor.

“She was a friend of your grandmother’s,” my father told me. Then when my mother shot him a look, he added, “Long ago.”

I saw my mother that night, standing outside, feeding a pelican that lived on Jestine’s roof but sometimes came to our garden. I recognized the bird because it had a ruff of gray feathers around its throat. My mother gave it not merely fish bones but an entire small fish, cooked and spiced. She talked to the bird as if it were human, conversing with it though its only response was to stare back at her. “You agree with me,” I heard her say to the bird. My mother was crouching down near the frangipani as though she were a girl. The sky was a soft, fragile blue. The air itself was tinted an inky shade, as if there were drops of water in the veil that surrounded us. I could see my mother as Jestine had described her: a girl who ran off into the countryside to look for turtles and birds, who intended to fly away, or jump into the sea and be carried to another shore.

I could not sleep that night and dreamed of shades of aquamarine and navy and indigo. All day next day in school I thought about whether or not I should return to Madame Halevy’s house when I knew my mother wouldn’t approve. Marianna and I still shared a desk, but next year I would have to share my desk with a boy. By then we would be considered too old to sit together innocently. I had the sense that soon enough this would be my long ago.

At three o’clock I went to Madame Halevy’s and knocked at the back door, and the maid let me in. “She had me make banana cake for you,” the maid said. She was nearly as old as Madame Halevy, and I knew that when she came into the store, my brothers made fun of how stooped she was. “I haven’t made it in so long I forgot the recipe,” the maid told me. “Eat it anyway so she won’t yell at me.”

Madame was waiting for me in the dining room. It was an elegant room filled with antiques from France: silver candlesticks, expensive china, a lace runner on the table. There were emerald-green cut-velvet chairs sent from France, and the rugs were handwoven, spun of pale gold wool. The light coming in through the window was obscured by silk curtains and turned red as it filtered across the floor.

“There you are,” she said to me. “I thought you might come back. I’m a good judge of character.”

We had our tea, and I ate an entire slice of the nearly inedible cake to please the maid. The crumbs stuck in my throat, and I had to wash them down with cold ginger tea before I could speak.

“You were going to tell me about Jestine’s daughter,” I reminded Madame.

I thought she must be eighty or so. Maybe ninety. She wore two gold rings.

“I was very close to your grandmother. She was a lovely person and the best friend I could have had, like a sister. The good deeds that she did have gone unknown. But she didn’t get along with your mother. No one likes a headstrong girl who won’t do as she’s told. Your grandmother adopted a boy out of the kindness of her heart. She treated him like a son, and I suppose your mother resented that. Maybe this caused a rift between mother and daughter that was never healed. Or maybe it was because your mother always tried to get what she wanted by any means necessary, even if it would ruin her own children’s lives.”

I ate another slice of the horrid banana cake and kept listening. I noticed the old Madame’s eyes were so pale they were like stones on the beach. I wondered if she could see through the white film. The angles of her face were sharp, planes in the shape of a bird’s wing. Loss had cut into her and left a mark. I could see that she had once been strikingly beautiful. She had an entire book of stories inside her, waiting to be told, but she didn’t give anything away without a cost. I knew she wanted something from me, though I couldn’t imagine what that might be.

After a while she waved her hand, dismissing me. “Come back on Thursday if you want to hear more.”

I thanked her formally, and she took my hand. She was strong when she held on to me. She wasn’t quick to let go.

“Tell your mother you were here. Ask her if she has anything to say to me.”

I was confused. Here were two women who clearly hated each other, and yet they were interested in one another’s lives. When I returned home I told my mother of my visit simply to see her reaction. She was sitting with my sister Hannah, who was a grown woman, and very close to my mother. When I told them where I’d been, Hannah and my mother exchanged a glance. My sister was of marriageable age, and I knew there was a young man she met late in the evening. I’d heard their voices in the small yard behind our store. There was some bitterness involved, and some intrigue, for he came only at night, when no one knew he was there. I soon understood my sister was not considered good enough for his family.

“You visit Madame Halevy?” My mother seemed genuinely shocked. It had been years since she’d had anything to do with people of our faith. On an island as small as ours, they had needed to try hard to avoid each other, but they had managed. The street could always be crossed, after all, when you saw someone you didn’t wish to greet.

“She wants to know if you have anything to say to her.” I was a calm, detached messenger, but inwardly excited to annoy my mother. I felt the drama of the situation, and believed that for once I had the upper hand.

I noticed that Hannah tugged on my mother’s arm, urging her to give me an answer.

“Tell her she’s a witch,” my mother said.

The very next day, Hannah was waiting for me when I was let out of school in the afternoon. We walked together for a while. The sea was aquamarine, the sun so bright we squinted just to see. The world was light and white. We’d had different parents, but she was the sister I felt closest to. She was tall with blue eyes and pale red hair. Anyone could tell Hannah wasn’t directly related to my mother. She had a sweet nature that was to be found nowhere else in our family.

