In New York, they found a third-floor apartment on Thompson Street. Papa and Dee’s place was a few blocks away, but it wasn’t big enough to take in refugees. They were often traveling, and they were a blank in Polly’s mind until she was six or seven. She was a denning child, given to blanket forts and shipping boxes, the queen of small spaces, and she refined her plan while hiding in a thicket in the muddy courtyard behind the apartment building, a secret trampled place among elderberry bushes that she made her own. The lacy white umbels gave the thicket a dizzy feel when they moved in the wind, and later the berries, though bitter, looked like jewels. Back then, she thought the older children never saw her, but now she was sure they chose to ignore her. They at least allowed her to listen to their games: If you were an animal, what would you be? What country would you live in, and how big will the kingdom be? How many children will you have, what will your new name be, what will you see?

You could pick whatever you liked. It seemed reasonable.

The three of them on Thompson Street learning how to live. They made coffee at the same time every morning, stopped letting the laundry mildew on the floor or in the washer, began to have dinner at 6:00, with an eye on Walter Cronkite. Merle put on his badly ironed starch-rippled shirts every day to be an assistant for a biologist he despised, and Jane took summer classes at NYU, though she was always behind, always late. She’d grown up with Dee, a world-class cook, without ever paying attention, and now she floundered through Joy of Cooking and Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She was only twenty-two, hot and resentful in a housedress, starch water in a Coke bottle with a saltshaker top, ironing work shirts badly while they watched Julia Child on television. Polly remembered the mundane moments, not just the laugh reel, the construction of a stew, a cake, a sauce. “Soufflé on a Platter,” for instance—Jane was a real mouth-breather for that episode, watching with a steno pad and a pen. Some experiments were repellent (salmon soufflé with canned salmon, bones and all), but the triumphs—duck à l’orange, béarnaise sauce, éclairs—burned their way into Polly’s soul.

Giddiness when a meal worked, hungover mornings. At night, even when she was three years old, Polly never dreamt of breaching the wall of the bedroom door. It was Merle and Jane’s world. They were different people on Thompson Street, always whispering to each other, always close, and Polly was always with them but forever in her own world watching. They were nothing like the people she knew now, another point for memory over imagination.