Neil Powers rapped on the opened door of his daughter's room and stuck his head in. "Quinta? You coming to the Ball?"

Quinta was lying on the quilted coverlet of her white spindled bed, reading. A huge bowl of fruit lay alongside her; she plucked a grape from a half-eaten bunch and without looking up said, "Nah. I think I'll pass. I'm really enjoying this book."

"What're you reading?"

"Pride and Prejudice."

"For pity's sake, girl. Why read about balls when you can go to one?"

She looked up and laughed at that and tapped the pages of her book. "Because it's lots easier to pretend I'm dancing at this one," she said, and her face, which still had some growing up to do, sparkled with teen-age superiority.

It was a pretty face, tanned and with a refreshingly un-pert nose, and framed by straight gold hair. It didn't look like her mother's, and it didn't look like her father's. Quinta was the only one of five children who truly had believed that her parents found her under a cabbage leaf; change-of-life babies are like that.

"Sure you won't come? When your sister's back up and around, I can always drag her, but for now ...." He was packing the loose tobacco in his pipe with his index finger, a careful study in abandonment.

Quinta flipped the book over on its stomach and sighed. Her father was getting better and better at this guilt-trip business. For the last four years, ever since her mother died, he'd been wandering through life aimlessly, leaning on one daughter, then another, to share his amusement. But daughters have a way of growing up, and now everyone had left the nest except Quinta. Watching him, calmly aware that she was being manipulated, it suddenly became obvious to her: He would not grow up while she was there to minister to him.

With an almost painful effort she forced her body to stand up, stretch, and return to the twentieth century. Reaching for the nylon windbreaker on the back of her bedroom door she said, "If someone handed you two actual tickets to the Yachtsman's Ball tonight, would you go?"

"Of course," he said, wondering.

"I mean, with a--you know--a date?"

He looked into her hazel eyes, so completely unlike his dark ones, while he drew flame through the bowl of his pipe. "A date?" he said between puffs. "What's a date?" as though the word had long since been dropped from his vocabulary.

Quinta trotted after him down the stairs of their too-large house, aware that she was breaking new ground; none of her four sisters had ever suggested to their father's face that he pick up the pieces and get on with life. "Come on, dad, be serious. There must be someone in Newport you wouldn't be ashamed to be seen with. What about Mrs. Saunderson?"

"It never occurred to me," he said cooly without turning around. "And besides, she's way too old."

"She's your age!"

"And looks it."

"Well, everyone can't be as pretty and lively as mom. And besides, you are four years older than when--" But she retreated; he wouldn't appreciate being reminded that life was passing him by.

They were at the foot of the stairs. Powers turned to his daughter. "It seems to me, young lady, that I should be worried about your boyfriends, and not vice-versa. How's Jake, by the way? He hasn't been around in ages."

"He's not my boyfriend. He's a kid," she said, thoroughly insulted.

"He's your age!"

"And looks it."

"I suggest a truce," her father said, which is what he always said when they got into one of these circular arguments. He was never willing to resolve anything, which drove Quinta crazy. Her mother had always been the one to take life's various bulls by the horns; Neil Powers had never had to bother. As a result he had developed a true genius for daydreaming and evasion, and he never knew which tie to wear with what shirt.

On the other hand, he was a wizard with computers. If he'd gone into teaching he'd have made an excellent absent-minded professor. For her birthday he'd bought her a personal computer and now Quinta was miles ahead of everyone else in her class. In the evening Quinta would amble into his study with a question on Pascal; in the morning he would beg her earnestly to tell him whether paisley went with pin-stripes. It was comforting to her that he knew everything about programming languages. But shouldn't he know a little something about men's wear, too?

Her father was locking the entry door from the outside when Quinta suddenly changed her mind. The night had a damp, nasty edge to it, and thoughts of her cozy, color-filled room and Austen's country gentry became irresistible. Right now all that mattered to Quinta was, what would proud Darcy say to Elizabeth's violent rejection of his proposal?

She reached into her shoulder bag and brought out her key. "I'm not going after all, dad." And stuck it in the lock.

