Osprey Island

The osprey should, in all honesty, have been named in its genus, forKing Nisus of Alcathous, whose daughter, Scylla, sacrifices him to hisattacking enemy, Minos, whom Scylla loves. But Minos rebukes her,disgusted by her betrayal of her father, and he quits the land she offershim. Scylla, mad with despair, jumps into the ocean to follow Minos’retreating ship, and is followed by her father—now turned into anosprey—who plucks her from the water as such a bird of prey is wontto do. Regard:Her father saw her as he hovered near(changed to an osprey now with tawny wings) And swooped to seize and tear her, as she clung,With his hooked beak.

—A.D. MELVILLE, trans., “Scylla and Minos,” Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Would that the early ornithologists had more closely read their Ovid.

—DR. EDGAR HAMILTON, PH.D., “How Our Island Was (Mis)Named”

SUZY WORKED THROUGH THE MORNING at the Lodge darning blankets and bed linens on a relic of a sewing machine she’d unearthed in the maid’s room and managed to render functional. When the Irish girls broke for lunch, Suzy went up the hill toward her parents’ place. The sun was high overhead, beating down on the Chizek house. Suzy could hear the air conditioner as she approached, a window unit installed at her mother’s demand. It blew exhaust against the scrappy rosebushes Nancy had planted there in an inadequate attempt at camouflage.

Nancy Chizek was a finicky woman, but not necessarily thorough. She liked the edges of her world tucked and trimmed, but was famous for cutting corners in ways that were at best unceremonious and at worst downright tacky. She had lobbied for the air conditioner with the insistence of, say, one in line for a heart transplant. Then, once the thing was in, the offense of its unsightliness became the bane of her existence—a topic she brought up not only to complain of her husband’s stinginess, but because she found such a topic interesting and worthy of lengthy discussion. Finally she’d bought a few twiggy, thorny starter rose bushes at Kmart, planted them herself, and then neglected their care entirely. The rose “bushes” were two feet tall, the air conditioner at least four feet off the ground. What could anyone possibly do in such an impossible situation, Nancy implied, but throw up one’s hands and wait for the bushes to grow?

Suzy didn’t knock. She could see her mother through the picture window, sitting at the kitchen table, telephone crooked to her ear as she flipped through a catalog of what looked like swimming pool supplies. Nancy looked up as Suzy entered, lifted a hand and wiggled a few fingers absently as she turned back to the catalog. Suzy poked her head into the stairwell. “Dad?” she called.

“Excuse me for a moment. I’m so sorry,” Nancy said into the phone. “Suzy, your father’s in the shower,” she called, though it seemed like the information was being relayed as much to whoever was on the other end of the phone line as to Suzy. “I’m sorry,” Nancy said, back to the phone again, her apology so vehement it was as if she’d just forced that person to overhear something of an intimate and mortifying nature.