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than that; when you were tenth, you were in control.
    She breezed through Brearley, her only close call coming junior year when she did the painted backdrops for a ghastly production of The Cherry Orchard. It was such a sad play, it moved her so, the faded grandeur of the characters, that she spent long hours after school fiddling with her work. You don ’ t paint sadness, of course, you feel sadness, and somehow transmit that feeling to the art work and when she was done, she was exhausted. Not an unpleasant fatigue.
    The next day, though, when she got to school, there was unpleasantness enough for everybody. Because the head of the drama department had seen her work and brought in the head of the art department who brought in the head of the school, and they summoned her, all three of them to the room where her backdrops were.
    “ Edith I just love these, ” the drama head said. The Headmistress nodded. They both then looked at the art department.
    Edith ’ s eyes flicked for the door.
    The Art head, a painter herself, studied the main object, an enormous panorama of the cherry orchard itself. The colors were autumn colors. And the overall feeling was one of such sadness. “ I didn ’ t know you could paint like this, Edith. ”
    “ I didn ’ t paint that, ” Edith said quickly. “ I just copied it. ”
    “ Copied? ”
    “ Well, I don ’ t mean I traced it or anything, but I didn ’ t make it up either. I mean, it was just an illustration 1 found in a book about other productions of The Cherry Orchard and I just enlarged it ‘ Enlarged ’ I should have said, not ‘ copied. ’”
    “ From our library? ” the drama head asked.
    “ Actually no, it was my father ’ s book, he loved Chekhov, his father was from Russia originally. ”
    “ This is all getting beside the point, ” the Headmistress said. “ What matters is the work. It ’ s gifted work, Edith. ”
    “ Just an enlargement, ” Edith replied. “ But thank you. ”
    “ You must paint more, ” the art department told her.
    “ Oh I wi ll , I will, ” Edith said, smiling at them all Naturally, it was the last time at Brearley she ever picked up a brush.
    Radcliffe was unavoidable. Sol had wanted a son, a Harvard son, so what could Edith do? She maintained an easy A-minus average, did a number of helpful extracurricular activities and was, for someone naturally quiet, popular. No surprise there really. By her late teens, Edith stood five six, with a good lithe figure and a good warm face. Not pretty in a cheerleading way, but the features were strong, she was obviously kind, and her reddish hair by now tumbled wonderfully down her shoulders.
    Sally Levinson was her first close friend, and Sally was pretty in a cheerleading way. Small and blond, pert and bouncy. At least in appearance. She had as foul a mouth and good a mind as any man at Harvard and said she didn ’ t give a shit who knew it She and Edith made a team more formidable than most men wanted to tangle with.
    Phillip Holtzman seemed the least afraid. He was older than they, he had been in service and was in the Graduate Business School at Harvard while Edith was still a junior. He was tall and thin and people said he looked like Abraham Lincoln, which drove Phillip slightly c razy, since as he patiently explained— Phillip did everything with great patience—he didn ’ t resemble Lincoln at all. Who he looked like was Raymond Massey who had played Abraham Lincoln, both on the stage and in the movies, and Massey didn ’ t look like Lincoln either. All of Phillip ’ s reasoning came to naught: his nickname at the B School was, then and forever, Honest Abe.
    “ You gonna marry him now or after graduation? ” Sally asked after Edith came in from a date one evening. Sally was in bed reading Berenson, her God.
    “ Oh stop it, ” Edith said.
    “ Well it ’ s so obvious, you ass. You never fight, you never argue. You ’ re both so decent It makes me sick, Edith, it really