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de la crème. I spent the hour until they returned daydreaming on the fencepost about what they were saying, deaf to Pamela’s remark that I would get splinters on my behind. She departed with the others, and I was thus the first to see the little cloud of dust that signaled the approach of the old black car. In my excitement I tried to stand on the post. A shriek came from behind me—Aunt Edie had witnessed my antics. The whole crew came tumbling out the front door, and I was deprived of my sentinel’s prize. But it didn’t matter, for the rattletrap was chugging toward us with three young heads in the back now, Tom sandwiched between Philip and Isabella. We waved and shouted. Uncle Kurt stood next to me and held me steady on the post, laughing his contagious, gunfire laugh. Tom was getting a Hatfield Special.
    The rattletrap pulled to a halt, and the rear door closest to us flew open, creaking on its hinges. There was a moment when all we could see were Isabella’s endless arms and legs, flailing like a trapped octopus as she tried to get out before her brother. In the end she scrambled almost into the dust before finding her footing and scooting to one side. Her mouth was stretched in a grin that seemed to cut her face in half—she didn’t mind making a fool of herself as long as she knew why people were laughing. Philip, meanwhile, had emerged on the far side with his usual serpentine dignity. We ignored him.
    Tom was luxuriating in this imperial arrival. He had enough dramatic sense to wait a second or two before following Isabella. Then he slithered out feet first. He was still wearing his student’s outfit of white shirt and tweed suit. We fell silent. I was leaning against Uncle Kurt’s shoulder. Tom stood next to the car, squinting from the sun. Like Isabella and Delia, he had light brown hair that sat atop a comfortable, snub-nosed face. But he, much more than his sisters, had inherited his father’s handsomeness. He was magnetically attractive, and now he stood before us, allowing us to drink in the sight of him.
    “Hi, everyone,” he said, waving a sheepish hand.
    Such casual words—and yet, to me, they were the beginning of everything.

2
Croquet
    T he morning after he arrived, Tom proved our theories about his talent for action by suggesting a family tournament of croquet. We were all in the kitchen, eating breakfast in the Hatfield fashion, which was to come at will and linger for as long as the food held out. My mother and Margery usually prepared the meals, Rose being too lazy and Edie too pernickety to do well in the culinary realm.
    “Is there a croquet set here?” Charlie asked. “I’ve never seen one.”
    “You’ve never looked,” said Aunt Margery. “Of course there’s one. We played croquet all the time when we were young, didn’t we, Caroline?”
    “I remember perhaps one or two games,” my mother replied, smiling.
    We found the set in one of the closets by the kitchen, a forgotten hideaway filled with antique sports equipment. Charlie crowed over an ancient baseball bat, and I located a bag of heavy balls that no one could identify. A few days later I asked Uncle Kurt about them, and he said they were bocce balls. He offered to teach me how to play but never did, so they remained a mystery until much later in the summer. Tom, of course, found the croquet bag, a big, unwieldy, canvas sack full of sharp wickets and clattering mallets. In uncovering the bag he threw a pile of litter into the room behind him, and Delia Robierre picked up an ancient kerosene lantern, stained with age. “What’s this?” she asked, amused to find a reminder of the age of gas lighting—which, in those days, was not so many years in the past. But Tom had no time for distractions, and the lantern was returned to the closet with all the other paraphernalia.
    “Outside, everyone!” he ordered. He had a way of taking command that made us forget how short he was, how slender and insignificant his