Introduction

Instant New York Times Bestseller

“The Guest Book is monumental in a way that few novels dare attempt.” ?The Washington Post

The thought-provoking new novel by New York Times bestselling author Sarah Blake

A lifetime of secrets. A history untold.

No. It is a simple word, uttered on a summer porch in 1936. And it will haunt Kitty Milton for the rest of her life. Kitty and her husband, Ogden, are both from families considered the backbone of the country. But this refusal will come to be Kitty’s defining moment, and its consequences will ripple through the Milton family for generations. For while they summer on their island in Maine, anchored as they are to the way things have always been, the winds of change are beginning to stir.

In 1959 New York City, two strangers enter the Miltons’ circle. One captures the attention of Kitty’s daughter, while the other makes each of them question what the family stands for. This new generation insists the times are changing. And in one night, everything does.

So much so that in the present day, the third generation of Miltons doesn’t have enough money to keep the island in Maine. Evie Milton’s mother has just died, and as Evie digs into her mother’s and grandparents’ history, what she finds is a story as unsettling as it is inescapable, the story that threatens the foundation of the Milton family myth.

Moving through three generations and back and forth in time, The Guest Book asks how we remember and what we choose to forget. It shows the untold secrets we inherit and pass on, unknowingly echoing our parents and grandparents. Sarah Blake’s triumphant novel tells the story of a family and a country that buries its past in quiet, until the present calls forth a reckoning.

Editorial Review

An Amazon Best Book of May 2019: Sarah Blake’s latest novel, The Guest Book, is a gorgeous epic that charts the course of an American family over three generations, from the 1930s to present day. Blake draws you into the Milton clan, and the more I became privy to their secrets, fears, and desires, the more I felt at home with every flawed one of them. Early in the novel, Blake’s character Evie tells her students, "History is between the cracks,” and so it is in this book: a history created in moments big and small, knitting itself together inside us, and of us. Crockett Island, off the coast of Maine, bought by Kitty and Ogden Milton in 1936 as a place of refuge and legacy, is as much a character in the novel as those who gather there. Through Blake’s writing I could smell the ocean, see the lilac tree beside the door. And I could feel Kitty and Ogden’s dream fray when the grandchildren inherit the island and all it represents. The Miltons’ story mirrors the times in which they lived, and we watch as parents and siblings make choices driven by ambition, prejudice, or pride that later haunt them and their progeny. Issues of gender inequality, classism, racism, breaking free from the past—Blake tackles them all, because all play an important role in the history of the family as well as that of the country in which we live. There is so much I want to tell you about this book. So many passages I have underlined and returned to. Instead, I invite you to visit the Miltons of Crockett Island in the pages of The Guest Book yourself, so that you too may experience the emotional resonance of Blake’s remarkable and thought-provoking novel. —Seira Wilson, Amazon Book Review

Excerpt

Chapter One

The fall had turned to winter and then back again without conviction, No- vember’s chill taken up and dropped like a woman never wearing the right coat until finally December laughed and took hold. Then the ice on the black pathways through the park fixed an unreflecting gaze upward month after month, the cold unwavering through what should have been spring, what should have been warming, so that even in April, in the Bowery in New York City, the braziers still glowed on street corners, and a man try- ing to warm his hands could watch the firelight picked up and carried in the windows above his head and imagine the glow travelling all the way along the avenues, square by square above the streets, all the way uptown and into the warm apartments of those who, pausing on the threshold to turn off the light, left their rooms, and descended in woolens and furs, grumbling about the cold—good god, when will it end—until it turned without fanfare one morning in May, and spring let loose at last. All over the city, children were released from their winter coats and out into the greening arms of Central Park, so here we all are again, thought Kitty Milton, stepping into the taxi cab on the way to meet her mother at the Philharmonic.

It was 1935.

She wore a soft cloche hat which belled below her ears, casting her eyes into shadow and making more pronounced the soft white of her chin tipped forward a little upon her long neck. Her coat swung easily around her knees, her upright figure swathed in a foamy green silk dress, the woolen coat, just a shade darker.

The taxi pulled away from the curb toward Central Park, and through the window spring unfurled above her head in the elm trees, and down along the walkways the forsythia shouted its yellow news. She leaned her head

upon the leather.

Life is wide, girls, Miss Scrivener had bid them all, years ago. Cross it with your arms open. And standing before the schoolgirls ranged in rows before her—all six feet of her, Miss Scrivener’s fiancée killed in the Great War, an old maid—their teacher had thrown out her arms.

And Kitty hadn’t known whether to laugh or cry.

Well, wide it was, Kitty thought now, spring begun and nothing ahead but possibility. Ogden would be home soon from abroad; the ground had been broken on their house in Oyster Bay. She was thirty. It was ‘35. Neddy was five, Moss was three, and baby Joan just turned one. Her head filled with the delicious, delightful math of life—the word flushed up onto her cheeks and into her eyes, broadening into a smile as the taxi moved up Fifth Avenue.

She caught the driver’s eye in the mirror and knew she ought to turn her head away so he didn’t see her, smiling like an idiot, but she held his gaze instead. He winked. She smiled back, and slid down on the seat, closing her eyes as the taxi plunged into the tunnel moving east to west, underneath the playgrounds in the Park where her children were playing with a concen- trated fury against the end of the morning, the arrival of lunchtime, crawl- ing around the great bronze statue of a beloved English poet, perching like little sparrows on the giant knee, climbing (if they were lucky, if their nurse wasn’t watching) all the way up to his massive sloping shoulder.

But the Milton boys were not lucky that way, the Milton boys’ nurse told them to get down, right now, get down immediately and come here.

Moss, the younger, who did not like when grown ups looked at him with that distant, frowning attention that signaled more attention coming after, coming closer, slid off the statue, too quickly, and landed on one bare knee. Ow, he mouthed and lowered his cheek to the hot, scuffed skin. Ouch.

But his brother had paid no attention to Nurse below him, their baby sis- ter Joan on her big hip; Neddy kept climbing, creeping to the top of the statue’s head and was—what was he doing?

“Edward,” Nurse moved quickly forward, “Edward! Get down. This in-

stant.”