“When you go to see Madame, tell her our mother sends her best regards, and asks for her forgiveness.”

I was many things, but not a liar.

“Hannah,” I said. “Our mother would have my hide if I said that. And I doubt that Madame Halevy would believe me.”

My sister explained that she wished to be wed to a man from the congregation whom she’d met when he came to our store, but since my mother and father’s marriage was still such a sore point, this man could not tell his family of his love for her. We were outcasts and he was an upstanding member of the community. He was a cousin of Madame Halevy, and her good wishes could change everything if she was inclined to help. Hannah was flushed as she talked to me. I realized she was beyond the age most girls were when they married. She was animated as she spoke, her pale skin flushed with heat, and with something I was too young to recognize as desire. I saw there was blue thread in the yellow dress she wore, a ribbon that was nearly invisible to the naked eye.

I worked in the store that day, beside my three brothers, who were better at any task than I was. At the end of the day I took a bottle of rum, wrapped it in burlap, and put it in my schoolbag. I had recently turned eleven, and after that birthday my father had sat down with me for a talk. He wanted me to learn Hebrew so that I might be bar mitzvah when I turned thirteen. He told me the synagogue would not be able to deny me this, but I thought they likely would and I had no interest in my lessons, other than the fact that the teacher he had found for me, a Mr. Lieber, was an affable, learned man from Amsterdam who told me stories I enjoyed hearing. He spoke of skating on the canals, but more interesting to me was the color of his childhood world, for it was incandescent and white, with snow falling everywhere, onto the frozen river, onto his eyelashes. I thought about the many shades of white there might be: white with cold blue, and white with gold, and silver-white falling from the night sky.

I’d learned some Hebrew from Mr. Lieber, but all in all, despite my father’s good intentions, I was a terrible student.

I went for my lesson on the day I was to visit Madame Halevy, but as usual I wasn’t prepared.

“I notice you don’t study,” Mr. Lieber said to me. “If you did it might change things.”

“I’m a bad student.”

Lieber shook his head. “You’re a disinterested student.”

I presented Mr. Lieber with the bottle of rum I’d taken from the store, and asked if I might skip my lessons from now on. I would instead stop by, say hello, then be on my way, ready to wander into the mountains with my sketch pad or, something I failed to mention, sit in Madame Halevy’s dining room and listen to her stories.

“And what do I tell your father?” Mr. Lieber asked me.

“Tell him I’m a work in progress,” I suggested.

“Is there anything you care about?” he asked me.

It was a difficult question, but I knew the answer. I cared about light, color, bone structure, the movement of the leaves on the lime trees, the luminous scales of fish in the harbor. I did not know how to explain this, so I said, “There is. But it’s not in any book.”

“At least you’re honest,” he said to me.

We shook hands, he accepted the rum, and then I went to Madame Halevy’s. The more she refused to tell me the story of Jestine’s daughter, the more I wanted to hear it. I think I was obsessed. I loved Jestine and could not stand to think of her in pain. It was as if the mystery of the world would be revealed to me once I understood what had happened to this girl.

The maid had prepared a mango pastry that was syrupy and brought flies to it. “Here’s our little guest,” she said when I walked through the door. I was as tall as she, so I laughed. I had inherited my father’s height and was the tallest fellow in my classroom, as well as the laziest when it came to my studies.

I went to sit at the dining room table. The lace runner, from Burgundy, was set over the gleaming mahogany. I saw now it was frayed, thin as tissue. Upon inspection, I realized the silverware was twisted and very old, brought from France two generations ago. Some of it had turned black due to the salt air. Everything that had been new and beautiful was ancient now. The island’s weather was not good for preserving delicate things.

Madame Halevy came in to greet me. “Your mother has a message for me?”

“She does indeed.” I still wasn’t sure of what my response would be.

Madame seemed to like the pastry her maid had concocted; she dug right in, so I pretended to eat to be polite. Mostly I pushed the crust around my plate. The pastry was pale and flakey, the color of damp sand. I decided to give Madame Halevy the message constructed by my sister. “My mother sends you her best wishes and asks that you forgive her all of her transgressions.”

“Does she?” Madame Halevy said thoughtfully. Her eyes were bright beneath the white film that covered them. I could see the intelligence in her expression. I didn’t think for a minute that she believed me. “How is your sister Hannah?” she asked. She was cagey at all times.

“Fine.” I nodded. “Ready to get married.”

I wasn’t certain if I should speak of this or not, so I concentrated on my tea. The china was from Paris, gold and green, bone thin. I added sugar, and then, as people on our island did, a dash of molasses. It made a very sweet and delicious mixture.