Dream Catcher: A Memoir (79 page)

Peggy pulling Daddy’s nose. “It was most exceedingly pullable-looking hair, and pulled it surely got; the babies in the family always automatically reached for it, even before the nose, which, God wot, was also Outstanding.” (“Seymour: An Introduction,” 1959)

This lovely woven slat fence, which as young as age four I climbed with ease, was referred to by reporters and biographers as an “eight-foot-tall impenetrable fence with a sort of guard tower overlooking the house.”

The “guard tower,” courtesy of FAO Schwarz.

My view of creation as a sort of miraculous immaculate conception was supported by my father’s mythic stories about me, such as how I went to the keyboard before I could barely stand unassisted, and picked out a tune perfectly, the first time.

My father told me stories about a naughty little girl, Lucia Ferenzi, and her lion, Samba, that bore a remarkable resemblance to things good little Peggy and her lion, Simba, might have done.

My aunt Doris told me strange and wonderful things. . . . She called the skin on my face “your complexion.”

Peggy and Matthew, 1960.

Claire Douglas, age five, is the first little girl on the left. Photo from
Life
magazine, July 17, 1939.

Peggy on vacation in Florida. I have the same bathing suit as the Mayfair Bath Club girls, but oh, that face!

The author, at age ten going on twenty, in 1966.

On my first day of boarding school, a Cheshire cat’s teeth appeared, smiling in the long corridor. It said, “Hi, I’m Holly. What’s your name?”