The boy was going to fall.

He had planted both feet, one on either side of the great head, the shaggy bronze hair covering the two ears, a foot on either shoulder, and was care- fully, slowly pushing himself up to stand, aloft.

The boy was going to break his neck. “Edward,” Nurse said, very quietly now.

The other children stopped their crawling, frozen where they were on the statue, watching the boy above them who had climbed so high. Now he was the only thing moving upon the bronze.

“Edward.”

Slowly, carefully, Neddy raised himself, pushing off the poet’s head, wa- vering just an instant, then catching steady, and stood all the way up. Steady and up so high. Compact, perfect, he stood on the statue’s shoulders a small being in short pants and a cardigan, now regarding the world of upturned, worried faces below him.

“Moss,” he squawked. “Lookit.”

And Moss tilted his head and saw up through the folds of the statue’s jacket, the great thick hands, up past another boy clinging to the open page of that enormous book, Neddy far above, standing, grinning, and crowing. If he’d held out his hand and said Come, fly! Moss would have flown. For when your brother calls come, you step forward, you take his hand and go.

How can you not, it was always him in the front, going first.

His head tipped, his cheek still on his knee, Moss grinned up at his brother.

Neddy nodded, and lightly, easily, bent again, and slid from the top of the brass lump, clambering all the way down, arriving with a little bounce as he dropped to the pebbled ground.

“Your father,” Nurse promised, “will hear of this. This is going on the list.” She unlocked the brake on the pram, and pushed the boy’s shoulder,

roughly. “The list, Edward. You hear me?”

Neddy nodded. And started marching forward.

Moss stole his hand into his brother’s. Both boys kept step, ahead of the pram, their little backs straight as soldiers. Smiling.

There would be no list, they knew. It was only Mother at home. Father was in Berlin.

Indeed, Ogden Milton had just turned off the busy Tiergartenstrasse thick with its double decker buses and the determined low-slung black Mercedes, entering the wooded park at the center of the city and onto Florastrasse, which stretched through the Tiergarten in a quiet and solemn line to the spot where he was bound. Almost immediately, the city vanished behind him. He walked beneath the thick alley of lindens in bloom overhead, gath- ering him immediately in that scent he had tried, but never managed to de- scribe to Kitty. Through the black trees along his left, one of the park’s vast meadows rolled all its green way to a distant, flashing lake. And everywhere out in the sunlight and air, in pairs and groups, on bicycles, or on foot, there were Berliners turning their faces towards the long lovely end of the day, as they had done since the time of the Kaisers.

With the easy grace of a man who’s winning stroke was a sweeping cross- cut from the back court, Milton made his way through the park, his lineage hanging lightly on his well-formed limbs, the habit of knowing just what to do in any given moment having been passed down from generation to gen- eration. Descended as he was from one of the families to arrive just after the Mayflower (aristocrats, Ogden, not refugees, his mother, Harriet, once corrected him), Ogden had been raised with every advantage and told so. There had been a Milton in the first class of Harvard College in 1642 and a Milton in every subsequent class for which there was a young man to offer. A Milton Library was tucked under the wings of the Widener.

With his open American face, his frank American voice, one might think to oneself, seeing him, there walks a good man. A noble man. He appeared dashing and splendid. Undismayed by the ordinary evil of the world, he had

the place and the power to make good, to do good. And he did so. He be- lieved one could do right. He had been raised to expect that one could. His was the last generation for whom those givens remained as undisturbed as a silk purse.

The fourth in a line of Miltons at the helm of Milton Higginson, a bank begun in 1850 that sat squarely at the center of the fortunes of his country and now, increasingly, of Germany’s, this Ogden Milton had taken over the firm quite young, steering at first cautiously, then more and more easily be- fore the wind into the broad, lucrative waters of the 1920s, advancing into Europe with the schoolboy’s grin that would never leave him even as an old man, an infectious grin that seemed to say, isn’t this marvelous. Isn’t this something. Meaning, life. Meaning, luck. Meaning, his world.

The Miltons had excellent liquor and an adequate cook, and it was around their table that the men who did not have a visible hand in Washing- ton, but who in the shadows remained most useful to the President, gath- ered. Families like the Miltons had always pulled the levers of the country in quiet, without considering that quiet to be anything strange, passing down that expectation to their sons early on—in the schools, the churches, the places along the sunlit rocks of the East Coast where all of them summered, from Campobello to Kennebunk to Oyster Bay. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, after all, was one of them.

Ogden had saved Roosevelt’s hide in 32—though most of his Harvard classmates would have gladly taken that hide and tacked it on the back wall to dry. The New Deal had not been the Death of Business, as the Wall Street Journal had darkly threatened. Ogden had seen beyond the fray with a canny eye and a keen ear that would put him time and again on what ap- peared to be the right side. Above the heads of a crowd, Ogden saw what he wanted, and turned there. Operating a couple of blocks down from the great stone whale that was Morgan’s Bank at 23 Broad Street, Ogden ran Milton Higginson like the pilot fish, nimbler, able to bank and borrow out of the public eye, able to invest where he chose.

This was Ogden’s second trip to Germany in the past nine months, cer-

tain, as he was, that good men, fair play, and the open sluices of capital pour- ing into the right coffers would combat the madmen and fools. It was why he had invested heavily in this country. It was why he was now walking to- wards the party he could see ahead of him spread upon the lawn that edged the roses at the end of the broad walkway.

“You must come,” Bernhard Walser had remarked that morning after the two men had signed the papers, the notary had left, and the ink was drying between them on the oaken desk in the enormous green damask offices of German Steel, overlooking the river Spree. “It was Gertrude’s favorite spot in all the city.”

Walser turned his head towards the high open windows as if he’d heard her, as if his wife, dead for years, might any moment be coming along the pavement.

“She would have been fifty-seven, today,” he mused now.

Milton reached for his pipe and tobacco, touched as always by the older man across from him. Bremen aristocrat, Veteran of the Great War, Chair- man of the Walser Steel Company, in possession of one of the finest anti- quarian libraries in Europe, and yet still a man who had wooed his wife, a famous English beauty—and a Jew—by reciting Goethe in a twilight gar- den in Mayfair. Walser was a man who wore his many jackets easily. A sin- gular man one couldn’t pin down, Ogden thought, tamping the tobacco in the bowl. Bigger than his britches.

