And then everything about daily life changed again: Jane and Merle produced three more children, and the times before and after New York were divided by a wall of babies, pets, car breakdowns, blizzards. It’s hard to be a self-involved teenager in the midst of a swarm; this sudden bloom was probably the best thing Jane could have done for her daughter. Eventually Polly’s sadness was convenient, a wallow after a lonely day at school, when she’d lie in bed and imagine she could see Dee make her slow evasive way to the greenhouse, or hear Papa moving through the kitchen, humming or whistling, snapping his fingers. The worst moments came from a sense that she was letting go of things she should keep.

When Polly thought of Edmund in the next few years, he’d become one of the lost people, someone who’d vanished as absolutely as Evie and Frank, Papa and Dee. Edmund wasn’t the only abandoned child of that time, and by high school, many of her friends would be ruined, while others would bounce through.

After college, Polly moved to New York. She found a job in the pastry department at Dean & DeLuca, then small but glorious on Prince Street; she aspired to a job in cheese or meat. She ate coffee beans and berries all day, trading sweets for slices of pâté and salami, sable and vacherin, and she weighed barely a hundred pounds. Caterings blurred together in a succession of white carpets and cupboards, and larger parties were like going to war. This was at the dawn of actually trying to make food taste good at huge events: vans filled with lilacs and mock orange, vats of cream, always several mental breakdowns to monitor. And it was the dawn of AIDS, Polly moving through the boys who didn’t know they were dying yet, none of them understanding how deeply they’d later wish they’d loved even these low-wage hours, any hour, just one more day.

After two years, sick of food and drama, she crawled through a series of magazine offices with her English degree clamped in her teeth, pumped up her typing skills with an egg timer, and found a job as an assistant, and then a script editor. She gave up words again when she finally had a good salary and joined her friend Jimmy in opening a place down on Hudson. Polly would handle the bar menu.