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enormous breakfast and help my mother with the housework after my father has gone off to school. I'm not a famous author, I'm just my mother's daughter.
    She never called Michael Rossi “father.” Sometimes, jokingly, she said “Daddy-O,” and hoped he understood that she meant more than she could yet bring herself to say; but most often she called him Mike. It was just to herself that she said, “My father.” At first, she had done so as an experiment, to see if she would be overcome with guilt at her disloyalty to Allison MacKenzie, her own father who was dead, but she had felt nothing. It was as if Allison MacKenzie had never really been her father at all, but just a man with whom her mother had had a rather unfortunate love affair a long, long time ago.
    â€œI've never been sorry,” her mother had said. “I loved him and he was good to me. And I got you. That's a lot more than most women ever have.”
    At first, when Allison's bitterness against her mother had been at its peak, she had repeated the ugly word over and over to herself.
    Bastard.
    And she had thought that she would die of shame and horror. She guarded her secret as well as her mother had ever done. She hugged it tightly to her, carried it with her, waking and sleeping. Illegitimate, out of wedlock —words like these leaped off the pages of the books she read; they seemed to be printed in a heavier type. More than that, at her most sensitive period she had the feeling they had been used only to wound and hurt and insult her.
    She had never told anyone the facts of her birth, not even Stephanie Wallace, who had been her roommate in New York, nor Bradley Holmes, who had been her lover.
    During the weeks and months of self-pity and self-laceration that had followed when Allison first returned to Peyton Place, she had wondered often and bitterly about Bradley Holmes. She did not even know how to place him, how to identify him in the scheme of her life. Could he be called her lover, she wondered. But that implied love, and on his side there had been none. No, he was simply her first man, the one who had introduced her to sex, who had taken something from her. And given her something, too. For this reason he was important to her. A man she would never forget. For all the sophistication of her writing, Allison could not yet rid herself of the belief that you had to marry the man with whom you had made love.
    She had wasted a lot of time hating Brad, but in the end it was due to him that she had begun to understand her mother and to love her again. Knowing herself now to be human and capable of weakness, she no longer expected others to be supermen, not even her mother.
    Allison heard a stirring downstairs, and in a few minutes her mother's laugh drifted up the stairwell to Allison's room. Her mother and Mike never got up separately, just as they never did anything apart from one from the other. If she had ever needed anything to convince her that what she and Brad had was not love, she had only to look at Mike and Constance. Allison had heard them giggling together like school children more than once as they made coffee.
    â€œIt's indecent,” Allison had laughed, for her mother always bathed while Mike was shaving.
    â€œI can't help it,” Mike said. “Your mother always has aroused the most shocking feelings in me. And, I suspect, she always will.”
    â€œShocking my arse,” said Constance inelegantly. “The day that you're shocked by anything will be occasion for the declaration of a national holiday. School children will celebrate it with fireworks, parades, and essays.”
    When Allison went downstairs it was to the smell of coffee and bacon, and the first thing she saw was her mother, in a pale blue robe, her golden head outlined against a snow-covered windowpane. Allison's eyes stung with tears as they always did when she saw something beautiful.
    â€œGood morning, darling,” said