No. Bigger than his cloth. The kind of man Ogden aspired to be.

Fifteen years ago, Ogden had walked out of the gates of Harvard Yard with the men in the class of 1920 and found his father leaning against a new Model T with a smile on his face. Go on over to Europe, for a looksee, he’d said. Invest, he’d said. Find the right men and the good ideas and put our money there. They had shipped the black car over, and through the sum- mer months the lanky American had motored through England, down into France and then to Germany, arriving in Berlin in the last golden days of autumn, the tremendous heady chaos of the Weimar democracy palpable in the narrow streets and city squares, and under the tiny lights embedded

in the twining vines above men and women gathering in the open air of Biergärten. Refugees had poured in from the east after the war, and the new breath of strangers, perfumed with yeast and salt, honey and garlic, blew through the city. Talk was plentiful, passions were high, but neither would fill a stomach.

These people needed jobs. And no one had seen what this meant for the country with more clarity or insight, thought Ogden Milton now, as he did at the time, than Bernhard Walser.

So it had been with a clear conscience that Walser had quietly broken the Treaty very early on and, with the help of investors like Ogden, built back Walser Steel through the 20s, incensed by what he saw as a French and British move to keep Germany out of competition, disguised as a false pacifism. True peace was only guaranteed by jobs. The machinery needed to build a strong economy was the machinery of peace, no matter what that machinery made: faucets, hairpins, or, as the Walser Gruppe had begun to do, the wings for planes.

“You must come.” Walser said again, returning his attention to the man before him now. “Elsa will be there. And some others you may know.”

Walser looked at him a moment.

“But, you have not seen Elsa this trip, I think?” “No,” Ogden rose. “I haven’t.”

Walser pushed across the desk a thick yellow envelope, emblazoned on the front with the Walser Gruppe letterhead over which was stamped the Nazi seal.

Ogden took the envelope and smiled. “There we go, then,” he said. Walser nodded. “There we go.”

Elsa Hoffman pulled the door shut and turned around on the stoop, de- positing her key in the bag for the shops on her arm. There was no one on the street. No one loitering, watching. No one walking past the house. She

turned right, toward the shops on Friedrichstrasse, her heels clicking down Linienstrasse, the sun reaching its long arm onto her shoulder and resting there.

It is the prelude, Gerhard whispered into her hair at night, the two of them lying under the open window, the night breeze on their bodies, his leg thrown over her, his hand cupping her face. These are the days of tempo rubato, the tempo off, but we can’t see where the beat was stolen, we can’t see the changes. Gerhard pulled the single sheet across them. Wagner knew it—when you steal time from the ear, the ear, the body, yearns for the order back, inside our chests beats the need to stop this, to resolve—the need to close the open chord.

“Like this,” she had lifted her head from the pillow and kissed him. “Like that. Or like this,” he pulled her close.

No one followed. She walked steadily, having grown more and more practiced at evading attention. At first the work was only to be carrying notes for Gerhard to the others in the group. Then, it became a bit more complicated, though still it seemed like playing, like childhood games. That first time, Gerhard’s brother Franz pulled her aside in the line for the cham- pagne at the Philharmonie, and asked if she might sit in the cafe outside the Hotel Adlon and take a coffee.

She had looked up at him, and nodded. Und dann?

Und, he leaned to kiss her cheek in farewell, his hand on her waist and then sliding in her pocket, “Stand, and pay, and leave this money on the table,” he whispered, pulling away.

Today she was to meet the S-bahn at Friedrichstrasse at 11 and simply watch that a man and a woman were not followed.

“And, who are the man and the woman?” she asked. “You do not know. You should never know.”

She was to wait at the bottom of the stairs and follow the couple holding hands, the woman laughing up into the man’s eyes.

Like any couple.

“How will I know it is the right couple?”

“She will stumble on the stairs, and he will hold her tighter so she doesn’t fall.”

It was a play.

Elsa went into the butcher shop first, nodding from the back of the store at Herr Plaut, then to the grocer and the baker. Meat, eggs, potatoes, bread. Above the street the Cathedral tower rose, and the three quarter bells sounded as they did every hour. As they did every morning at this time, she knew, because she was out every morning, just like this, walking, the bas- ket over her arm. The fear, that was the difference. This is happening. This is real. This is no game. You could be hurt. You could be arrested and taken

away. For looking wrong. For catching the wrong person’s eye on the train.

If anyone watches you, let them see nothing.

The earlier train hurtled along on the tracks overhead at Friedrichstrasse and the silhouettes of the waiting people on the distant platform burst free and moved like the figures on a music box.

She shifted her basket.

Meat, eggs, potatoes, bread. Now stamps to write letters. The newsstand at the bottom of the U-bahn station stairs.

“Morgen,” she nodded at Herr Josten.

Distantly, she heard the second train approaching. Ja. Sehr Schön, Beauti- ful, she answered Josten, opening her change purse for the coins. The rails above her head hummed.

“Bitte?”

“Your father,” Josten asked. “He is well?”

“Ach ja, danke,” she smiled, handing him the coins. The train pulled into the station on the tracks above.

She forced herself not to turn and look, to take the three stamps Josten held for her, to slide them into her change purse, to nod and thank him, smiling, just as she did every morning, turning away at last, and glancing up at the train only as one would check a blue sky suddenly crossed by clouds.

A couple descended the U-bahn stairs hand in hand.

The picnic made a pretty picture upon the lawn beside the circle of roses that ringed the alabaster statue of bare-breasted Flora, bending over her flowers at its center. The stark white uniforms of the Reichswehr punctu- ated the otherwise indistinguishable men in dark suits, and there were two women in summer hats so wide they floated like birds in the evening air that hung delicious, and lingering around them all. Ogden heard Elsa’s laughter like a ribbon on the breeze, before he picked her out in the crowd in a yel- low dress the color of sunflowers and summer, quick, small, and urgent.

