In her memory, the house was darker than a Catholic sky. Thick curtains further dimmed the fog-enfeebled daylight falling on the heavy, stained-oak furniture then in style. Her mother seemed to view both her and Shirley as aberrations that her body had unaccountably twice housed for nine months, their births a regrettable interruption of her social life but otherwise a relief on the order of passing a kidney stone. Her father’s heart might have had room for two daughters if the first one, Shirley, hadn’t filled it inordinately. His obsessionality （the dumpling’s word） served him well in his business, Western All-Sport, to which he devoted sixty and seventy hours a week, but at home it served to make Marion feel invisible. Ruben’s darling was Shirley. When he happened to look at Marion directly, it was often to ask, “Where’s your sister?” Shirley was the really pretty one, even as an infant, and took his adoration as her due. On Christmas morning, she didn’t tear through her immense haul of presents with a normal child’s greed. She unwrapped them like a wary retailer, carefully inspecting each of them for flaws of manufacture, and sorted them by category, as if checking them against a mental invoice. The repeated chiming of her voice—“Thank you Daddy”—was like the chinging of a cash register. Marion took refuge from the excess by absorbing herself in a single doll, a single toy, while her mother yawned with open boredom.
Christmas for her mother was an enforced separation from the four friends with whom she did everything. The friends were from old families with less depleted fortunes, and, although three of them had husbands and children of their own, all five were in love with themselves as a unit. They’d been the marvelous fivesome of the Class of 1912 at Lowell, where they’d jointly decided that, if the world had a problem with their marvelousness, it was the world’s problem, not theirs, and for the rest of their lives they never tired of lunching together, shopping together, attending lectures and theater together, reading books together, advancing worthy civic causes together. Marion came to see that her mother’s place in the fivesome had always been the most precarious—she’d begun with the least money and then married a Jew—and therefore the most fanatically defended. Isabel lived in fear of being the fifth wheel, and at Christmas she fretted about the three friends whose husbands were also good friends, the non-fivesome gatherings that might be happening without her.
Spoiling Shirley wasn’t the only thing her father couldn’t stop doing. Beginning when Marion was six or seven, he never seemed to sleep at all. Awakening at a small hour, she could hear him playing ragtime, self-taught, on the piano two floors below. He was also a self-taught architect and spent other nights alone with his drafting tools, forever redesigning an even bigger house. At work, he bought businesses above and below him—his obsessive goal was to open a nationwide chain of sporting-goods stores—and he made more speculative investments as well, employing his special insight as a stock picker, his special gift for well-timed margin purchases. He smoked enormous cigars and wore a coonskin coat to Cal football games, sometimes taking Marion to sit with him in his fifty-yard-line seats, since Shirley and her mother had no interest. He talked nonstop throughout the game, in a technical language mostly beyond a seven-year-old’s comprehension. He knew the name of every Golden Bear player and carried a little notebook in which he drew Xs and Os to show Marion how a play had worked, or to design new plays that he intended to show Cal’s head coach, Nibs Price, whose job, he confided to her, he could have done better. He never behaved rudely, but his voice was loud and excited, and Marion was uncomfortably aware that other fans kept looking at him.
How like a mental illness a nation’s economy was! She later wondered how much longer, if the stock market hadn’t crashed when it did, her father’s manic period might have lasted, and whether, if his illness had set in later, he could have managed to be manic in the midst of a depression. These hypotheticals were hard to entertain, because the coincidence of the market’s crash and her father’s crash seemed so inevitable in hindsight. In the weeks following Black Tuesday, he duly scrambled to salvage what he could of his highly leveraged holdings, but his voice, on the phone in his study, from which he communicated with New York before going to the office, sounded the way it had when he’d made funeral arrangements for his father. Marion came home from school and found him in the parlor in his shirtsleeves and suspenders, staring at the cold grate of the fireplace. Sometimes he spoke to her about the singular misfortune that had befallen him, and the little she understood of margin purchases and mining futures, as an eight-year-old, was still more than her mother and her older sister cared to know. Her mother was scarcer than ever, and Shirley was coldly disappointed by the diminished flow of goods to her, the meagerness of Christmas in 1929, the vaporization of the Larkspur weekend house in whose pool she’d been assured she would be swimming the following summer.