ON the way over to the Island they composed the kind of grouping commonly sought by fashion photographers. One of those faintly insolent, terribly insouciant family sets you see from time to time in Vogue magazine, Sue Swanson thought. The still-youthful mother and father, athletic and well-nourished; the married daughter who improves on them both in profile, with the wind lifting and tunneling through her long brown hair; the European son-in-law with his brief beard and ever so slightly down turning moustache. And of course the dog, the obligatory panting Golden retriever obediently sprawled at his master's feet. The difference being, she noted silently, that we are pretenders in this glossy and our Golden is one-half ancestry unknown.

A few other late vacationers lounged at the rail lifting already tanned faces to the September sun, but they had the top deck of the ferry pretty much to themselves. After the Cranston had delivered its three right-of-way hoots and the ship had settled into a vigorous bobbing motion, Sue began unpacking the picnic basket Bertrand had carried up from the station wagon parked in its allotted slot below. Ham and cheese sandwiches for Douglas, her husband, and for Bertrand, her son-in-law, Bertrand's with Dijon mustard. For Cindy and herself, the penitential yogurt. Potato chips for the men. Carrot sticks for the women. For the men, chocolate cupcakes. Apples for all. Biscuits for Agamemnon, who had been denied breakfast as a precaution against seasickness. He dispensed with these in one gluttonous swipe and waited slavishly for the sandwich crusts and cake crumbs that were also his birthright.

Once at a cocktail party a psychiatrist had told her that people make their dogs into neutral love objects, a repository for all the unspoken passion at work in the yeasty milieu of a family. And she had smiled passively, agreeing with him. So they had. They were, furthermore, the kind of family that gives its animals royal, heroic, mythological names. There had been Castor and Pollux, Cindy's dapple gray ponies, Oedipus and Caesar, Peter's pygmy goats of one summer. Melissa's cat had been named Cleopatra, her one surviving kitten, Cassandra. And, in this case, fourteen years of Agamemnon, who had as a puppy slept in one child's bed after another, transported from place to place' with his wind-up clock wrapped in a towel, his teddy bear, and his teething bone. Cindy had been eight, Melissa six, and Peter four when he came into their world. The trouble was, he would not live long enough. The trouble with love was, it could be outlasted.