He slowed. For there she was long ago, in the box at the Stadttheatre, sit- ting with her father, her dark head turned away from him that first night, her brown hair piled high. Ogden saw that, and saw the lapis blue velvet drapes in the box, the chipped gold of her chair pressed against the curve of her bare back. And Ogden, practical to his core, but impressionable, and in Eu- rope for the first time, believed in the truth of serendipity. He was twenty- two. Elsa Walser was older, and German. All this flashed through him in the moments before Elsa had turned and seen the awkward American at the back of their box.

Entschuldigung, he’d managed. Excuse me.

Her father had introduced them, he had slid into the empty seat beside her, and the three of them faced the stage where the first violinist had just taken his seat to the left of the conductor and the hall fell silent. And when the man had touched his bow to the string, touched and then drawn the bow across, holding that long first note, Ogden had understood that every life had at its center a beginning that was not birth, a moment when the catch on the lock in one’s life opens, and out it comes, starting forward.

And the memory of Elsa opening the door to him at Linienstrasse 32 the next morning, flooded up as it did each time he saw her after an absence. If there are places that hold us, keeping us in them, surely too there are peo- ple, he felt, people who work like mirrors for the selves we have forgotten. The young Ogden stood on the stoop below Elsa Walser that day, stock still,

stuck and dumbstruck staring back at the women in the doorway, unsure whether to look, or look away. In that instant, he imagined himself in love with her.

“Ach,” Elsa had teased him. “The American. But he does not move.”

The Mouse, she was nicknamed by the circle of friends she brought him into, though Elsa was not shy or retiring, not mouse-y at all. I am—she leaned over and tapped his shoulder at the end of a long late table littered with ashtrays and napkins—how do you say? Undercover. And smiled.

“Milton!” Elsa called now, catching sight of him, her eyes resting on him even as she continued speaking to the woman beside her.

He waved.

And as he walked forward into her gaze, the gap between what he’d imag- ined and what was the truth appeared as it always did whenever they met. At first, he was a figure of curiosity to her, and then, fairly quickly, a figure of gentle fun: a man of property, an old man at twenty-one, she teased. She had marked him as an American through and through—appealing and fun- damentally uninteresting. She had married Gerhard Hoffman, the man on the stage that night Ogden first saw her, the principal violin for the Berliner Philharmonie, a genius. And like her father, she had married a Jew. Now they had a little boy. Ogden could never have been the man she needed. He would have always fallen just shy, just short. Though short of what, and why, still continued to elude, and—if he were honest—to irritate, albeit softly, like a hole worn into his sock. He knew himself to be more than what she saw.

“Here is Milton,” Elsa explained in her perfect, accented English as he ar- rived, “We pretend we do not know his Christian name.”

The heavy German r tolled beneath her words. He leaned to kiss her on both cheeks, smelling the lilac in her hair.

“Ach, so?” One of the women in the little group around Elsa, extended her hand from beneath her hat, ready to smile, unsure of her own English.

“I do have a name, as it happens,” he replied cheerfully. “The Walsers refuse to speak it.”

“My father likes to claim he’s had a Milton at his table,” Elsa had turned from him. “He is a great reader of Paradises Lost.”

“One,” Ogden retorted mildly, “is enough, I should think.”

She smiled back at him, putting her arm on a soldier standing beside her so inordinately proud of his uniform, it seemed he would not bend for fear of creasing it.

“Private Dieter—” she began, as the man’s arm shot up in the air with the greeting Ogden still found impossible to take seriously, but was every- where, even here in the open air of a spring evening in the park. He had heard from Bill Moffat at the Embassy that there had been American tourists beaten for not responding with the required gusto.

“And Colonel Rutzbahr,” she continued, pointing to another man who had wandered into their group, this one genial, bowing, fluid. The stiff and the smooth, Ogden held his smile in check, a perfectly German pair.

“Heil Hitler!” he nodded, turning back to Elsa. “Where is Gerhard tonight?”

“He will be along,” Elsa answered. “He had to meet someone.”

“Ach, always the Someones for Gerhard Hoffman,” Colonel Rudi Pütz- graff appeared beside Elsa with a champagne bottle and glasses.

At her husband’s name on the man’s lips, a light shut off in Elsa’s face as if a hand pulled closed a door at the end of a hall.

“Our National Treasure,” the Colonel pressed a glass into Ogden’s hand, “is kept quite busy.”

Ogden nodded his thanks.

“It is good to see you here, Herr Milton, “ Pützgraff remarked, tucking the champagne bottle under one arm and reaching for his cigarette case. “I gather you are to be congratulated.”

“Am I?”

“American money and Nazi industry,” Putzgraff offered the cigarettes. “You and Walser.”

Elsa slid one of the cigarettes free.

“German industry,” Ogden shook his head at the case.

“But they are the same,” Putzgraff replied. “Natürlich.” Ogden didn’t answer.

“Your husband will play the Wagner on the 24th?” Putzgraff asked Elsa, sliding his lighter from his pocket and leaning toward her cigarette.

“Of course,” Elsa turned her smile up to him. “That is the program.” Putzgraff straightened.

“He does not like Wagner?”

Elsa exhaled, her eyes on him. “But I said no such thing, Rudi.”

Ogden glanced at her. She was holding herself at attention, like a sentry in a box.

“Prost.” He raised his glass to draw the man’s gaze.

“Prost!” Putzgraff tipped his glass toward him and moved away.

The golden light caught on the lower branches of the lindens across the park, softening at the edges. Two rowboats on the lake raced across the flat, darkening water. In the growing dusk, the brilliant white statues glowed in a line beneath the trees. One of the uniforms and Elsa’s friend, the hatted woman, wandered together slowly down the grass towards another fountain.

Dropping to the blanket on the ground, Elsa patted the spot beside her for Ogden to sit as well.

“Where is Willy?” he asked, lowering himself down. Her face softened. “At home. In bed.”

“Poor fellow. My boys hate to be put to bed before sunset.” “Ah, but sunset lasts much longer here.”

It was true. Even now, verging on nine in the evening, there was little sense of the end of the day. Twilight hovered in the grass, and in the crushed petals of the roses, but the sky above stretched a sweet and endless blue.

