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disconcerting and reassuring. Unlike Marilyn, most women in the fifties devoted considerable energy and ingenuity to dramatizing gender differences. That was the era of crinolines puffing up skirts, of carefully coiffed hair, of subtle pink lipsticks and painted-on all-over Pan-Cake makeup, of tightly cinched-in waists and stupid poodle decals in felt blazoned across the front of a skirt. Women simpered and blushed and pouted; as in Orwell’s discussion of working-class penny dreadfuls, they went directly from being a Honeymooner (all curves and ditsy innocence) to being Mom (prettily outraged fists planted on ample hips undera tailored skirt below a perfectly pressed blouse). From soprano to contralto. The older version of womanhood was best enacted by Lucille Ball, the mindless, eye-batting redhead, always adorably confused by the world’s complexities and endlessly hatching another harebrained scheme.
    Marilyn had pretty, small features and was slim and nearly flat-chested. She had a tiny wen on the lower lid of her right eye, which gave her gaze an intriguing asymmetry, as if it were an artfully placed beauty patch. She never wore makeup at all and had a well-scrubbed look, a bit like the actress Nicole Stéphane, the sister in Cocteau’s (and Melville’s) Les Enfants Terribles . Marilyn’s parents were German-Americans who’d been born in the reclusive Iowa religious colony of Amana. They’d moved away from the colony when they were young soon after they were married, but they’d imparted to their children an idea of the possibility of being different from other people. Marilyn’s older brother Dick had studied philosophy in Vienna, become a communist and a West Coast longshoreman before ending up a conservative, pious Catholic. Marilyn’s next older brother, Carol (named after King Carol of Romania), ran the family construction business and became a gentle, cultured, kindly Midwestern businessman. Marilyn was, and remains, a militant atheist and has always been left-leaning, though eventually her activities as a feminist displaced her sympathies for the Soviet Union, Red China, and Castro’s Cuba. Her younger sister became a Catholic convert who worked an office job in New York but devoted most of her spare time to absorbing the wisdom of her intellectual guru. The youngest brother lived in Chicago and was in finance.
    All of the Schaefers, somewhat surprisingly, had a terrific sense of humor, dry and self-deflating. They were all devoted to their mother but had a more difficult rapport with their father, a big lovable man who’d tear up when he’d had a few schnapps, whostill had a German accent though he had been born in Iowa—and who had an unfortunate habit of defending anything Germany did, including the election of Hitler as chancellor. He was what the French call a négationiste , someone who denies that the Holocaust took place (a crime in Europe that can result in prison time). Back in the religious colony he’d been trained as a youngster to be a carpenter. After joining “the world” he became a successful real estate developer and builder. At first a union man and progressive in politics, he soon drifted to the right.
    Marilyn loved her father but found his politics infuriating and his assumption of traditional gender roles even more maddening. Old Mr. Schaefer would, no doubt, have had no idea what she was talking about, though he had learned to cool it in public with his views on the Führer. She grudgingly admired his interest in history, though she regretted he was always deep into the latest worshipful biography of Bismarck or Hindenburg. When her family went to Europe, it was to head directly for the Fatherland; even a change of planes in France or England they thought of as sullying them.
    I learned (and remembered) all of this about her family because I idolized Marilyn, coaxing stories about Amana and its strange rites and regulations out of her. For instance, I knew that if a young