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even know the name of.
    â€œI am writing, fast, my pen speeding over the page, writing in the hopes that if I get it all down, get it right (or as nearly right as an American granddaughter can), it will ease his passage—or mine. I know that death is a movement toward light—or so I said once in a poem-but I also know that to die by inches, and every inch alone, is neither light nor just—though it is common.
    â€œHe was a painter. He should have died the minute he could no longer paint, the minute the cataracts, the cancer, the arthritis, the exhaustion, the despair overwhelmed him. But that would be too simple, and just as we do not choose our loves or our children, we do not choose our deaths. I have known a number of men in their nineties who died by inches—Kurt Hammer, Louis Untermeyer, and my grandfather—and each at the end truly wished to die, but his wish was no command.
    â€œI knew him only and always as Papa. My parents were Jude and Nat in that phony thirties tradition of parents-as-pals. We all lived to regret it. But Papa was the patriarch—with all the good and bad that word implies. In a house full of artists, he had the best studio, the only studio. Amongst daughter-painters he held his maulstick like a magic wand (or a bludgeon) over their heads.”
    Normally Isadora was a good reader. She could hold an audience captive with her incantatory poems; she could read other people’s poems and novels with the conviction of a born actress. But reading this painfully self-revelatory memoir, her conviction faltered, her palms sweated. She stood at the shaky lectern, wishing she had something more to hold on to. She had nothing, not even Papa’s hand. She had committed herself to this as one commits oneself to childbirth—at a moment one would commit to anything.
    â€œWhen I was born, it seems he was already an old man. In fact, he was only fifty-nine. He wore round wire-rimmed glasses and painted in the witch-hatted studio that crowned the triplex apartment on Seventy-seventh Street where I grew up. That curious gothic apartment house terminates skyward in a trapezoidal roof containing a huge northern window which rattled (perhaps still rattles) in the wind that the Museum of Natural History fails to block. The window shades were dull forest green and drawn up on pulleys from below; a trapdoor separated the studio from the rest of the house. On one wall of the studio hung a death mask of Beethoven, as mute in white plaster as his ears became at the end. Only the wind penetrated those ears; and his domed eyes were sightless as well. This blind Beethoven was watched, however, by an open-eyed Voltaire, present in a bust of the same dusty white plaster.
    â€œOn Halloween, a sheet would be draped from Beethoven’s mask, a candle placed next to a jawless skull perched on my grandfather’s heavy, paint-spattered easel, and we children would gather, teeth chattering, for the tale of Dracula, told by my mother in this witchi est of settings. Here, in the heart of New York, was Transylvania—or as near to it as one could get.
    â€œI was too little. My older sister’s friends—five years older—were having the party and I was just allowed, as special grace, to creep up the studio stairs, sit upon the middle step, and listen.
    â€œNever have I regretted any grace so much! The stake might as well have been driven through my heart; the bats might as well have flown through my skull. The nightmare galloped through my dreams for years after that fatal story hour! An evil that cannot die indeed!—but my grandfather lives on, being transfused when he wishes to die, being X-rayed when he has no lungs, being spiked through the hand and heart with tubes and needles like the living dead.”
    Nice, she thought. Dracula in the intensive-care unit. That was indeed how intensive-care units always made her feel.
    â€œThe skull, the death mask, the bust of