Sublime

Helene Wright was an impressive woman, at least in Medallion she was. Heavy hair in a bun, dark eyes arched in a perpetual query about other people’s manners. A woman who won all social battles with presence and a conviction of the legitimacy of her authority.

My aunt Ruth graduated magna cum laude from Hunter College in New York City in 1931, and after graduation she fell in love with a man whom she was determined to marry. My grandfather, who would have no such fate befall his

“And what made you two connect?” Meredith Blake is smiling and polite but shrewd: she has a grandmother’s face with a lawyer’s eyes, the way Lady Macbeth might have looked,

But she was acidly disappointed by the price her double—“The Dark Lady of American Letters,” “The Sibyl of Manhattan”—exacted. She confessed that she’d hoped “being famous would be more fun,”9