"Well that's nice. Why not"

"Because of the book and--do you really want to know?" she asked hopefully. "Because I think it's dumb to stand around in the dark gawking at a lot of rich people making their grand entrances into a mansion. I mean, who cares? I'm not a debutante, and I don't own a yacht with a helicopter on it, and I'm not dating one of the America's Cup crewmembers, and I'm sure not racing on one of the l2-meter yachts that's trying to win the America's Cup--so what's the point? I'd rather read a book," she finished up, facing down the first chill blast of reproach that seemed to emanate from her father's dark eyes.

"Fine. I need the exercise. I'll walk over myself. I didn't realize that you'd grown so blase about the America's Cup. No doubt I bore you with my continuing interest. Fine."

He always did that, took that vague, offended tone whenever he was being opposed. "Oh dad," she said, and there was awful sadness in her voice. How could he be expected to change at fifty-six?

"Please. Spare me your sympathy," he said. "But before I go I'd like you to know that I don't--necessarily--follow the balls because they're important to me. I do it because your mother used to enjoy it so much."

The last shot was right on target. Wounded and near tears Quinta said, "Dad--"

"No, fine. Really." And he walked quickly away from her up the hill to Spring Street, where he would turn right towards Ocean Drive, millionaire's row.

And Quinta knew, even before she dragged herself back up the mahogany stairs of her father's comfortable colonial home, that her reunion with Jane Austen's amusing, impertinent heroine Elizabeth would be not much fun after all.

Neil Powers had put a mile and a half between himself and the painful scene on his front porch before he could ask the question: Was he being an ass again? The look he got from Quinta was the look he'd got from the other four girls, each in her turn, during the last couple of years. He did not need their pity; he was doing just fine as a widower, thank you. Tomorrow morning, for example, he planned to go out in his cabin cruiser--if it wasn't blowing too hard--and do a little bottom fishing on Naragansett Bay. Alone. He didn't mind, not actually. Quinta had overreacted.

Or what the hell; maybe he had. After all, that he was a bit overworked at the office lately. As soon as he hired another man--although where you could find a process control specialist in Newport, Rhode Island was beyond him--as soon as the pressure let up, he'd be less crotchety. And if he did get a kick out of following an America's Cup campaign through a Newportt summer, goddammit, then why should he apologize for it?

Still, there were aspects of an America's Cup summer that he could do without. It was only July, and already Newport was under seige. Already he was sick of the tourists, sick of the media, sick of the small planes and helicopters droning overhead all day. He was even, God forgive him, sick of the Goodyear Blimp. You couldn't go out; restaurants were booked for days, sometimes weeks ahead. (Not that he'd want to eat at one: Until October the service would be lousy, the food either overcooked or undercooked, the price of lobster a nasty joke.) And none but the grim could possibly reach the waterfront by car anymore. Which is why, after the last America's Cup yacht races three years ago, he'd had to move from his harborfront office to an industrial park outside of town. Not even the promise of a close-up look at Ted Turner or a 12-meter yacht had been enough to entice his savvier customers to fight for parking space. Besides, the rent had become outrageous.

It was the forced move from his beloved harbor, where he'd taught all five daughters to fish and to sail, that offended him most. Everyone knew that the America's Cup Races were big business for Newport. Neil Powers was realistic enough to understand that if you weren't a crewmember or a supporter of one of the America's Cup syndicates--and if you didn't assist, feed, clothe, write about or sleep with those who were--then there really wasn't room for you on the crowded, jumping waterfront.

But he was naive enough and--yes, sentimental--enough to believe that he deserved a place in the America's Cup rituals: because his father was Sammy Powers, an oak tree of a New Englander who had crewed fifty years earlier on Harold Vanderbilt's Rainbow. That's when the yachts that raced for the America's Cup were yachts, not the stripped-out toys that nowadays competed. The Rainbow was twice as long as today's 12-meter yachts and five times heavier, with a spread of sail that could cover a good-sized gym. The Rainbow was a J-boat, and the J's were it in yacht racing--ocean dinosaurs, the likes of which would never roam the seas again.

Powers stopped and held up his watch, trying unsuccessfully to make out the time. He'd been walking briskly for half an hour he thought, and he he had probably another half hour until the Finnesterre mansion. By the time he got there even the fashionably late would have arrived; the show might be over. He'd convinced himself that Finnesterre was an easy walk from his modest house on Howard Street. It wasn't. If he had any brains he'd turn around and go back home. But Neil Powers was, and always would be, an America's Cup junkie. He was on Coggeshall Avenue, far from the harbor but close to the ocean, and he was careful to step out of the way of the occasional automobile that slithered past on the unlit road. It was Saturday night, a dangerous night. Drunks were everywhere--in the bars, in the cars, in the bushes. Powers fully expected the City of Newport to slide into the sea some night on a wave of beer suds and maraschino cherries.