Putzgraff strolled round the group with the champagne, dropping into conversations and moving along. Ogden was aware of Elsa beside him watching the man as well. A little farther along the pathway, he caught sight of her father deep in conversation with a German economist who had trained in Wisconsin. Beside them stood the director of the Reichsbank, an

old friend of Walser’s and to Ogden’s mind, a reasonable man. Ogden raised his hand in greeting; Walser nodded and held up his glass.

“You have signed the papers,” Elsa said quietly. “That is good. That will be good for Father.”

He glanced at her. She was looking past where her father stood now talk- ing to the economist.

“Have you travelled outside the city on this trip?” she asked. “No.”

She nodded, and inhaled.

“Take a bicycle ride in any direction, on nearly any road, and you will see it all—plain as day.”

“What will I see?”

“Training fields, air strips, Brownshirts in the woods. We are all Nazis now.”

“Elsa—”

“You don’t believe me.”

“Believe that all Nazis are the same?” He shook his head. “There are too many good men, too many with too much to lose to let the thugs rule.”

“But which is which?” She turned and looked directly at him. “How can you tell? How can any of us tell?”

He held her gaze. She looked away.

“It started so slowly, Milton. Coming towards us like a river shifting from its banks, one centimeter at a time. One lie, then the next. Lies so big there had to be a reason to tell them, there had to be some purpose, maybe even some truth—Goebbels is not an unintelligent man—”

She spoke without seeming to care if he heard, thinking aloud in the dusk. “Perhaps a communist truly had set off the fire in the Reichstag, though it made little sense. Perhaps there was a reason so many people were arrested that night, in Berlin alone. Perhaps there was a danger no one could see, yet.” Her voice caught. “But now has come the slow awakening—this will not pass. This will not stop.”

She looked at him. “But it must be stopped.”

She was admirable, Ogden felt, but untempered. Too quick to jump to dangerous conclusions.

“Elsa—”

“They are beginning another phase,” she said quietly. “Gerhard is certain they will demand he step down by the end of this year. They are talking of passing ‘laws.”

“But he is first chair.” Ogden frowned. “He is one of the primary draws of the Philharmonie.”

She flicked her cigarette into the grass before them.

“There are thousands of jobs for the taking now. Jobs that belonged to Jews, even Jews like Gerhard. Thousands. So, it is Christmas morning here in Germany,” she shook her head, “and here is Papa Deutschland. Papa with the Christmas Goose, Papa with presents—

“And no one asks, where did the presents come from, Papa? Whose tree did you rob? Because Papa hasn’t robbed anyone. Only Jews. Those jobs—those houses—those belonged to Germans all along. And all Papa needs to do is join the Party. Then it is Christmas morning, everywhere. That’s all.”

He masked his impatience. “The Nazis are nothing but thugs. It cannot last.”

She shook her head, and turned away. “Milton,” she said. “You are not lis-

tening.”

“I am listening very hard.”

“We have been . . . purloined,” she said. “In plain sight.” He cast a brief, considering gaze at her.

“Elsa! Milton! Meine Freunde,” Colonol Putzgraff called. “Ein Foto! Kom-

men Sie hier. On the blanket, there—” he pointed to where Elsa and Ogden sat. Good-naturedly, the others began to move towards the blanket as Putz- graff busied himself.

“We need you.” Elsa said to him swift and low beside him. “We?”

“Gerhard,” she nodded. “The others.” “Elsa—” he protested. “What can I do?”

“Ach,” she turned away. “Still the man with the courage of his conven- tions.”

Ogden pulled from her, pricked.

“Closer,” Putzgraff frowned playfully. “Much closer.”

Ogden drew his knees up and wrapped his arms around them.

“You should not condescend, Elsa,” he stared straight into Putzgraff’s camera. “It does not become you.”

“Eins, zwei—” the Colonel counted.

“Become me?” A thick, unhappy laugh burst from Elsa in the moment the flash went off.

“Sehr gut!” Putzgraff, raised his fist in satisfaction.

Kitty had crossed out of Central Park at 72nd street and was walking steadily east towards the River. It had been a lovely afternoon. The Philhar- monic had played the Mendelsohn, and Kitty and her mother had run into Mrs. William Phipps and then, unexpectedly, into the Wilmerdings. She had put her mother in a cab and decided to walk the rest of the way home. She stopped on the corner to wait for the light.

Across the street, protected by its green awning and polished brass rail- ings, stood One Sutton Place, one of the many unremarkable granite squares on the Upper East Side whose address did all the work, as nothing about its unadorned face suggested the wealth inside. This had been entirely purposeful. When the building went up in 1887, there was a general sense among its first occupants (all of whose apartments commanded corner views of the East River) that the thick-shouldered, rather showy mansions of arrivistes such as Frick and Rockefeller on Madison and Fifth did not bear repeating.

And certainly had not been repeated here, Kitty mused, delighted by the

old building, stolid as an uncle. Delighted by it all. By everything. By the light. By the day. She raised her eyes and counted up fourteen stories to where the windows of their apartment stretched.

Even now—seven years after Ogden had bent without a word and picked her up in his arms on the day they arrived back home from their Wedding Trip, carrying her, wrinkled travelling suit and all, straight towards the dou- ble brass doors out front, straight over the threshold and to the elevator where he leaned her against the satin covered wall waiting for the elevator to open, and kissed her—even now, she had the short sharp sensation sometimes here, on the street outside where they lived, that she was playing at house. She had tripped along the pathway set down for her life, footsteps light on the flagstones—there went Kitty Milton arms full of flowers for the front hall, there again at lunch, and again later beside her husband, her arm snugged under his elbow, the three children born every two years in perfect, healthy succession, proof if anyone were ticking off the boxes (as she knew they were, she had grown up beneath the myriad eyes of dowagers and gos- sips who occupied the stiff backed chairs in front rooms and back gardens between East 12th and East 28th Street) that Kitty Houghton had gotten it right.

When she had vowed to Love, Honor and Obey, she’d never have guessed how easy Ogden would make it. Or how much she would want to. How she wanted what he wanted. She moved through the world with a nat- ural reserve. The longing to speak out, crack open, start up suddenly did not run in her. Cool, calm, observant, she knew it was these very things that had drawn Og to her. And yet, when he had come to her on their wedding night and slid his hand down her bare arm, her body rose under him as if another girl had lain there coiled and waiting. She shivered now with the memory.

