Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

I understood all this only later. All through the 1930s Mea's arrival at our house in Scarsdale meant a party. Mea could put a few teacups and a plate of graham crackers on the table and make it a banquet: always my mother's best china, linen napkins, and a vase of flowers, even if it was dandelions from the yard.

All her life she yearned for the gracious surroundings she could never afford. In someone else this might have been pathetic, but Mea had the gift of seeing elegance when there was none and making you see it too. She could draw us children into her world of make-believe as fast as you could say let's dress up, and Donn and Caroline and I adored her.

As soon as I could read, she began writing to me once a week in turquoise ink on pearl-gray stationery. In her letters as I grew older, Mea reminisced about her own growing up. The years in New Jersey, though less deprived physically, had been as lonely as those in the Bristol orphanage. The childless couple who brought her to this country lived in an isolated house where curtains were closed because sunlight gave her uncle headaches. Even in a stiffly posed high school picture dated 1906, I could see the large-eyed beauty Mea had become. Her aunt, possibly jealous, banished the teenager to a third-floor room and kept her in her own cast-off black dresses. The love-hungry girl grew into a love-hungry woman.

There were three brief, disastrous marriages, entered into by Mea, I suspect, at the first hint of affection, fled by each man in turn as Mea's need for love proved insatiable. From the first marriage had come a son, Richard. The father vanished at the outset of the pregnancy, and Mea had her baby in the charity ward of a Baltimore hospital.

I met Richard, twenty years older than I, only twice. He was a lifelong alcoholic; I can only imagine the pressure on him to be all that his mother needed. He'd disappear for years on end, then