At night, bound by the narrow walls of our kitchen, I was not always absorbed in my book about girls at boarding school whose clever mothers had sewed for months before their departure, making silk dresses and dark wool jumpers, warm wrappers, innumerable muslin guimpes, had crocheted fascinators and had bought blue merino stockings. Although I envied the fortunate creatures, my own life which I plotted in a variety of patterns was richer. My hair became blond; my name was Antoinette de la Mar. “Soon after Antoinette or Toni, as her chums called her, went to live in the Pride mansion on Pinckney Street, a handsome Harvard student named Andrew Eliot Cabot Lodge fell passionately in love with her. But as she had already decided not to marry anybody, she spurned him with a few kind but firm words. That night he shot himself, but he did not die and she nursed him back to health. She had many suitors but she lived only for Miss Pride who adored her and often had her do a toe-dance for her visitors who were often foreign kings and queens. They would say, ‘I say, Antoinette de la Mar has it all over Denishawn. Why, Denishawn could never whirl on one toe that long.’ ”

My mother, who spent nearly every winter evening playing Patience (she always cheated, to my indignation, and as other disrespectful children in a fury curse their mothers, I would howl at mine, “You cheat at cards!”), would notice that for an hour I had not turned a page in my book. “Are you asleep, booby?” she would scold. “Are you asleep sitting up like a little cow?”

If my father raised his eyes from Riders of the Purple Sage, quaintly called Das Gesetz der Mormonen, to join our quarrel, perhaps to accuse me harshly of thinking of boys, my mother would instantly come to my defense and would commence to belabor him with vituperation. When they had finished the skirmish, my father would lift the red felt cozy off the white china coffee-pot and drink from a thick cup. He would then return to his book and my mother to her cards as she remarked, “He gets the fine pot for his coffee but Shura Korf has to keep her tea in a tin can.” Perhaps he would ignore her, or would say, pointing to his chest, “The pot is mine. It is a coffee pot. Why don’t you drink coffee?”