So much had changed in the past fifty years. Everything seemed smaller, more diminished. The boats. Newport. Even the men. He thought of his father, a powerhouse of a man, so aptly named: six feet and two hundred thirty pounds of unadulterated muscle, a giant of a man for a giant of a boat. Hamfisted, quick-witted, and totally without arrogance. Sammy Powers had worked his ass off belowdecks for Harold Vanderbilt on the Rainbow and loved every anonymous minute of it. When Sammy saw his young son at all during that fateful summer of 1934, he filled the boy's head to bursting with stories of harrowing races against Yankee, the other American J-boat trying out for the right to defend the America's Cup. "It's nip and tuck, my boy," he would tell young Neil. "Nip and tuck in every race, and by God it's exciting." Then he'd grin at young Neil and add, "And wildly foolish, I know." (Sammy owned his own boat, a working cargo schooner, and fancy yacht racing embarrassed him, a little.)

How desperately Neil had wanted someday to sail in an America's Cup contest like his dad. Cup fever continued to burn far more brightly in Neil than in his father; after the success of 1934 Sammy, by then bitter and devastated, lost interest completely in the contests. But Neil followed the races in 1937 as closely as a stockbroker the Dow-Jones report. And then after 1937 no challenges for the Cup came from abroad: Europe had turned to less trivial pursuits. Not until 1958 did someone (England again) finally get around to challenging the United States for the Cup; by then personal fortunes had shrunk and so had the size of the boats.

And so, of course, had Neil's desire to sail on a Cup defender. He had a bit of a paunch, a degree, a wife, two little girls, and a job at an electrical engineering firm which would frown on the idea of his flouncing off to go a-yachting all summer.

But still, he had liked to keep his hand in, and now at fifty-six Neil Powers was a nicely mellowed connoisseur of the sport. Because he was old friends with an engineer who had worked for the French challenger during the 1977 races, Neil had been slipped a decent number of invitations to minor events--cocktail parties, brunches, Cup-related expositions (posters, watercolors, bronzes) and even an occasional syndicate party. Balls were iffier. He and his wife had never quite managed to get into one. Nancy died between challenges, but in 1980 he'd kept up his deliberate strolls to the great mansions on Bellevue Avenue whenever there was a ball being held. Like so many of Newport's servant and middle classes, Neil Powers was a rubbernecker at heart.

That's why, despite the imminent threat of rain, he was now standing a discrete distance from the exquisitely lit porte-cochere of the Finnesterre mansion, watching fantastically jewelled ladies and black-tied gentlemen descending from their motorized carriages. If he stood there for a million years it would not have occurred to him that his youngest, dearest, most difficult daughter of all, Quinta Cameron Powers, would one day rival the undisputed queen of just such a ball.

*****

Candy Seton brought the pale yellow Mercedes to an abrupt stop and waited impatiently for the top-hatted valet to get her door. She hated driving big cars and she particularly hated arriving at balls unescorted. She deduced that therefore she hated Alan Seton since he was responsible for both conditions. The door to the Mercedes was opened and Candy, remembering in time that her driving foot was bare, slipped into a high-heeled, glove-soft slipper, scooped up the bottom few yards of her Galanos black silk crepe de Chine, and swept out of the sedan and past the raised sabers of an honor guard of soldiers in Revolutionary War uniform.

The Great Hall of Finnesterre was ablaze with dozens of electrified candelabra whose soft, shimmering light seemed designed to enhance the almost old-fashioned paleness of Candy's heart-shaped face and the subtle blondeness of her baby-fine hair. In a town which virtually insisted on at least a minimum depth of tan, Candy turned heads: Her paleness, strikingly beautiful as it was, labeled her as "uninvolved." It was obvious that she was not spending any time out on the water following the 12-meter yachts during the elimination trials. On that, all who saw her agreed. Beyond that, opinions as to who she was usually differed.

