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club, she asked, “What kind of club is it?”
    When neither of us said anything, she grabbed me by one arm and shook me violently. I began crying and maybe Asa did, too.
    “Now, you tell me the truth,” she said. “What kind of club do you have?”
    “It’s our
club,”
I said. “He’s the president, and I’m the vice president.”
    I didn’t mention that we had only one other member in the club, Asa’s cousin.
    Miss Miles said, “You better watch yourselves.”
    When I returned to the class, I slumped to my desk, still crying. I felt humiliated and didn’t know what was going on. I remember crying, then becoming aware that mucus was hanging from my nose when it landed on my desk. I pretended it was funny, causing the other kids to howl, but I felt humiliated and hid it as best I could.
       In our family picture album, there is a photograph of me with a few words scrawled on the back by one of my sisters: “Bud—and is he a grand boy! Sweet and funny,
idealistic
and oh, so young.” Once Tiddy told me, “By the time you were seven or eight you were constantly bringing home starving animals, sick birds, people you thought were in some kind of distress, and if you had a choice, you’d pick the girl who was cross-eyed or the fattest one because nobody paid attention to her and you wanted her to feel good.”
    I suppose it was true. I fashioned myself into the protector of weaker beings. I stopped shooting birds and became their guardians. I scolded friends who stepped on ants, telling them the ants had as much right to live as they did. While I was riding my bike near the beach in Evanston one day, I passed a woman who was lying on the ground; it turned out she was falling-down drunk, but I thought she was just sick. I rode her home on my bicycle and told my parents, who were outside on the porch, that we should help her because she was sick. They were embarrassed and uncomfortable, but they knew I was sincere and so they helped her. The memory of this incident suggests, I realized later, that early on I felt an obligation to help people who were less fortunate than me, or didn’t have friends. But it wasn’t only people to whom I felt an obligation. Curiously, after I moved to New York, whenever I saw a piece of paper on a sidewalk, I thought, If I don’t pick it up, who will? So, I would bend over and put it in a trash basket.
       When I was eleven, my parents separated, and my mother, my sisters and I went to live with my grandmother—the matriarch of the family, whom we called Bess or Nana—in California.
    She was buxom and sharp-featured, with white hair, an aristocratic bearing and the look of a Gibson girl. Like my mother, she was also very much an individual and a renegade who refused to accept unblinkingly Victorian standards of behavior. Being Irish, she was witty and amusing. Humor, I suppose, is probably the hallmark of my family; if anything kept us sane, it was humor. We never knew what would come out of my grandmother’s mouth. She had an enormous laugh and a sense of absurdity about human behavior, but there was also a serious side to her. She was a Christian Scientist practitioner, and a good one, I was told.
    I attended the seventh and eighth grades at Julius C. Lathrop Junior High School in Santa Ana, a farming community in Orange County, south of Los Angeles. It was a period when my mother drank more than ever; she’d promise to stop, then disappear on another bender for four or five days—trying to love us, I suppose, when she was home, but rarely paying much attention to us. I probably didn’t realize yet what an alcoholic was, but, like my sisters, I had to live with the effects of her disorder. My mother would get drunk on the sly, then try to hide it in classic alcoholic fashion. For a time in Santa Ana, I had a fantasy that the important people in my life were all dead and were only pretending to be alive. I lay in bed for hours, sweating and looking up at the ceiling,