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mother loved and was often persuaded by it. For the moment, however, she only sighed and said she would give it serious thought, which meant that she would take the matter up with our neighbor Mrs. Curran and the Ouija board.
    Mother had long been interested in matters of the occult. There were séances in our house occasionally, but many more of them down the street at Mrs. Curran’s. According to my mother, she was a savant of the supernatural and had a very familiar and persuasive way with the board. I wasn’t invited to attend the session, but when Mother returned home from Mrs. Curran’s she reported that I could go to Bryn Mawr after all, and that everything would be well.
    Later I had to wonder about Mrs. Curran’s prophecy because it seemed blatantly false to me. I did go away, in 1911, but the whole venture was doomed before it even began. The summer before I left for Bryn Mawr, my older sister Dorothea was badly burned in a fire. Though she was well out of the house during the years I was growing up, Dorothea had always been the kindest and most supportive member of my family, and I felt she understood me in a way no one else did or wanted to. When things at home grew too stifling and restrained, I’d walk to her house and watch her two young boys wrestling around her, feeling calmed and restored.
    Dorothea was very pregnant that summer. She was home alone with the boys a great deal, and one afternoon the three were out on the front porch when Dorothea saw that a fire had started in a pile of rubber tires in the empty lot next door. The boys were curious about it, but Dorothea was afraid it might spread to her own yard. She ran over and tried to stamp out the flames with her feet, but her long summer kimono quickly caught fire. Her stockings did, too, badly burning her all the way to the waist before she fell to the ground and rolled, snuffing out the flames.
    When her husband, Dudley, called us with the news, we were at our vacation cottage on Ipswich Bay. We were all worried sick about Dorothea, but Dudley reassured us she was in the hospital getting the best of care. She had no fever, and the doctors believed she would recover fully. The next day, she delivered a stillborn baby girl. Dorothea and Dudley were both devastated, but the doctors were still saying she’d live. They kept saying that until she died, eight days after the fire. Mother got on a train for the funeral, but the rest of us stayed in Ipswich, heartbroken and numb.
    I remember feeling that I might not survive Dorothea’s loss, and maybe that I didn’t want to. Mother came back from St. Louis, bringing Dudley and the boys with her. They stepped off the train looking wretched, and what comfort could I offer?
They have no mother
, I found myself thinking over and over.
    One afternoon shortly after the funeral there was a terrible storm in Ipswich Bay, and I talked one of the boys from a neighboring cottage into taking me out in it, in a rowboat. Waves slashed at the bow and came stinging over the sides and into our faces. I couldn’t even swim, but he didn’t turn back, even when the lighthouse captain signaled us to come in. The clouds were low and terrible and the air was drenched and salty. I felt as I if was drowning the whole time, over and over again. And even when we made it back to shore that day, the feeling that I was still out in the bay, sinking deeper and deeper, stayed with me through the rest of that summer and long afterward.
    In September I boarded the train and went off to Bryn Mawr as planned, but my classmates seemed to be running on a different frequency. The girls in my dorm spent their afternoons in the salon drinking tea and frothy hot chocolate, talking about dance mixers and potential conquests. I felt well removed. As a girl I knew I was pretty, with bright red hair, nice eyes, and fair skin—but now I couldn’t seem to care whether boys noticed me or not. I stopped taking an interest in my clothes and my