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the bell of our Lady of the Angels Home for Girls. Night was falling. Her face was so thin she looked like a skeleton, and I tried not to show my fear. For her. Of her. If she ever died, I would die, too.
    It was December 23, 1929, and everyone was afraid. The stock market crash, the bank runs . . . overnight, our world had blown up, and we were not very good survivors. We were fragile females, used to being catered to and doted on. My mother had lived like a queen—like the Queen of Los Angeles—and I’d been my father’s princess, and he took care of everything. My mother had never touched a paper bill or a coin in her entire married life. It was a bargain ladies made with society—we would barely exist in the world, and in return, men would love us.
    But my father hadn’t loved us enough. On Halloween, he had leapt from the ledge of his office window in the Crocker Bank Building on Santa Monica Boulevard.
    They are vampires , he had written in his suicide note. They have sucked the life’s blood from this country.
    We didn’t know who “they” were. The industralists he played golf with? The glamorous movie stars who made deposits in his bank at two in the morning? We didn’t know, and so we couldn’t protect ourselves against them.
    I couldn’t understand how one day we had servants and cars and pantries bulging with food; and the next, our Los Angeles house was gone, and so was our apartment overlooking Central Park. And so was my father. But it was all gone, as if sunlight had burned it up. As if we had awakened from a long and beautiful dream.
    Now we had less than nothing, and I was hungry for everything I used to have, for my future, for my life. We tried everything, but we simply had no money.
    We began to starve. We didn’t even know how to buy food; and I think the greengrocer and the butcher cheated us, because they thought we were still rich. We didn’t know how to haggle or bargain. We’d had people to do all that.
    And so, my mother took me to the orphanage, where they had people.
    I was only fourteen but as we stood before the door, I felt as tired as the woman who had dragged herself down the palm-lined avenues of our exclusive neighborhood up in the hills. We had seen her many times since the crash. She was once quite beautiful, but her desperation stole her beauty from her day by day. Wrinkling and aging, she sold apples on some days, pencils on others; and all her jewelry after the apples and pencils got no takers. I didn’t know who she was, but the sight of her somehow pleased my mother. She would laugh rather crazily, watching the woman from the window of the home that soon would be gone.
    Once, as the woman stumbled along the street, my mother turned to me and said, “You can never trust other women, Bess. Remember that. They will want what you have. Your husband. Your home.”
    Then she stared at the woman with pure hatred on her face.
    I called her Our Lady of the Vampires, because vampires had killed my father, and ruined us, and I sensed that once upon a time, she had been a threat.
    “You won’t be hungry,” my mother whispered, her voice breaking, as we waited at the door of the orphanage.
    As the door to Our Lady of the Angels Home for Girls creaked open, the same dried-out woman glowered down at me, or so it seemed. But this woman was different—older, thinner, and dressed in the black and white habit of a nun.
    By the watery light of a ceiling lamp surrounded by the motionless blades of a fan, the withered old woman glared at the two of us as if she hated us. I began to panic, and I grabbed onto my mother with both hands.
    “Please, no,” I begged. “Mother, don’t leave me here.”
    My mother burst into tears, and I did, too. She clung to me, and ground out in agony, “How could they do this to us? How could he do this?” and I hugged her so tightly I thought her pencil-like spine would crack.
    My stomach growled.
    “Come now,” said the nun, grabbing my forearm.