Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

her warmth, and her ease with people. Over the years, I felt a strong connection to Marguerite, in part because of our similar complexion, in part because of our common position as the youngest in our families, but mostly because my father loved her so much. When I was about to be confirmed in the Catholic Church at the age of eleven, my father asked me to take the name of Marguerite as my confirmation name. It was an easy request, for this was the name I had come to want for myself.
    For reasons that I will never fully comprehend, my father somehow emerged from this haunted childhood without a trace of self-pity or rancor; on the contrary, he seemed to possess an absolute self-confidence and a remarkable ability to transmit his ebullience and optimism to others. There is an old Jesuit maxim: “Give me the child for the first seven years and he will be mine for the rest of his life.” Perhaps the love he was given by his parents in his early years gave him the resources he needed to confront the trials he later faced. Or perhaps he was simply born with a sanguine temperament, a constellation of positive attitudes that became as much a part of his makeup as the color of his eyes and the shape of his nose. What is clear is that at some point my father determined he wouldwrite the story of his life himself, rather than let it be written for him by his tortured past. And this resolve was the greatest gift he bequeathed to his children.
    M Y PARENTS had not planned on having me. With two daughters, Charlotte, fourteen, and Jeanne, nine, they thought their family complete. Charlotte later told me she was so embarrassed to discover our mother’s pregnancy at the advanced age of thirty-five that she refused to tell her high-school friends. On the day I was born, a blustery January day in 1943, my father handed out cigars to his fellow examiners and bankers. One of these colleagues was the father of a high-school friend of Charlotte’s. When the girl arrived at school the next day and told everyone the news, Charlotte was mortified. Her only hope, she would later tease me, was that I be shut away in the attic until I was grown.
    Everything glamorous, comely, elegant, fragrant, remote, feminine, and forbidden was my sister Charlotte for me. She seemed the model of physical perfection, tall and shapely, with high cheekbones, a creamy complexion, large hazel eyes, and long thick hair. She walked with a natural grace and wore a slight smile that seemed to acknowledge her beauty. The star in her high-school plays, she thrived on attention and was always conscious of her appearance. During one play she refused to dye her hair gray, fearing it would make her look old at the cast party later that night. I remember her surrounded by adoring boys—one had a Chrysler Highlander with a plush red interior, another a violet Chevy he called the “Purple Passion.”
    Once, when she was still in high school, Charlotte told us that the new boyfriend she was bringing home had an ugly scar on his right cheek, about which he was acutely self-conscious. She warned us against looking directly at his face when she introduced him. I tried to obey her command, but my eyes were drawn irresistibly to his forbidden right cheek. Seeing no scar, thinking I must have confused right and left, I maneuvered to his other side, which was equally unmarred. Later that night, I asked my sister why she had told us the story of the scar. “He’s so arrogant about his good looks,” she replied laughingly, “that I figured it would throw him off if none of you looked at his face.”

    My sister Charlotte and me (
above left and right
). Charlotte seemed the model of physical perfection, tall and shapely, with high cheekbones, a creamy complexion, large hazel eyes, and long thick hair, My sister Jeanne (
left
), was a surrogate mother, looking out for me, taking care of me when our mother was sick.

    I liked to sit on a small cushioned stool in the back bedroom, which