When I say we lived in that house during my growing up years, I mean precisely that. We lived there. By we, I mean Mother, Father, me, my brother Philemon and my sister Eugenie. We ate and slept there, took our piano and voice lessons there, greeted company there. We never had much fun there, and I don’t recall much laughter. We grew up in that house. I don’t believe any of us children ever felt any emotion but relief when we left.

My mother gets most of the credit, or the blame. She did everything that a genteel mother of that era was supposed to do for her children, except that she did not love us. Granted, there were times when our own children were growing up and Duncan and I were more or less confined to our ranch that I would gladly have traded them for magic beans. But I loved my four rascals, and they knew it. We could usually end a fraught day amicably enough, sitting on the corral fence watching Duncan train one of his horses.

Mother was different. It seemed to me then that she spent a lot of her time trying to pretend we were not there. This wasn’t difficult in our house, with its three stories and broad porches. After birth, she relinquished me to a wet nurse and a nanny, who gave way in time to a governess, a tutor, a dancing master and an Italian instructor. La penna è sul tavolo. Indeed.

Phil, Eugenie and I often went days without seeing Mother. She would get an occasional burst of motherly feeling and instruct the governess to bring us downstairs to visit with her after we finished our dinner in the nursery. These visits never lasted longer than twenty minutes, in which Mother asked us how we did. Later on, she inquired about our studies and asked if we needed anything. When conversation thinned and vanished, she put her hand to her forehead and looked at the governess, who hustled us away until her next motherly feeling.

I mustn’t leave out the obligatory kiss. We lined up according to age, with the governess always cautioning us not to step on Mother’s dress or muss her hair. We bent over her with our hands behind our backs and kissed her cheek, which she tilted forward slightly. I was never kissed on the mouth until much later. (That’ll make Duncan raise his eyebrows and grin.)

One time when it was my turn to kiss Mother, I teetered off balance and fell into her lap. She stood up and dumped me on the floor, declaring in a high voice that I had wrinkled her taffeta.

I could continue, but you can gather from this backward glance that my childhood was not all bliss. As much as we dreaded Mother, we worshipped her, too. She was so beautiful. I have before me now a tintype taken when she in her thirties, a decade she claimed for twenty years, which must have been rewarding for her.