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Rothschild. Henry, sensing his wife’s frustration, bought her jewelry and groped for special ways to please her.

     
    Henry had remarried to make a bad situation better; he had only succeeded in making matters worse, and now it seemed he could do nothing right. On Sundays, he took Eleanor and the children on excursions to the Bronx, where they visited Eliza’s grave at Woodlawn. “That was his idea of a treat,” said Dorothy. It was a five-minute walk from the cemetery entrance to Myrtle Plot. The moment he caught sight of the marker wreathed with its stone flowers, emotions overrode dignity, the grief came rushing back, and he would start crying. “Whenever he’d hear a crunch of gravel that meant an audience approaching, out would come the biggest handkerchief you ever saw, and in a lachrymose voice that had remarkable carrying power, he’d start wailing, ‘We’re all here, Eliza! I’m here. Dottie’s here. Mrs. Rothschild is here—’ ” At these moments Dorothy hated him.
    Judging by her numerous poetical references to graves, coffins, and the Dead—a term that essentially meant Eliza—the Woodlawn outings had consequences that would have astounded Henry, for they provided food for his daughter’s ripening fantasies. While he blubbered and waved his hankie, she observed him and inwardly smiled to think how her mother “would laugh, could you have heard the things they said.” Unlike her husband, Eliza would not permit herself, living or dead, to make a fool of herself. Dorothy imagined her with hands crossed, lying quietly underfoot in shiny wood and eavesdropping on the dramas taking place above.
    When Dorothy was six, she idealized her mother. Twenty-five years later, carrying the same pictures in her head but no longer able to disguise her angry feelings, she decided the dead “do not welcome me” and furiously denounced them as “pompous.”
     
     
    Dorothy and her sister attended Blessed Sacrament Academy, a private parochial school run by the Sisters of Charity. Academically, it was one of the city’s finest schools and had the added advantage of being located close by in a double brownstone on West Seventy-ninth Street. She walked there with one of the housemaids. She never forgot the laundry smell of the nuns’ robes, the desks covered with oilcloth, Sister Dionysius’s cold-eyed glances, the haughtiness of her classmates.
    Helen had no trouble fitting in, but she was that sort of person. Dorothy had no intention of belonging. She referred to the Immaculate Conception, which struck her as sounding a little fishy, as “spontaneous combustion” and felt enormously pleased at having thought up the joke. She made a special effort to criticize everyone and sought reasons to find them ridiculous. “They weren’t exactly your starched crinoline set, you know. Dowdyest little bunch you ever saw.”
    There was another girl who hated Blessed Sacrament. Mercedes de Acosta, the daughter of a wealthy Spanish-Cuban family, had a married sister who was suing her husband for divorce. The newspapers were full of sensational stories about the suit, which prompted the children at school to gossip maliciously that Rita was trying to sell her son to her husband for a million dollars. Mercedes, squaring off against her persecutors, traded taunt for taunt, in which endeavor Dorothy was only too eager to aid and abet. Before long, the nuns had cast them as the school troublemakers, parts the two scrappy little girls played with relish. Eighty years later, a student who had been three grades ahead of them at Blessed Sacrament could still remember the pair behaving so badly that their teacher suffered “a breakdown.” Dorothy was reputed to be just as devilish out of school. She even invented a secret language that drove her parents very nearly out of their minds.
     
     
    All day long the nuns talked about Jesus. When she arrived home from school Dorothy found Eleanor bustling right out to interrogate