And the thought of the children in their baths up there, the drinks set out on the bar in case anyone dropped in, the single place setting at the long table ready for her dinner, the bed turned down at the end of the evening and the curtains drawn, gave her a happy jolt. Her rooms were full. She was not playing at all.

The light changed and she stepped off the curb and toward two little girls walking toward her in their crisp dresses, faces forward, holding onto either side of the pram in which a new baby lay. “Up you go,” the nanny breathed, raising the front wheels to take the curb. Wordless, the little girls climbed up onto the curb, still holding onto the pram as onto the straps of a rope tow.

“Do we have to go to the park?” the biggest one asked as Kitty passed. “Yes, Miss Lowenstein, you do.”

Jews, Kitty noted, making her way toward the dark green awning that shaded the well-polished door, straightening her back without thinking. Little Jewish girls. And up here, on the Upper East Side.

“Hello, Johnny.” She inclined her head toward the doorman with a smile. “Mrs. Milton,” he nodded, holding open the door for her, Neddy’s

stuffed bear in his arms.

“Oh Lord, they’ve done it again?” she smiled, taking the battered bear from the doorman’s hands. “It’s a game, you realize,” she said. “You only en- courage them.”

“Keeps me busy.” Johnny’s eyes danced. “Out of trouble.”

“Is that so?” she cocked an eyebrow by way of her thanks. Beneath the uniform—any uniform—men all just wanted to play ball.

I must speak to Neddy, however, she promised herself, making her way across the black and white tile to the elevator doors. He oughtn’t to pre- sume on Johnny’s good humor. Johnny had a job to do, and it didn’t include retrieving the stuffed bear that Neddy had tossed from the open window, fourteen stories up, to see if Bear could fly.

She smiled. Neddy who wouldn’t sit still, Neddy, whose hand she had to keep tight hold on, he had a tendency to go off and explore. No one had prepared her for boys and their impulsive, wandering, setting off this way and that, a creature on some scent, following their noses into trouble. Little ferrets.

She waited as the machinery of the lift hummed its way downward and bounced lightly before the grate was pulled and then the door slid across.

“Hello, Frank.” Kitty said to the elevator man as she walked into the lift. “Mrs. Milton.” Frank glanced at her and pushed the grate across.

They rode in silence up the fourteen flights, both pairs of eyes watching the light on the dial as the elevator rose through the numbers. At her floor, Frank spun the gear, slowing the elevator until it stopped just at the lip of the threshold. He pulled the gate back and waited.

“Thank you,” she said, catching sight of herself in the mirror hung in the center of the tiny elevator hall. She had a flush on her cheeks and the plea- sure of the afternoon still shone in her eyes.

The light was on in the library. To the right the early evening sun lit up a swath of the living room out of whose windows Kitty glimpsed the bright green spring waving in the treetops. She slipped out of her coat and reached for a hanger in the cedar closet, tucking the wooden shoulders into the cloth and hanging it back upon the rod, where it hung now beside Ogden’s. Mr. and Mrs. Milton. She smiled at the cloth couple, touching the sleeve of his coat and then, leaned and buried her face in its neck, possessed by this wild, irrepressible love of the coat and her coat and the hall and—Oh, I am ridiculous, she smiled. Absurd. But the sense of joy that had begun that after- noon in the taxi and had carried through the music in the hall, back out into the park, that sheer abundant light in her heart as she had walked home, open windows, oh, she wanted to burst out of her body, she realized pulling out of the closet, and shutting the door on her coat beside his.

Ogden, she thought, Come home.

The afternoon her cousin Dunc Houghton had first brought Og, newly returned from Germany, to one of her grandmother’s interminable soirees—one moment there she was, Kitty Houghton, standing next to her sister, Evelyn, just inside Granny’s library door, bored and perfumed, but ready and on hand to be the girls at yet another musical evening, and the next moment, there she was, quite simply, not.

She was something else entirely. Standing there with Evelyn, she’d heard the commotion in the hall behind her as the street door was thrown open and men’s laughter clattered over the yellow silk settee and the two Queen

Anne chairs, hello Barker, hello, sirs, may I take your hats—and crash-banged right into the front room where Granny’s guests were busy finding chairs.

Go and see what that is! her grandmother’s face had commanded Kitty

silently. And Kitty had slid round the door, emerging into the hall just as Dunc crowed, “See, Ogden. This is what I’m talking about—,”

Dunc was pointing to the John Singer Sargent portrait of her grand- mother hung (too high, the little curator from the Museum had sniped when he had come one evening) above the entrance to the library behind her, but the man next to him was not looking at the painting.

“I do see,” he said. She blushed.

“Oh, yes.” Dunc turned to his friend, and clapped his hands, apprecia- tively. “Yes, my cousin, Kitty. The flower of an altogether different age.”

The young man had crossed the rug between them and taken her hand in his. “I’m Ogden,” he’d said.

One of the Pierpont Place Miltons, he was a catch in anyone’s book, though he was quite a bit older, had travelled, and there had been whispers of a woman somewhere. But the man in front of her had blue eyes and a lean face ending in a grin that seemed to her right then, her hand in his, to shine on her alone. He had experience. Very well. She hadn’t been frightened in the least. She was not her mother. A man’s life stretched into all corners, ran like water where it was tipped. The past was, simply, past. He had come to her with his arms wide and his heart full and they had begun.

All her life Kitty had moved hand to hand forward, lightly holding on the line strung between signposts for a woman’s life. As a girl, it had been firmly set down that one ought never speak until one was spoken to, and when one did, one ought not speak of anything that might provoke or worry. One referred to the limb of the table, not the leg, the white meat on the chicken, not the breast. Good manners were the foundations of civilization. One knew precisely with whom one sat in a room based entirely on how well they behaved, and in what manner. Forks and knives were placed at the six-forty on one’s plate when one was finished eating. One ought to walk

straight and keep one’s hands to oneself when one spoke, lest one be taken for an Italian or a Jew. A woman was meant to tend a child, a garden or a conversation. A woman ought to know how to mind the temperature in a room, adding a little heat in a well-timed question, or cool a warm temper with the suggestion of another drink, a bowl of nuts, and a smile.

