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private school—we would get out and walk the rest of the way. Jack motored members of the Bernays family around the city in a Cadillac for many years until the war and gas rationing made a private car impossible—unless you wanted to trade on the black market, something my parents refused to do. Jack was released from his job. I never knew his last name.

    Jack, the Bernays’ driver, late 1940s.
    My parents had no reluctance or even mixed feelings about having money. They never apologized, denied, or even tried to disguise their riches. Whenever my mother needed something made of leather—handbag, wallet, passport case—she headed for Mark Cross on Fifth Avenue. A dress? Bergdorf Goodman, where the saleslady knew her name and size. A tie for my father? Countess Mara’s shop on Park Avenue, where every tie had impressed on it a medieval tiara. Shoes? Ferragamo. She bought fish at a place on Madison she called “Tiffany-by-the-sea” but was actually Wynn and Treanor. A jewel or two? Cartier, a store both more posh and more personal than Tiffany, where you were apt to bump into tourists and arrivistes. And on and on, always top of the line, the most exclusive, cleanest, quietest, perfume-smelling swishy, and above all designed to make the customer feel desirous and desired.
    When my sister and I were very young our mother bought our shoes at Indian Walk on Madison Avenue. They X-rayed your feet to make sure shoes and feet were a match. They gave you a paper Indian chief’s headdress or a balloon when you left the store
    Before heading to a party young girls inserted themselves into party dresses with stiff buckram to make the skirt stick out like a tutu. Before the war, these were light-colored silk or Egyptian cotton with puffed sleeves and a wide belt. During the war you were in danger of growing out of your clothes and not being able to buy replacements as pretty. In any case, a girl’s delicate party dress underscored the prevailing assumption that we were expected to behave like angels-in-training. “Sugar and spice and all things nice—that’s what little girls are made of”—we heard this with nauseating regularity.
    Little boys wore short wool pants, gray or dark blue, a cutoff version of men’s trousers. When they reached a certain age—around ten—they graduated to long pants. This passage was so significant—the sartorial equivalent of rites of puberty or a bar mitzvah—that the phrase “he’s still in short pants” indicated a stage of emotional growth rather than mere age. Some boys wore woolen knickerbockers, called knickers, a kind of trouser that ended just below the knee in a tight cuff and were also known as “plus fours.”
    From the time a girl’s breasts materialized out of tissue that had looked remarkably unpromising for twelve or thirteen years, her waistline took on a superimportance. You belted yourself as tightly as you could without actual pain; I considered the so-called hourglass figure of the 1890s a silly revival. It was especially hard on fat girls, who looked like sausages. If the 1930s were cool and understated, with women’s dresses beltless and sinewy, often cut on the bias and enclosing their wearers in their own aloof concerns, the 1940s and 1950s required women to flaunt it—breast, waist, hip, leg—as if men needed that extra visual jolt. In most postwar closets there hung a medley of clothes to meet a medley of social requirements, for each of which there were rules, explicit and otherwise. If you didn’t abide, you were stared at. My mother added rules of her own: Always wear a slip under a skirt. Never wear black and brown next to each other, or, for that matter, blue and green or red and orange. Why? “They clash.” Never leave the house without at least one pair of white gloves.
    I owned a lot of sweaters and a couple of sweater sets, a short-sleeved pullover