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their son Freddie, with his wife Eleanor moved there when he was demobbed from the Navy.
There were enough family contacts for my dad, once he passed the bar examination, to find a few clients in his new private practice. Mom could probably get a job at a local social work agency. It
would be tough for a while, but there wasn’t much choice.
    Burgundy Farm aimed to instil self-reliance and confidence, but it certainly didn’t prepare me for the Huntington School System. I entered the fourth grade in Woodbury Avenue Elementary
School in the way many travellers enter obscure foreign parts, partly intimidated, but fascinated as well: what odd customs, what peculiar rituals. In the morning you pledged allegiance to the
flag, but I didn’t know the words, and was regarded with suspicion: was I some sort of communist? Sometimes there were drills in case of atomic bomb attack, but if you hid under your desk the
fall-out wouldn’t get you. Otherwise you sat behind the desk all day with about thirty (silent!) kids, while Miss Saul talked, and you wrote down what she said.
    The class was studying Babylon, which I knew to be a town somewhere on Long Island. It sounded an interesting place. Apparently they had a lot of wars there, masses of treasures, and a king whom
everybody worshipped, or else. I raised my hand:
    ‘Please, Miss Saul. How long does it take to get there?’
    I am not sure whether an entire class can guffaw, but I think that is what happened. They already knew I was different, and thus peculiar and not to be trusted. I was too good at maths, had read
an awful lot of books, but didn’t know anything about science, or, it was clear, history. After class, Miss Saul gave me a book entitled Ancient Babylon . I didn’t read much of
it, but it was annoying that they had to give it the same name as our local town.
    We moved into a block of new apartments, where Ruthie and I shared a bedroom, but within a year, once dad’s practice had begun and a few clients rolled up, we bought a new house (for
$20,000, which was such a lot ) on Brookside Drive. Only well-off kids lived in new houses; you could tell which kids were poor just by looking where they lived. My fourth-grade
classmate Judy Hackstaff lived in an enormous really old house, with a wrap-around front porch and peeling white paint, and funny towers like a haunted castle. It looked spooky and dirty to me, and
I felt sorry for her and invited her up to see our new house, so she could tell her parents how rich people lived.
    Ruthie and I had separate bedrooms, there was a den and two living rooms, and a garden where mom could plant stocks and phlox – she loved bright and strongly perfumed flowers. All of the
other houses on the road were exactly the same – that was nice – only in different colours. But only ours had a cherry tree in the front, with yellowy-red cherries that weren’t
too bitter once you got used to the taste.
    Ruthie and I fought over colours for our bedrooms: of the hundreds of choices we both wanted the same blue. (I wanted it first, of course.) There were tears, and she got the best blue, while I
settled for the next best. Somehow she also got the biggest bedroom, which I resented without coming to the conclusion, quite, that she was the favoured child. All it proved was that if you made a
big fuss you could get your way. We both got new beds with real foam rubber pillows, new desks, and got to choose prints for the walls from a museum shop. New, everything new. It was like starting
all over again. Mom and dad treated themselves, in the master bedroom, to a built-in unit behind the bed, which had a long bookshelf with louvred doors which, when closed, you could prop your
pillow against. It was painted the same colour (not blue, taupe) as their room, and looked, we all felt, distinctly ritzy. I admired it very much – asked if I could have one too – but
it hardly occurred to me, in those pleasure-hazed first months, to look