The hangers-on guessed that she was a hanger-on herself, one who lacked the simple decency to bother making the effort to look as if she belonged. The politicians saw at a glance that she was rich and therefore either was powerful or had access to one who was. The yachting community (including the skippers and their crews, the major syndicate backers, the Race Committee, the Selection Committee, various yacht club commodores and the vast network of worker bees and industrious ants known as the Syndicate Support Groups) knew very well who she was: Candace Seton, wife of Alan Seton, the skipper of Shadow, one of four American yachts hoping to defend the Cup in 1983. Candace Seton--charming on land; a whining bitch at sea. Immature. Terminally bored. Not strong enough, they whispered, to be a Skipper's Wife.

Not everyone disliked Candy. There were those in Society whose hearts overflowed for the neglected, unsung wives of the men who drove the twelves. They had no patience for men who began to fidget in any conversation involving horses, houses, or landlocked countries.

Mrs. Cyril Hutley liked Candy, and Mrs. Cyril Hutley counted. She was wife to the heir of a Providence manufacturing dynasty, and perhaps because she was childless and Candy was a trust-fund orphan, Mrs. Hutley had recently taken the young woman up. The imposing, middle-aged socialite spotted Candy immediately as she wove her way uncertainly through the waltzing couples in the Great Hall, and intercepted her on the edge of the dance area.

"Alone, poor darling?" Mrs. Hutley cried, taking Candy lightly in her arms and kissing her. "The beast isn't coming, then?"

"I don't know what he's doing," Candy moaned. "Apparently it's still complete chaos down on the dock. Alan said the spare mast was too long or too short or some stupid thing, so they've got to add something or subtract something, I'm not sure which. All of the crew are still down at the dock, undoing things from the broken mast and putting them on the new mast. I'm sorry," she added, "but I don't think any of them will be coming. And you've worked so hard." Candy looked around through glazed eyes, unseeing. "Everything looks perfectly lovely."

"Thank you, dear. It's not the America's Cup Ball, of course," she said deprecatingly, "but it's a lovely warm-up for the main event, if I do say so." She looked around contentedly. "We couldn't decide on a motif, so we thought perhaps just lots of flowers and palms. We were very careful to have the national colors of each of the challenging syndicates. And it's so hard, you know, to do blue. Delphiniums are shockingly dear and Irises, well, ordinary. I pray to God West Germany never challenges--one can do nothing with black. Ah well, someone else will be chairwoman then. This is positively my last ball." Mrs. Hutley paused for breath and squinted appraisingly at Candy. "Your gown is marvelous, dear, but I must say you look piqued. Have you had dinner?"

Candy's laugh was short and bitter. "Dinner! As a matter of fact, Alan called a little while ago. He wanted me to bring a dozen pizzas and two cases of beer down to the dock for the crew and him."

"He didn't. Tonight?" Mrs. Hutley squealed. "What can the man be thinking of? Someone should be here from the Shadow syndicate. I mean, really. There are dignitaries here--ambassadors, governors, commodores--from five different countries. And it's not as though they're from banana republics, or Baltic slave states. These are our allies, darling: Australia, France, Canada, Italy, and ... and ...." She struggled for the name of the fifth foreign challenger.

"Great Britain." Even Candy knew that.

"Of course. England. So what does Alan hope to achieve, internationally speaking, by such undiplomatic behavior?"

"I suppose he hopes to win," she said with a shrug. Candy, even Candy, was startled by Mrs. Hutley's complete failure to grasp the exhausting mechanics of a successful defense effort. First you had to knock out all the other Americans; then, having won the right to defend the Cup, you had to beat the successful foreign challenger. Alan was still trying to whip the other Americans, and already Candy had torn apart every boutique in Newport, dined at every restaurant, attended fetes at every mansion, driven every mile of coastline, gone to countless teas, brunches and cocktail parties--and all without Alan. Lately even the discos had failed to hold her interest. Back in May she'd been delighted to learn that the most popular spot in Newport was named "The Candy Store." Then she found that it was filled with America's Cup sailors and millions of groupies. Boring.

"Candace," Mrs. Hutley asked, reading the obvious chagrin on the young woman's face, "does Alan have any idea that a Cup summer should be fun?"

"He doesn't know the meaning of the word," Candy answered sullenly. "He has this idea that I'll be closer to the crew if I work alongside them, mingle with them more. I don't know why he just doesn't have me shine all their shoes and be done with it."

