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her fingers like a golden snake. “Bill arrived at her apartment around four, as they had arranged, and, not hearing her, assumed she was out. So then he looked in a folder on the desk where they used to leave notes for each other and found this—love letter, I suppose. It began, ‘Dearest Bill, You must know how deeply I love you’—or something like that—the tone was very intimate, in a way, and she kept repeating ‘I love you’ throughout—then something about how she didn’t hate him any more and didn’t want him to be troubled by the vagaries of her illness—her handwriting was becoming quite illegible by this time, sliding down the page—and it ended with ‘Be strong, be brilliant’—and her signature. You can imagine the panic he was in when he read it. He raced into the bedroom and found her looking as if she had prepared for bed last night and then just never got up this morning.” We were almost through the Seventy-ninth Street transverse; Pamela automatically reached into her purse for a compact and lipstick. “Of course, it is impossible to interpret the exact
intent
of the letter now.” She powdered her exquisite skin lightly; I could tell she’d been to the beauty salon that afternoon—probably Kenneth’s—because her fingernails were freshly polished, and herauburn hair, with its natural gray streak rising perfectly from her forehead, was newly shaped.
    My brother, sister, and I stretched languidly and licked each other in the late sun filtering through a hundred different greens. One time, when we were very young, Mother and Father had taken a house in St. Malo, a private beach community some thirty miles north of San Diego. I was about five, Bridget three, and Bill one. The beach was very deep as it ran down to the water, and the sand always glinted with thousands of tiny gold flecks. One evening at low tide, the shore was totally covered at the water’s edge by minuscule blue and pink shells rising mysteriously out of its slick gurgling surface; they exactly mirrored the pastel colors of the sky. The three of us screamed with joy: it was the most beautiful thing we had ever seen, though no one could explain why it had happened. Every day we ran naked on the beach, until some neighbor complained about Bill’s one-year-old genitals; then Mother fashioned a primitive bikini out of elastic tape and an old handkerchief, and he resumed eating all the cigarette butts he could find in the sand. Bridget and I taught him how to lie very still in the water while it foamed around us and sometimes almost gently carried us out to sea, and how to collect only the shells with tiny holes wormed through them so that we could string them together like long leis, and how to wrap seaweed around our waists like wet hula skirts, and how to scratch pictures in the sand, quickly, between waves that would erase them the next minute. It was the summer that I learned to tie my shoes, and Father had his fortieth birthday, to his great displeasure, but that morning we were allowed to taste coffee out of his cup for the first time. Many people came and stayed—three of our four godfathers: John Swope, a photographer who was always following us around taking pictures; and Jimmy Stewart, who brought me a silver necklace that I never took off, with a turquoise-eyed thunderbird dangling from it; and Roger Edens, who arranged and produced music and was married to Martha, our
only
godmother, Mother’s closest friend. Roger and Jimmy played the piano and Johnny taught us this song:
    Mouse, mouse, come out of your hole

And I shall give you a golden bowl
.
You will sit on a tuft of hay

And I shall frighten the cat away
.
Mouse, mouse, when you go to bed
,
I shall give you a large loaf of bread
.
You will have cheese and a plateful of rice
,
’Cause I love to think of the dear little mice
.
    We all went around singing it endlessly. Bridget and I shared a bedroom for the first time in our lives; it was unbelievably