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real skeleton, reproductions of T’ang dynasty horses—was both a place of refuge and a place of fear. It smelled deliciously of turpentine and oil paint, like some enchanted wood. But the death masks of Beethoven and Keats, and the skeleton and skull, gave the place a creepy air. You would not want to be there alone at night.
    Every Halloween, the studio became the site of ghost and vampire storytelling. A candle would illuminate the skull, and the skeleton and death masks would wear white sheet shrouds like KKK members. Papa would set a painting of another skull (Yorick’s perhaps?) on his old paint-encrusted easel (which had traveled with him from Edinburgh, Bristol, and London many years ago when he first migrated to the New World, again escaping the draft in England as he had the Russian draft as a teenage boy in Odessa). We think our lives so singular, but historical forces lift us up and fling us down. My grandfather (like yours and yours) fled Europe and its wars.
    My mother told the story of Dracula—embellishing it bloodily—and the children shrieked in fear and pleasure to hear of the undead, of fangs, of maidens pale and anemic from their nighttime trysts.
    On normal workdays, I was always welcome to paint beside my grandfather. He would prepare me a little canvas (he always proudly stretched his own), give me an extra palette filled with such mellifluous colors as alizarin crimson, rose madder, viridian, cobalt blue, chrome yellow, raw umber, Chinese white, and he would place two little metal clip-on cups, one for linseed oil and one for turpentine, in the thumb-hole of the palette. “Don’t muddy the colors,” Papa would say, giving me both sable and pig bristle brushes. Then I would paint away at my grandfather’s side, in utter bliss, stoned on the smell of the turps and the sound of brushstrokes. Papa whistled Russian folk ballads and Red Army songs as he worked. Seventy-seventh Street might as well have been the banks of the Dnieper.
    Papa was a tough taskmaster. If I “muddied colors” or failed to take my painting seriously, he would rage and chase me down the stairs with his maulstick, whipping the air. He never had to hit me. His roar was enough to terrorize me. I have read with amazement all these books about childhood incest and abuse, and I know that my grandfather’s roar was abuse enough. How unstylish to have to report that no one molested me in childhood. Except psychologically. It was enough.
    My grandfather had a studio, my father had an office, but my mother set up a folding easel when and where she could and resented this bitterly. My grandmother meanwhile ruled the house, chasing after our Jamaican maid, Ivy, to make sure she did things right.
    Iviana Banton was the feisty West Indian woman who ran our household (when my grandmother would let her). Her hands were leathery and black on the outside and marvelously pink on the inside. I loved her accent, and West Indian speech patterns still seduce my ear.
    Ivy was ugly, with a huge wen on her nose, sprouting a hair, but she was alive and strong. I learned early that being alive and strong were far more important than being beautiful.
    Despite enough analysis to support a small country, I have repressed all early childhood memories of my mother. I know she both adored me and resented adoring me, and her extreme volatility had to be filtered out like poisons from a household tap. I loved her more than life and I was also terrified of her mutability. My older sister was often physically violent to me, twisting my arm till I fell to the floor writhing in pain; she also tormented me by “winning” my gold watch in fixed crap and card games, embarrassing me in front of friends. Two women tyrannized me for much of my childhood, but my memory is blank for most of it. Still, I conclude that my conciliatory temperament, my tendency to hide my anger even from myself, then explode years later, or use