133 west eleventh street

This day may have been the day, the very day when my identity was born. Before the incident occurred, I didn't think about who I was. After, I would spend the rest of my life testing myself to see if I had been right.

The whole family was gathered after dinner to make the acquaintance of a possible nurse for Peter, my brother, just born five months before. Lucy and Joey, my two older sisters, and I were all under the age of eight. We lived in the top floor of a six-story town house on Eleventh Street.

"Quick, girls, it's almost eight, the plane got in an hour ago. Get dressed and wear shoes and socks and brush your hair." Mommy was holding a cigarette between her lips. She tried to get a brush through the tangles of my feathery hair, and finally grabbed a barrette, attempting to get my hair to go somewhere it stubbornly wouldn't go. She left it in a web of blond knots and went on to an easier task: brushing Lucy's hair.

Andrea Simon still had to neaten up her chignon, don her black calf heels, and apply a new layer of lipstick. She always wore bright red.

From at least three rooms away I could hear Daddy playing the piano: a strong, beautiful classical piece he'd been working on. It sounded just like a record.

Daddy had been in the hospital for five weeks after Peter was born. He had had a "nervous collapse." I would not learn about psychology until later, when the names and labels and diagnoses would collect and sprawl before me.

"Quick, girls." Mommy hurried us along. "Don't forget your manners," she might have repeated several times so it would stick.

"I wish he'd play something from Carousel or South Pacific," Mommy thought aloud. "It would make Mrs. Gaspard feel more comfortable, I should think. Rachmaninoff isn't for this kind of meeting," as if any of her three young daughters would know. She really did mean it, though, because she issued one final direction to us and then walked very fast into the living room to tell Daddy, I presume, to stop playing what he was playing and play something more "fun." We girls followed her and could hear them having a minor argument, and then Daddy started playing "The Man I Love," from Strike Up the Band, by George Gershwin. Gershwin had sent him a copy. My father was at the center of the publishing world in 1948, and he had gotten to know Gershwin while the company was doing a book on him. Daddy had started the company, Simon & Schuster, in 1924, with Max Schuster, and by 1948 things were only getting better.

"And he'll be big and strong, the man I love