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time in delirium.” While he was convalescing, he broke out in red spots, which “the doctor circled in blue ink.”
    Their brother’s fever was so contagious that Diane and Renée were moved to the Hotel Bolivar, on Central Park West at 84th Street, where they lived with their nanny for three months. Every so often they would be trotted back to Stand opposite the San Remo and wave up to their mother, who stood at their apartment window waving back.
    During that period, Renée recalls, “Diane and I were as intimate as we’d ever be, I suppose.” She remembers coming back to the hotel and Diane helping the nanny bathe her and Diane coloring in her coloring book or drawing pictures for her and reading to her from Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights. Diane enjoyed Gothic novels in which fantasy predominates over reality; the strange overshadows the commonplace, the supernatural prevails over the natural. “I had the feeling Diane likened herself to Jane Eyre, who was a talented, superior girl deeply romantic and full of dreams,” Renée says.
    At school she was a font of creativity—particularly in art class, where she sketched, painted in oils, sculpted, and made collages. “Obviously Diane possessed a gift which gave her a sense of separateness, from the very beginning,” her art teacher, Victor D’Amico, says. “She wasn’t aware of her talent then, but her talent—her imagination—compelled her to live in a state of internal crisis, of excitement, which must have been disturbing to her. I remember how impatient she was with easy solutions.”
    He recalls, “Once I gave her class an assignment to design a dream house. Everyone else drew up very traditional plans, mainly mock Tudor three-story jobs with fireplaces and balconies. Diane’s house was completely round with windows on different levels so she could study the stars in the sky as well as watch the grass grow. There was little furniture in her fantasy house, just the essentials—bed, table, chair—because she wanted to be free to walk around in the dark without bumping into things. In spite of her fears about so many things, Diane felt safer, more comfortable in the dark.”
    However, in school, invariably surrounded by a group of children who looked to her for leadership, she was beginning to show signs of independence. After class she would organize treks and games in Central Park with her friends. Whenever there was something a little daring or dangerous to do, like jumping over a wide crevice between rocks or playing a trick on a teacher or teasing one of the younger girls, Diane would be theleader, “the first one to do it.” As a result she was considered one of the boldest students at Ethical Culture, but privately she was sure “I was more afraid than the others.” She forced herself to be brave, “even though I hated to and was all hot and frightened.”
    She became very popular and was able to move in and out of cliques, which she defined as being “based on exclusion and feeding on the misery of non-members.” She fluctuated between wanting to desert one clique and be close to another. She was never sure which clique she liked best.
    Even at the age of eleven she was aware of the duplicity in herself and her classmates, and she would write about it angrily in her autobiography—labeling both herself and her friends as “mean” and “stupid” because they all pretended they knew everything when they knew nothing. She realized she was supposed to act excited and silly about boys and clothes and dances, too, but often she found she could not react. She felt still and empty inside and then she would go off by herself to the Metropolitan and stare at the El Grecos. A classmate remembers how “Diane would float away from a group of us—suddenly—no explanation. Later we’d see her sitting by herself reading a book of poetry in Central Park. She did that a lot.”
    She was always being disappointed in people. They were not what they