Though she did indeed study with Diego Rivera, taking little planes down to Mexico City “in the days when the stewardess would just give you a stick of gum and say ‘Good luck,’” her important paintings have hung on the gallery walls for years, unsold. She likes to disparage Ted deGrazia, a schlocky but very successful painter who’s made a career of sentimental renderings of faceless little Indian children done up as angels. “I taught him to paint,” she’d wail, “and then he turns out shit and makes a fortune!” Mr. Doyle’s retirement income is not quite adequate to her plans: thus the yarn shop, the group lessons in still life. Mrs. Doyle feels the new developments—like ours—are cutting too deeply into the desert, moving too close to her. So she wishes to build another house, on the other side of town, out in an area of old orange and date-palm groves. She’s designed a neo-Arabian villa, with a dome for meditation, its plaster pierced with little shapes of brilliantly colored glass in cobalt and very deep red.

My mother drives out to visit Helen sometimes even on days when they haven’t scheduled lessons. The two will have tea and snacks on pottery dishes Helen’s made, some of which have been molded on real melons, then glazed black on the outside, lustrous coral within: ”So Russian!” Helen exclaims.

About this time a sort of cultural juggernaut began, which had as its goal the betterment of me, so that I would later enjoy the benefits of a firm grounding in the finer stuff of the educated life. My parents ordered (from a TV ad?) the Reader’s Digest Collection of 100 Great Masterpieces of World Music (order now and you’ll also receive…). It didn’t matter that the box of records that came were in fact a compilation of snippets, the most famous bits from this and that. We’d listen to them and learn to recognize the bits; we’d make a game of it: How quickly can you name this piece of music, and the composer? Dance of the Hours from La Gioconda! By? By…um…Ponchielli!