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I had an uncommonly happy childhood. I was born in the fortunate spot: the middle child, the only girl, with a brother five years my senior and a brother five years my junior. I was patently, enviably and deliciously my father's favorite. And I was born on the magic island of Manhattan in a brownstone on West 75h Street. All New York was our playground--but especially Riverside Drive and Central Park, from the Mall to the merry-go-round, from the Shakespeare Garden to the caves along the rowing lake. Our Nana sat , like one of a long line of black crows, with the other Nanas on the benches along the asphalt paths, her black hat skewred into her pompadour over a rat. The Sanitation Department was less efficent in those days. The snow stood in triangular mountains along the cross streets and we made steep staircases and castles and forts all winter long outside our front doors.

In the summers we moved to Elberon, New Jersey. We swam in the Atlamtic, made castles in the sand and tried to dig holes to China, went crabbing in Pleasure Bay and watched with ferocious delight the Wagnerian holocausts when the spoendid U.S. Grant period wood hotels and houses went up in flames. When we could, we spent hours at the little railroad station. We put pennies on the tracks and when the steam engines had rublmed  passed picked up our copper discs, thin and shining and smooth as an angel's wing. In the tiny, ivy-covered library at Elberon I borrowed my first book: "The Secret Garden" and there, defying my family's more intellectua; tastes, I indulged in an orgy of Pollyana books and then Carolyn Welle's "Patty" series.

In my early childhood, my mother [[strikethrough]]was [[/strikethrough]] seemed a somewhat remote and galmorous creature who lived in a room with heavy gold-colored satin draperies. On cold winter evenings, she wore black velevet negligees with sleeves, lined in turquiose , that f;ared into great triangular ends. Daddy was a way a great deal int hose days. But when he came home,tshe was waiting in one of those costumes--for so they seemed--her black hair and brown eyes and red lips giving her round face a vivid, exciting look. The big excitement of

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