But Andrea had always felt so bumbling in her boyness, like it was a pair of pajamas that just didn’t fit. When she was eight years old, Andrea tried to tell Cynthia about a dream she’d had the night before. (She’d known by then that this would never be something she could tell her father, who made jokes about people who were different—jokes that everyone in his company laughed along to because they were all afraid of him. He was the kind of man who smacked his boys if he caught them crying, and who called them sissies when they wouldn’t step on a bug, and who spoke to Andrea in a girl’s voice for an hour one afternoon at their home in East Hampton because Andrea had been too afraid to go in the ocean. “These boys need toughening up,” he said to Cynthia more than once, in a voice that made her cower. “You baby them, especially Eric.”)

Anyway, Andrea was sitting with her mother in the back of a Town Car, whizzing through the city. “In my dream,” Andrea said, “I woke up, and I got out of bed, and I’d become a princess.” Then she looked cautiously at her mother. “It was great.”

Cynthia, who perhaps hadn’t been paying full attention, snapped up at this last part. “Pardon, Eric?” The look of disgust on her face said it all. “A princess?”

The door inside Andrea slammed closed. “Kidding,” she said. “Just seeing if you were listening.”

A few years later, she confided in one of the many nannies who passed through the house that she felt “girlish,” and the nanny misinterpreted this as Andrea telling her she might be gay. At least she was enlightened and brought her books about homosexuality and offered to read them; she introduced her to her gay best friend from high school—See, look! It’s okay! Andrea didn’t have the heart to tell her that she was so wrong. The nanny never repeated Andrea’s confession to Cynthia. Sometimes, Andrea wished she had—if only so that someone else could break the ice and it wouldn’t be left to her.

But the task had been left to Andrea, in the end. She’d broken the news to Cynthia—and only Cynthia, not her brother, and, God forbid, not her father—after she’d divorced Christine, after everything happened with Roger, after her family had banished her to California because of Roger, and after she’d already gotten Arthur used to the idea and started herself on the hormones. It had been horribly messy—Cynthia even threatened to take Arthur from her, because how could Andrea possibly be mentally stable enough to raise a child?