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"Hello again." I said, stepping toward them on the walkway. My mother looked surprised, of course. but I thought, or perhaps hoped, she looked pleased. too.

"Hello," Linden said.

At that. I saw the surprise grow brighter in my mother's face. She glanced at him, obviously waiting for him to drive me away. When that didn't happen, she turned back to me.

"Is it always so lovely here?" I asked, edging closer to them.

"No," Linden said sharply. "We have hurricanes and humidity and sand flies. But they're just not permitted on Worth Avenue."

"I suppose there isn't a part of the country that doesn't have something negative about it." I replied, my eyes mostly on my mother, who kept her eyes on me and kept that gentle smile on her lips.

Suddenly, however, some dark thought crossed her mind, and that smile evaporated. She looked as if she were going to get up and go inside.

"I don't want to intrude on your privacy," I said very quickly. -"But I have so short a time to spend here and so few interesting people to speak with about my topic, I've gotten all I think I can get from the Eatons." I added.

Linden looked very pleased with that remark. "I'm not surprised. That well is rather shallow," he said. He looked at his mother and then at me. "All right," he added. "We'll give you a few minutes of our very busy time. What do you want to know?"

My mother looked more frightened now than surprised. My heart began to pound. I certainly didn't want her to see me as any sort of threat.

I smiled and looked at the chair beside her. May I?" I asked.

"Go on, go on." Linden said impatiently.

I sat. "Is this where you grew up. Mrs. Montgomery? Where you spent your childhood?"

"Of course it is," Linden replied for her.

I acted as if I hadn't heard him and kept my eyes on my mother, my silence indicating I would wait for her to speak even if it meant sitting here until nightfall,

"Part of it," she said softly. "but not in this house."

"She knows that, Mother," Linden said, practically jumping at her.

"I imagine you must have felt like a princess," I said. "living behind castle walls in such luxury."

"More like a prisoner than a princess," Linden responded. She turned and looked at him hard for a moment and then turned back to me. "No," she said. "I did feel like a princess once. You're right. I used to pretend it was a castle with a moat and guards on the walls, a place where I was so safe nothing could touch me, not even germs."

Linden blew air between his lips, shook his head, and turned to the sea. "Some castle, some protection," he muttered.

"I wasn't born here." she continued, "I was nearly sixteen when my mother and I came to live here."

"Where did you live before?" I asked as gently as I could, I felt as if I were moving through a mine field, tiptoeing and hoping I wouldn't trigger some explosion. Linden seemed. as usual, to be on the verge of spontaneous combustion, and my mother looked as if she could burst into tears at any moment as well: just one wrong word, one wrong look, would ignite them both.

"We lived in what people here would call a rather modest home in West Palm Beach." she said. "My mother was a very attractive young woman who had come here from Norfolk, Virginia. My father was a naval officer who was killed in a helicopter accident when I was only fifteen."

"How sad." I said.

"He was a very handsome man with a promising career ahead of him. My mother used to call him the admiral because she truly believed he would become one someday. I remember that. It got so she even referred to him that way when she spoke to me. 'The admiral's coming home this weekend.' she would say. I was young enough to believe he had the stripes and the rank, and he would laugh and tell my mother she had better stop calling him that. or I would be telling all my friends at school my father was an admiral in the U.S. Navy. We were very happy then," she said, her smile deepening with her memories.

"How did you come to live here?" I asked. If she only kn

ew I was learning about my own family, I thought.

"My mother was a very independent, strongminded woman. She wasn't going to waste away as some navy widow, not for a second. One day, she picked us up and moved us to West Palm Beach. She had a background in the service industry."

"A waitress." Linden interjected with a smirk.

"Yes, she was a waitress when she and my father first met, but she was capable of being a manager. as well. She got a job as a waitress in a friend's restaurant, one of the better West Palm Beach restaurants, and there she met Winston Montgomery, who was Linden's grandfather."