The Heir (Paperback)

The Heir Emily Merrick, enjoying the new-found freedom of the Roaring 20's, discovers that liberation can come at a high price. But it is her son, Steven, who will pay it. Raised under the crushing heel of the man Emily tricks into marrying her, young Steven endures the malicious control of his step-father by escaping to his memories of Kingsland, the Merrick estate in Waterford, on Cape Cod Bay. Its steadfast presence sustains him, as well as his love of the sea, as he endures the constant humiliations devised by his mother's husband. Instead of entering Harvard, as he is supposed to do, Steven flees to Kingsland and lives there while he learns a trade in defiance of his pretentious step-father. He finds the simple life of the countryman a relief after the constricting pretentions with which he's grown up. Eventually he saves enough money to enter the college of his choice, graduating just in time to join the corporate culture of the 50's. By then he has inherited Kingsland, and when promotion passes him by, he again flees to Waterford, this time with his family. There he confronts the challenge of earning a living in so remote a place, and in the process of piecing together the possibilities meets Jenny Lawrence, an ancient lumber schooner that has been converted into a Windjammer. She cruises Nantucket Sound, carrying passengers to the picturesque ports of Martha's Vineyard and to Nantucket itself, and from her, Steven will learn the wisdom of the tides and the wind. She will teach him that there is an alternative to his generation's frantic post-war climb to the top, and she will carry him to the first woman - the only woman - he has ever loved, a woman through whom he will learn about the shame of his legacy, and a way to restore its honor.