"Poor baby; I know. After all, your picture isn't going to be splattered on the cover of every yachting magazine in the country. The America's Cup is just like the Olympics. Who knew what Eric Heiden's wife--if he had a wife--looked like? Who on earth cared? You just come along with me, darling. I'm going to find you a crushingly handsome partner for the evening."

Mrs. Hutley dropped a kiss on Candy's furrowed brow and gave the unhappy girl a hug. In doing so she upset the tiara that sat precariously on her thin grey hairs. The coronet was a pearl-and-diamond-encrusted token from Mrs. Hutley's great grandfather to his wife, presented on the night she hosted her first great ball.

"Oops; your crown's come undone," Candy said with a nervous, tight giggle. She could not get herself under control tonight.

"Be a dear and fix it for me, would you?" Mrs. Hutley begged.

Candy, shorter than her patronness, reached up to fasten the tiara more securely and in doing so exposed new expanses of firm white breast from the slippery confines of her strapless gown.

"Perhaps we should do this some other place," Mrs. Hutley said in a low voice. "You seem to be attracting rather fierce attention, Candace. That ... continental gentleman can't seem to keep his eyes off you. Do you know him?" she asked, inclining her head towards a forest of Boston ferns beside the string orchestra.

"Hold still, for goodness' sake!" Candy turned to look, but the man, perceiving that he was being noticed, had turned away and was swallowed up by the greenery. "No, I don't think so," she said distractedly. "This isn't working; I can't see what I'm doing."

"Very well, ma petite; I'll have it looked to." Mrs. Hutley plopped a rather chapped-looking hand on top of her head and said to Candy, "Stay away from the disco tent; someone told me it reeks of marijuana. Champagne, you know, is just as much fun."

And she left Candace alone and looking for someone to latch onto. Candy had arrived much later than she'd planned. The absurd business of the pizzas--She'd actually taken off her gown and slipped into a dressing gown before she realized that she didn't, she shouldn't ever, have to be a Steppin Fetchit. A quick call to the pizza place was all that was needed. Where had her wits gone? She really must begin to think things through. Alan ... Alan was such a fool. They had absolutely nothing in common, she saw that now. Pizzas on the dock! With men whose hands were filthy and sticky with epoxy and crud. It was disgusting. And it just wasn't fair. Instead of dining at the Viscountess Marchemont's preball dinner, Candy had wasted the evening waiting for Alan. Not that she was hungry, but ... she should be hungry, she realized vaguely.

The hors d'oeuvres were outside. As is usual in such affairs, all uncouth functions--disco dancing, eating, smoking, serious drinking--were relegated to the huge pastel-striped tents pitched over the groomed and rolling lawn. The ground floor of the gabled mansion itself was given over to more genteel occupations: If one were fond of a Strauss waltz, or graceful conversation, or merely of striking attitudes, one would certainly remain inside.

But if one were too sober for the disco tent, too drunk for the Great Hall, there was always the veranda. The veranda was an illogical afterthought to the Hutley house, added during the height of the palazzo competition during Newport's Gilded Age. In contrast to the rambling fieldstone and clapboard of the house itself, the veranda was a massive marble affair, rigidly symmetric in the manner of Versailles. It gave the huge Victorian "cottage" an oddly schizophrenic look: whimsical and playful from the front; severe and formal from the ocean side.

Those who gathered on the veranda under the rainbow of silk Chinese lanterns were more interested in observing than in being observed. Candy was there with her plate of untouched shrimpmeats and tiny teriyaki sticks, desperately scanning the guests below her for someone she knew who was unescorted. Damn you, Alan, she thought. If you were here this wouldn't be necessary. The champagne had rushed straight to the motor control center of her brain, knocking out coordination and filling her with a lightheaded recklessness. In her exalted state she thought she could see the wind blowing the champagne bubbles over the rim of her glass and down, like a comet's tail, into the darkness of the lawn below.

She leaned both arms on the balustrade and peered down over it. The coolness of the marble sent delicious rippling sensations through the thin fabric of her dress as she pressed her midriff and soft breasts into the unyielding stone. Champagne always affected her that way; it made her feel intensely erotic.

"Careful, Candace. You wouldn't want to pitch ass over teakettle intoo the bushes below." The voice was cool, ironic, and not particularly cautionary.