What Kitty had learned at Miss Porter’s School—handed down from Sarah Porter through the spinsters teaching there, themselves the sisters of the Yale men who handed down the great words, Truth. Verity. Honor—was that your brothers and your husbands and your sons will lead, and you will tend. You will watch and suggest and guide, and protect. You will carry the torch, forward, and all to the good.

There was the World. And one fixed an eye keenly on it. One learned its history, one understood the causes of its wars. One debated and, gradu- ally, a picture emerged of mankind over centuries; one understood the dif- ference between what was good and what was right. One understood that men could be led to evil, against the judgment of their better selves. De- bauchery. Poverty of spirit. This was the explanation for so many unfortu- nate ills—slavery, for instance. This was the reason. Men, individual men, were not at fault. They had to be taught. Led. Shown by example what was best. Unfairness, unkindness could be addressed. Quietly. Patiently. With- out a lot of noisy attention.

Noise was for the poorly bred.

If one worried, if one were afraid, if one doubted—one kept it to oneself. One looked for the good, and one found it. The woman found it, the woman pointed it out and the man tucked it in his pocket, heartened. These were the rules.

She could hear the children in their bath, and Nurse’s steady scolding, like a drum beneath the children’s patter. She shouldn’t bother them, she thought. She should let them be.

But a squeal and then the delighted laughter of Neddy drew her back, and she turned the knob on the bathroom door.

“Mummy!” Moss cried.

Two wet heads turned to her, standing on the threshold. “You’ve got Bear,” Neddy crowed.

“I do,” Kitty stopped herself from smiling. “But we must have a talk—” “Indeed, we must,” Nurse turned on her stool, her face quite terrible.

“I’ve told the boys I would report their behavior today.”

Behind her, Neddy grinned, and held his nose, sliding under the water.

Moss stared.

“Very well,” Kitty said, knowing she was meant to be stern, knowing she was meant to speak. But here were her two boys in the bath, their hair wet and their faces shining—Neddy rose back up out of the water, with his yel- low car that he took everywhere in his hand. Plonk, he said, running it along the rim of the tub. It was too sweet, too delicious.

“We’ll have a talk after the bath,” she promised Nurse. “Send them down to my room when they are out.” And she turned from the steaming room to hide her smile.

Oh, she thought again, hurrying down the hall. Here it is. Again. Life.

The wide bed with its white bedspread tucked precisely beneath the two pillows appeared wider in the late sun. The windows were shut against the evening and she set the bear down on the window seat and shoved one of the windows all the way up, wanting all the air in, the city in, the sound of traffic and far below the click of someone’s heels on the pavement. The smell of heat and earth reached all the way up to her, the deep dark of spring along some distant country lane.

She turned, stripping her wrists of her charm bracelet and her gold watch, slipping out of her flats, and walked into the bathroom, the deep green tile cool beneath her stockinged feet, and opened the china knobs in the sink. A hard cold gushed out of the tap. Startled, she pulled her hands out and caught sight of the grimace on her face in the mirror. The woman looking back smoothed her frown and studied herself. She had the Houghton lines, the Houghton nose, the high cheekbones above a curved mouth that now smiled back at the glass and at the generations.

Born a Houghton and married a Milton, her father had crowed apprecia-

tively, raising his glass at their wedding, Kitty has exchanged one ton for an- other! Then chuckling to the room around them, he finished—And she’s shown the great good sense to remain in the same weight class! And the long bare arms of Kitty’s bridesmaids lifting their champagne glasses lazily up- ward in the toast had reminded Kitty of swans at twilight, swimming effort- lessly, beautifully curved and silent.

“These are the best years of your life,” Mrs. Phipps leaned across the white tablecloth to her, putting a hand on Kitty’s for her attention. “You don’t know it, but it’s true.”

Kitty had flushed, nodding at her mother’s friend, knowing she ought to thank her, knowing it was meant well. But old women were thieves. They wanted to steal possibility, put one in one’s place and snatch the time they had lost back into their own baskets. Even here, on her wedding night.

Well, she had declared to herself that night, she wouldn’t do it. No matter how wise she grew, she promised, curving her lips into a smile for Mrs. Phipps, she’d never tell a girl like her at the end of every meadow there is a gate.

She buried her hands and then her face in the thick towel and then low- ering it, saw in the mirror that Neddy and Moss, freshly bathed, and now in their wrappers and slippers, their hair combed, had come silently into the room behind her, where they had found Bear, and had climbed onto the window seat.

Her heart stuttered.

The window was pushed high above their heads. There was nothing at all between them and the air.

“Get down, boys,” she said into the mirror.

They hadn’t heard. Moss was on his knees, perched against the sill. Neddy was standing above him and leaning out, leaning out way too far, about to launch Bear over the sill.

Kitty spun round, moving to get to him. “Neddy!”

Startled, the little boy turned. And Kitty saw that she would never get to him in time. There would be nothing to save him from the open sky.

And then he simply fell. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

**Spoiler Alert**

1. Discuss the significance of the title. What does the Miltons’ guest book represent in this novel? Are Len and Reg guests? Is there any significance to the fact that Reg never signs the book?

2. Evie teaches her students that “history is sometimes made by heroes, but it is also always made by us. We, the people, who stumble around, who block or help the hero out of loyalty, stubbornness, faith, or fear. Those who wall up—and those who break through walls. The people at the edge of the photographs. The people watching—the crowd. You.” Do you agree with her? How do the characters in this novel shape history? And whose history do they shape?

3. Central to Paul’s academic work is the idea that “there is the crime and there is the silence.” How does that statement echo throughout the novel, specifically in his and Evie’s conversations about the stumble stones in Germany? How does it echo throughout twentieth-century American history more broadly? How is that silence a kind of willed forgetting? Do you think Ogden was right to not divest from Nazi Germany and try to work within the regime? Was this a version of silence that Paul is criticizing? What kinds of silences do we reproduce in our lives in this country, now?

