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the story. Or maybe he was just in love with your mother.” How will we ever know? Dr. McLean, wherever you are: Thanks.
    Born in wartime to a big European-style family—my parents, my sister, my Russian-speaking maternal grandparents (who never taught us Russian so that they could have a secret language)—I remember early games like “running away from the Nazis” or my grandmother lathering my hands with Ivory soap to wash away “the Germans.” Thus did the war enter my childhood. I remember deliberately wetting my bed at night so as to be taken to my parents’ bed, to sleep between them in that safest of all places—both dividing and joining them. I remember looking up at the ceiling of their room to see kaleidoscopic light shows—“peas and carrots” I called them, meaning the fragments of green and red on the insides of my lids when I closed my eyes again in their big warm bed.
    â€œThe tempter under the eyelid,” Dylan Thomas names this flickering creature. Is it that tempter who makes a poet?
    My memories of early days are few, and all of them are visual. I may even remember being in a carriage, rolling through a park, and looking up at myriad green leaves fracturing the light. Never am I happier than looking up at leaves, so I imagine this relates to some early infantile euphoria. The leaves in the park, the optical illusion created by small octagonal bathroom tiles, which seemed to form a funnel into another world as I leaned over my seat on the bathroom throne and stared at their changing configurations on the floor—these are the most vivid memories I have.
    By the time I was two, we lived in the apartment I re-create in all my dreams—a rambling neo-Gothic affair occupying the top three floors of a building at 44 West Seventy-seventh Street, opposite the Museum of Natural History. We moved there from Castle Village in Washington Heights in 1944, and stayed until 1959, when we moved to another prewar palazzo, the Beresford, on the north side of the museum.
    My childhood memories of home are at once spooky and grand. The building on Seventy-seventh Street had been built for artists at the beginning of the century, and the studio had north light. We were always seeking north light, it seemed, like some strange plant life growing twisted to reach the sun.
    The apartment I remember is probably not the apartment that exists today—now far more elegant than in my forties childhood. Lions’ heads framed the living room fireplace; the dining room had dark wood paneling and Gothic moldings and faced a court; the kitchen had an ancient hooded gas stove and a zinc sink; the bedrooms were spaced along down a crooked hall; and a stony foyer, with Gothic wood trim, opened out into a stony hall where you summoned a mirrored, paneled elevator whose whorled wood looked like midnight owls half-hidden in midnight trees.
    The living room ceiling was double-height and covered with something called “gold leaf.” (In my child’s mind, I imagined these harvested from golden trees.) Four Venetian-looking lanterns swayed from its darkened golden squares. The front windows faced the museum with its brownstone facade and green conical turrets; the back windows saw the sunny courtyard and the leafy gardens of the New-York Historical Society and the row of limestone mansions on Seventy-sixth Street. Above the living room was a balcony, its rail hung with a Balinese batik on which evil demons danced in profile. And up two flights of stairs was Papa’s (my grandfather’s) studio, with a trapdoor, a ceiling that pointed up like a witch’s hat, and two huge windows—one facing north (that unchanging light that artists seek), the other south (too mutable, thus often darkened with double green shades manipulated by pulleys).
    Papa’s studio, filled with artists’ accoutrements—plaster masks (of Beethoven, Keats, Voltaire), a real skull, a