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whence our families had arisen generations ago and to which we longed to return.
    My mother, Adele, whose grandparents had arrived from Alsace-Lorraine full of stamina and good intentions, had worked at the DeLaval Separator company before she married. She had a good head for numbers and was given a job in the payroll department. This had been a source of great pride for her, since the DeLavalCream Separator Works was the biggest employer in Poughkeepsie. All that ended with her marriage and my birth.
    Perhaps the enforced isolation destroyed more than one dream for her. When I got older, and was mooning over Rudolph Valentino instead of an ice-cream soda, I heard the gossip that Theodore Miller flirted with his factory girls and sometimes it was more than flirting. He was tall, blue-eyed, very good-looking. More than one woman in town was secretly in love with him.
    My father’s great-grandfather had been a perfumer in Paris, a cousin of the great interior designer Dandrillon, who mixed the scents of violet, jasmine, and rose into his paints to hide the smell of varnish. His fragrances were said to last for years, not months. Dandrillon purchased those floral essences from my great-grandfather, Gerald Thouars. Gerald had to flee France along with his aristocratic clientele when the revolution arrived. That was how my father spoke of that event, as an arrival, like a guest, or a debt collector.
    Great-grandfather Gerald Thouars ended up in the forested wilds of New York as Jerry Tours, and took up farming. He was a failure at it, mostly because he spent all his time and money growing flowers and herbs and letting the corn and wheat fend for themselves. But he had the prettiest garden in the state. Even after the city of Poughkeepsie grew up all round the Tours’ land, and generations of poverty reduced the holding to a small city plot, it was still the prettiest garden for miles around, showing the bones of the original design in the gravel walks and ancient cherry trees standing sentinel in the corners.
    Sometimes, after my father had had his three after-work gins and was working up to the fourth, he would take me outside, into the old garden begun generations before, and we would just stand there, inhaling the fragrance.
    When the lilacs and roses and lavender were in bloom, you could close your eyes and imagine you were in Provence, on a terrace overlooking the blue sea, or in a secret garden in the walled city of Peking, where courtesans gossiped, or in a pharmacy in Paris, where a bottle of perfume had been spilled. And then you would open your eyes and you would be in Poughkeepsie, with the next-door neighbor’s laundry blowing on the clothesline and dogs barking down the street and smoke from the DeLaval Separator company painting gray strokes in the sky.
    Daddy had a special peony, an old Duchesse de Nemours that burst into fragrant clouds of flowers each spring, planted fifty years before by Gerald Tours’ son, my great-grandfather. A stone crouched under the leaves of this plant, and under the stone was a tin cigarette box, and every month Daddy added two quarters to the secret savings. “For you,” he said. “Something of your own, when it’s time to leave.”
    “How do you know I’ll leave?”
    “How do you know you won’t? You’ll want to go look at things in the world. See things I’ve never seen.” And so do parents begin the journeys of their children.
    Aside from the good looks of our most popular industrialist, my town, and Lee’s, was famous for Vassar College, where moneyed coeds with bobbed hair and short skirts carried around Sinclair Lewis novels. They would fill the train station at every break and we townie girls would go and gawk to see what the new fashions were.
    And every June, just as the college girls were leaving for the summer vacation, the town would fill again, this time with moneyed young men arriving for the annual regatta of the Intercollegiate Rowing Association, held on