She took rooms in Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard, as Rex’s family had done when he was a boy. What I remember of that summer was having my glamorous mother all to myself. We went to the Chappaquiddick Beach Club some days, to the Flying Horses carousel in Oak Bluffs on other days. Sometimes we just walked around the streets of Edgartown, looking in shop windows and marveling at the blue hydrangeas and the scent of boxwood.
The glow from that summer did not last.
Back in Boston my parents were either at work or out with their respective “friends” with greater frequency. Annette started her new job and spent long hours at the office. A tall, handsome fellow lawyer often brought her home on the evenings when they worked late. My father didn’t object. He had his own supply of lady friends—interns, residents, or lab assistants—who came to the house when my mother was still at work.
That fall I started first grade at the Woodward School on Marlborough Street. I don’t remember doing well or badly at school, but I was a physical coward. When a classmate pushed me into the gutter on our way to the Public Garden, I looked up at him from the street and said, “Don’t do that. I am delicate!” I had few friends at school and none whom I visited. But I had an imaginary friend whom I cherished. She was a Peter Pan type, also called Leslie. She dressed in blue tights, a matching loose overshirt, and elf shoes. She was taller than I with a round face and a head of uncombed, light-brown curls. She had everything I lacked: boyish good looks, physical prowess, and confidence. She needed no one else to be happy. On my way to sleep at night, if I could keep my regular fears at bay, Leslie would fly in and out of the windows of my imagination.
* * *
There were some good times: fall and spring shopping sprees with my mother, winter sledding on the Commons, and occasional Sunday lunches with my parents in the gracious second-floor dining room of what Rex called the Arlington Street Dog Wagon, better known as the Ritz. Best of all were Sunday-morning visits to Rex’s lab at MIT or accompanying him on teaching rounds at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. Ice cream sodas at the drugstore on the corner of Charles and Beacon Streets always followed.
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