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love of movies. Horror films were his favorite, and he took me to see them all, including Night of the Living Dead within a few years of its release in 1968. He would routinely screen 35 mm films in our living room, too, inviting guests for Sunday afternoon movie binges that often included the Italian horror classic Suspiria , preceded by, say, Laurel and Hardy shorts. We kids would crunch our butter-drenched popcorn, thoroughly absorbed in this or that bloody scene, while the adults sipped cocktails, the sweet smell of gin our frail link to the relative safety of the offscreen world. And all the while my father would be standing by the projector,glowing with happiness, as Halloween or Dawn of the Dead unfurled on the screen.
    I both loved and loathed horror films. The suspenseful music, the false sense of happenstance, the way two girls would get separated in the forest, guaranteeing their graphic slaughter—it all left me feeling by turns helpless and elated, danger becoming fused with excitement in my young nervous system.

MARY KATHERINE ROBERTSON AND GAIL ROBERTSON, CIRCA 1939
    (by Norman Robertson)

M y mother loved to drive cross-country. She took us everywhere by car—Florida, Martha’s Vineyard, New Jersey—running up the miles on the odometer even during the energy crisis in the seventies. We would stop to nap in rest areas along the highways, the police sometimes knocking on our windows to wave us on. If the trip required an overnight stay and no cheap motels were available, we’d sleep on a community center floor or in the backseat. If my father came along on the trip, we’d stay at a Howard Johnson’s or a Holiday Inn—the lap of luxury—until the car finally rolled into our resort or rental house.
    “Why did you drive ?” my cousins Pierre and Freddy would demand when we arrived at the ocean-side resort on Sanibel Island, candy wrappers and Coke cans littering the floor of our car.
    “Flying and then renting a car is a waste of money,” my mother would tell them.
    “It’s more fun to drive, anyway,” I would lie. “Besides, we got to go to Disney World.”
    Running out of gas was my mother’s specialty. We’d sputter to a stop at the side of the interstate, and she’d take our hands and march us along the shoulder of the freeway to the gas station at the next exit.
    A free-spirited eccentric trapped in the life of a 1950s housewife, my mother would have been a hippie had she come of age in the sixties. She spent her childhood in Llewellyn Park, a spacious, wooded residential enclave in central New Jersey, outrunning her oppressive nanny at every turn. Red haired, freckled, and perpetually Band-Aided on both knees, my mother was the tomboy in the family, while her much older sister, Frances, received the lion’s share of their parents’ attention. With her raven black hair and classical features, and her admirable skill on horseback, Frances was the image of the perfect wartime debutante, and was even pictured as such in a 1944 issue of Life magazine.
    My mother’s father, Norman Robertson, was an engineer of Scottish descent who ran a family business that produced hydraulic pumps for clients like Thomas Edison, the family’s neighbor up the road. An amateur jazz pianist and the life of every party, my grandfather entertained his many friends with Cole Porter while they fed him cocktails at the piano. My grandmother, Mary Robertson, also loved parties, and she and Norman made an especially compatible pair. At the end of the night she would help him home; as a girl, my mother would find her father in the kitchen the following morning, puffy eyed and bathrobed, hunched over a pint of coffee icecream. “He craved the sugar,” she told us years later. “But the cholesterol may be the reason he died so young.”
    Even during the Great Depression, the family was well-to-do, although my mother never forgot the sight of homeless people lining up at their kitchen door begging for food from the