Jane was beautiful, as beautiful as her lost mother, Asta, who’d existed only in photographs since a car accident in 1941, and as Asta’s mother, Perdita, Papa’s first wife, who’d died soon after giving birth in 1917. Jane was so lovely that Polly could remember being eight, living with Papa and Dee, watching visitors—poets and academics—spilling things while they tried to have a conversation with her. On the first day of school, Jane was always the mother everyone looked at, and Polly would feel a bolt of pride make its way through her dread of the new. Even at the time she’d known, without minding, that she would never come close. Jane could beat Polly in tennis while hitting with the handle, and on the iced-over pond near the farmhouse in Michigan, Jane would make graceful figure eights around her daughter, who fell again and again. Jane was elegant; Polly was not. Whatever genes Papa and Perdita had brought to the table—beauty, the ability to glide, the ability to kill with a look—very few had been left for Polly, whose figure was closer to that of Merle’s sweet dumpling mother, Cora.

Jane was still a junior at the University of Michigan when she became pregnant. She managed to receive her bachelor’s degree two years late, but everyone gave up something. Instead of hitchhiking around Europe, or writing poetry, or whatever escape he’d half planned, Merle signed up for a graduate degree in microbiology in Ann Arbor. They moved into married housing but spent most weekends at Merle’s family’s house a half hour away, a small plain place with linoleum and thin-planked oak floors, a cross on the wall next to school portraits. Merle’s parents, Cora and Frank, fed them; a swarm of teenagers cared for Polly when Merle and Jane needed to be young and alone.

Jane, child bride with no siblings, became silly and giddy with the noisy, chaotic Schusters. Merle’s brothers and sister and the flood of cousins in the neighborhood dressed Polly up and took her to church and for walks. Everyone paid attention to her, first grandchild, novelty—they read books to her, taught her games, gave her their best marbles. They took her to a cabin and towed her around a lake in an inner tube; they pretended she was managing to whip the cream or smash the potatoes on her own power.