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about the girls back then--and no one to help me sort them out. Once, quite recently, when I hinted at regrets about those times, a much older Clover said, "Oh Daddy, you were deranged, and you deserved to be." Well, I thought unkindly, and you would know about derangement, would you not?
    When the girls were small, I heard Poppy tell one of her friends, "I don't see how you could ever have a favorite when there are just two: one will always and forever be your first, the miracle baby, the one who paves the way, strikes out for adventure--the intrepid one, the one who teaches you how to do what nature intended all along--and the other, oh the other will always be your baby, your darling, the one you surprised yourself by loving just as desperately much as you loved the first."
    Pursuant to such sentimental partition, Clover ought to have been the intrepid one, the maverick, and Trudy the eternal infant, the one to cuddle, to indulge your adoration. It did not turn out that way.
    Poppy and I had named our daughters not by consulting our family trees but by following our passions and then our ideals. When Clover was born, Poppy and I still felt like newlyweds; in the hospital room, as I beheld this new creature, this bundled beauty, I kissed my wife and said, "Flower from a flower." We swept aside Rose, Iris, and Lily for a wilder, less pretentious cousin.
    Not fourteen months later, our second child arrived the day after Jack Kennedy was murdered. Such a solemn, bittersweet occasion, that birth. "We must give her a strong, virtuous name," said Poppy. Tearful over the violence and calumny of modern times, we named her for the first woman who had lived in our ancient house, in what we fancied an era when goodness had been essential to human survival. Truthful and Hosmer Fisk had settled here, next to Hosmer's older brother, Azor. From records in the library, we learned that Hosmer and his bride struggled to grow potatoes, turnips, and pumpkins in Matlock's stony soil; four of their seven children reached ages at which they, too, could work the farm. Two lived on to have children of their own. Hosmer's descendants had persisted in our house for three more generations.
    Over our friends' polite bewilderment, over our mothers' united dismay, we named our second daughter Truthful Darling. To us, it was a gorgeous, steadfast name, one that mingled courage and honesty with tenderness and love. Alas, it became a source of profound embarrassment to her the minute she set foot in school; even professionally, in her byline on dry articles in lofty medical journals, she has never used it.
    Shortly before my retirement, Trudy had been appointed chief of breast oncology at the leading cancer hospital in New England. Her picture appeared in a national magazine, in an article about groundbreaking female physicians. There she was, my own daughter, the baby of the family, posed in her office, an expression of businesslike dignity on her face, a stethoscope sprouting like a silver orchid from a pocket of her white jacket. My phone rang itself silly. I heard from friends I hadn't seen in years--friends of Poppy's, that is.
    Clover had led a much more varied life than her little sister--but that variety reflected a series of false starts, not bold adventures. After college (where she majored in sociology, a subject whose revelations she never shared with me), she worked as a waitress in a coffee shop, a gymnastics instructor, a ticket vendor in a Broadway box office, a clerk in a pharmacy, and, perhaps most memorably, as a uniformed parking valet at Boston's most expensive seafood restaurant, less than a mile from her sister's medical suite. Through her twenties, Clover lived with an equally eclectic succession of men, most of them with equally unfixed ambitions. And then she married a supremely decent fellow with a steady job as, of all things, an accountant. She met him when he kept her out of jail for having failed to pay self-employment tax for