4. During her trip to America, Elsa tells Mrs. Lowell: “Forgive me…but it is a mistake to think news happens somewhere else. To others. The news is always about you. You must simply fit yourself in it. You must see how—you must be vigilant.” Do you agree? How does her warning resonate for each generation of Miltons? What about in your own life? Do you think the author is consciously echoing Evie with what she tells her students (question #2) in referencing “you”? And if so, what is the author trying to say about collective responsibility?

5. On the porch later that evening, after Kitty says no to Elsa, Kitty is maddened by Elsa’s reading of her refusal. “For god’s sake,” she says, “it’s not so simple.” And Elsa replies, “But it is. It’s very simple. It always is.” Is Kitty’s refusal simple? How might Neddy’s death have shaped her thoughts? Does it let her off the hook in terms of Elsa’s request? Discuss the role of anti-Semitism within the novel. Do you think Kitty and Evelyn would have objected to Len if he hadn’t been Jewish but solely from a lower class? Do you think Joan ultimately rejects Len because he is Jewish? What do you make of what Len’s son, Charlie, tells Evie: that was the night “a Jew died too”?

6. Evie says of her parents’ generation that they seem to have “inherited their days rather than chosen them, made do with what they had, and so they peopled the rooms rather than lived in them, ghosting their own lives.” Is that a fair assessment? Discuss the similarities and differences between the various generations of Miltons in this novel in relation to what they have been given.

7. At Evelyn’s engagement, Ogden toasts: “Behind every successful man is a good woman…Or so the saying goes. But I suggest a good woman is the reason men put up walls and gardens, churches. The reason men build at all. At the center of every successful man is a good woman.” How do you read this in light of Evie’s thesis, about the anchoress? Discuss the gender dynamics at play in the different marriages in this novel.

8. Min tells Evie: “Jung believed the Hero was not the young man setting forth with his sword to conquer parts unknown…The true Hero is the man in middle age, who traveled backwards in order to be able to return.” What is the significance of setting Evie’s story line during middle age, the stage of life her best friend refers to as “the In Betweens”?

9. Watching Moss on the night of the party, Reg thinks: “Moss sang his heart on his sleeve, as if all the gates of the world would open with him, believing that they could, with all his heart. But here on the island, the care with which Reg was being handled, the pronounced attention was merely the opposite face of the face that gave the hard stare, or the push between the ribs, or the whip. Both faces turned to the black man as though to a wall that had to be climbed or knocked down—and always with the infinitesimal moment of wariness that slid immediately into anger or polite regard. As if to say, ah, you again.” How does Reg’s point of view here counter and complicate Moss’s optimistic belief that he can write a song that unites all Americans? What is Reg seeing? Do you think the Miltons ever come to see what he sees? Is Kitty’s attempt at reparation for the past by including Reg in her will an indication of this sight? Or simply more of the same?

10. Reg tells Moss: “You can’t slip your history, man. That’s what I’m telling you. That’s the story I keep getting, again and again. Those people…your parents—whatever they did, whatever they didn’t do in their lives—that’s what’s in you. No matter what you say, or do.” Do you think he’s right? Are the sins of the father, or in this case, the sins of the mother, inherited by the children? How much agency do the different characters have, and how much are their fates shaped by their last name or identity?

11. Moss describes to Reg the experience of seeing A Raisin in the Sun: “It was the first time I’d ever seen my own story on the stage…To see something, to want it that bad. To want and want and know that it’s impossible—it’s impossible.” What do you think about Moss, a privileged white man, making a claim like that regarding a seminal play about the experience of African Americans? In the rowboat on the island, Reg says he wants to be “alongside,” and Moss says, “You are.” What does that midnight conversation reveal? Discuss Moss’s friendship with Reg and the limits they face in understanding each other’s experiences.
12. Joan tells Evie, “You can’t revise what’s happened. Nor should you. A life can change in a single moment and from there you simply move forward.” Evie asks, “But can’t you re-do, Mum?…Can’t there be many moments? Can’t a life turn and re-turn and turn again?” We see that Hazel wants to revise Evie’s thesis on the Anchoress. Discuss the different ways in which the women of this novel view history, and the possibility of revising a life.

13. Paul tells Evie: “There is no story until we’re dead, and then our children tell it. We are just living. Your mother was living. Stop looking for what’s not there. Nothing happened—life happened. Reality is not a story.” Do you agree? What does Paul’s view suggest about how much we can ever truly know our family members? How does Paul’s statement complicate Evie’s view of history? Given that we know there was a story beneath the story of Joan’s life, a story that Evie couldn’t see, what does this suggest about the relation between truth and reality? What does that suggest about the act of novel writing?

14. What do you think about Joan’s wish to have her ashes buried, nameless, under a stone that says Here? What is she marking? What is the power of that word? How does it resonate with the relation between memory and place that the novel suggests?

15. When Anne realizes that Joan never told Evie about Len, she decides not to say anything because Joan’s story “wasn’t hers to tell.” Reg originally intends not to disclose this to Evie but ultimately changes his mind. Who do you think did the right thing? Is it important that Evie know who her biological father was? Why? And is it important who tells her the story?

16. What does Crockett’s Island represent for each generation of Miltons? Discuss the pros and cons of Evie’s generation fighting to keep the island or let it go. In what ways can a place both bind and define us? And how does the story we tell about ourselves connect to that place? Does your family have a place with a similar kind of significance?

17. In the middle of the novel, Kitty is uneasy with what she calls Moss’s “overabundance of conscience,” and thinks: “Responsibility was not an absolute. We were kind, we were generous, but we did not owe more than we could give.” At the end of the novel, before he says goodbye, Reg asks Evie what she will do with the island now that she knows its more complicated truths, and when she says, “I don’t know,” he answers, “That’s a start.” What do you think he means by that? What has started? What is the novel asking about the relation between knowledge of the past and responsibility to one another in the present? How does Reg’s response ask us to think about what do we do once we see the full story (or history) of a place? In light of Elsa’s words in the beginning, perhaps it’s not so simple, but is it hopeful?

18. “We vanish,” Evie whispers in the novel’s final line. What is the effect of those words on you? What is their significance and how do they echo across the entire novel that came before?

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