1922年:我祖父的石头门廊?我赢了吗?我和你一起去。我想和爷爷呆在一起!?了吗?what’我是怎么给爸爸妈妈泼冷水的?在周日的晚餐上畅饮马提尼酒. ...枫丹白露，马塔波西特，普吉特海湾....在我爷爷家过了一个夏天，哪儿也不是哪儿?年代农场。钻石尖，渴和诺曼，它的小巷的白杨树游行从祖母?在美国的玫瑰园里，有一片可怕的原始松树、灌木丛和永远开拓的小径。1922年的一个下午，我坐在石头门廊上，透过像漂浮的煤一样黑的屏风望过去。 Tockytock, tockytock clumped our Alpine, Edwardian cuckoo clock, slung with strangled, wooden game. Our farmer was cementing a root-house under the hill. One of my hands was cool on a pile of black earth, the other warm on a pile of lime. All about me were the works of my Grandfather?s hands: snapshots of his Liberty Bell silver mine; his high school at Stuttgart am Neckar; stogie-brown beams; fools?-gold nuggets; octagonal red tiles, sweaty with a secret dank, crummy with ant-stale; a Rocky Mountain chaise longue, its legs, shellacked saplings. A pastel-pale Huckleberry Finn fished with a broom straw in a basin hollowed out of a millstone. Like my Grandfather, the décor was manly, comfortable, overbearing, disproportioned. What were those sunflowers? Pumpkins floating shoulder-high? It was sunset, Sadie and Nellie bearing pitchers of ice-tea, oranges, lemons, mint, and peppermints, and the jug of shandygaff, which Grandpa made by blending half and half yeasty, wheezing homemade sarsaparilla with beer. The farm, entitled Char-de-sa in the Social Register, was named for my Grandfather?s children: Charlotte, Devereux, and Sarah. No one had died there in my lifetime ... Only Cinder, our Scottie puppy paralyzed from gobbling toads. I sat mixing black earth and lime. II I was five and a half. My formal pearl gray shorts had been worn for three minutes. My perfection was the Olympian poise of my models in the imperishable autumn display windows of Rogers Peet?s boys? store below the State House in Boston. Distorting drops of water pinpricked my face in the basin?s mirror. I was a stuffed toucan with a bibulous, multicolored beak. III Up in the air by the lakeview window in the billiards-room, lurid in the doldrums of the sunset hour, my Great Aunt Sarah was learning Samson and Delilah. She thundered on the keyboard of her dummy piano, with gauze curtains like a boudoir table, accordionlike yet soundless. It had been bought to spare the nerves of my Grandmother, tone-deaf, quick as a cricket, now needing a fourth for ?Auction,? and casting a thirsty eye on Aunt Sarah, risen like the phoenix from her bed of troublesome snacks and Tauchnitz classics. Forty years earlier, twenty, auburn headed, grasshopper notes of genius! Family gossip says Aunt Sarah tilted her archaic Athenian nose and jilted an Astor. Each morning she practiced on the grand piano at Symphony Hall, deathlike in the off-season summer? its naked Greek statues draped with purple like the saints in Holy Week.... On the recital day, she failed to appear. IV I picked with a clean finger nail at the blue anchor on my sailor blouse washed white as a spinnaker. What in the world was I wishing? ... A sail-colored horse browsing in the bullrushes ... A fluff of the west wind puffing my blouse, kiting me over our seven chimneys, troubling the waters.... As small as sapphires were the ponds: Quittacus, Snippituit, and Assawompset, halved by ?the Island,? where my Uncle?s duck blind floated in a barrage of smoke-clouds. Double-barreled shotguns stuck out like bundles of baby crow-bars. A single sculler in a camouflaged kayak was quacking to the decoys.... At the cabin between the waters, the nearest windows were already boarded. Uncle Devereux was closing camp for the winter. As if posed for ?the engagement photograph,? he was wearing his severe war-uniform of a volunteer Canadian officer. Daylight from the doorway riddled his student posters, tacked helter-skelter on walls as raw as a boardwalk. Mr. Punch, a water melon in hockey tights, was tossing off a decanter of Scotch. La Belle France in a red, white and blue toga was accepting the arm of her ?protector,? the ingenu and porcine Edward VII. The pre-war music hall belles had goose necks, glorious signatures, beauty-moles, and coils of hair like rooster tails. The fines