Tall and slender, she wore her chestnut hair swept up on her head and anchored there with a diamond pin. She had high cheekbones, and an elegant sneer. I once drew a picture of her and penciled in a bone through her nose. My governess was so horrified that I had to suffer bread and water in my room for the rest of the week. It was a good likeness, though.

Mother had the most extraordinary eyes, blue with a darker rim around the iris. Always observant, I noticed that she cultivated a wounded look in them whenever Father was around that enabled her to get whatever she wanted. Her eyes could fill with tears at the slightest provocation, real or imagined. Shortly after our marriage, I tried that look on my husband. Duncan just laughed at me. I know I must have left something out.

I am told that I look the most like Mother, with less height. I do hope to goodness I have never sneered at anyone.

My father must also receive his due for our constrained homelife, if only because he was away from McDermott Street so often that we never had much opportunity to get to know him. He spent long hours at his office, and we saw him mainly on weekends. After I learned something about life, I wondered if he kept a mistress in Omaha or its environs. Once could scarcely blame him. He helped me through a tight spot later, so I shouldn’t be too censorious.

I sometimes had the feeling that he would have liked to know us children better. On occasion he came to the nursery to play checkers with my little brother. Mother considered checkers lowbrow.

Our family consisted of a modest three children: my two-years-younger brother Philemon Edward, and my little sister Eugenie, four years my junior. Phil survived a series of childhood diseases that plagued him until he started school. All through our nursery years he broke out with hives, bumps or spots. To this day, I can’t look at calamine lotion without thinking of Phil and his sundry afflictions.

He was a good-natured boy who used to sit outside my door and read to me when I was confined to quarters for one or another infraction. We got through The Man in the Iron Mask that way. I’m smiling as I write this. Even Phil got into trouble when he pronounced the author’s last name as Dumb-Ass rather than Dumas. And wouldn’t you know it? I never could remember the correct pronunciation, which meant my own children still get the giggles over Dumb-Ass, even though we are all old enough to know better. Such is the trajectory of family jokes.

I last saw Phil, an Omaha attorney, a few years ago when he took a roundabout trip to San Francisco on business, via Oregon. My husband and I took him around the ranch, showed off the horses, and introduced him to all the children then currently home. He kept nodding and smiling. When we saw him off, he squeezed me tight around the middle and said, “You know, Liz, you have something awfully nice here.”