Mine was all blonde curls and fair skin, with delicate, perfectly sculpted features. She was a very pretty woman, a cool Nordic type, slim and lissome with a special kind of inbred elegance that was enviable.

Diana was much darker in coloring, with a lovely golden complexion and straight silky brown hair, pulled back in a ponytail this morning. Her face was broader, her features more boldly defined, and her large, luminous eyes were of a blue so pale and transparent they were almost gray. She was not quite as tall as my mother. "I'm a Celt," she had once said to me. "There's more of my Scottish ancestry in my genes than the English part." Diana's appeal was in her warm, tawny looks; she was a handsome woman by any standard, who, like my mother, carried her sixty-one years well, seeming years younger.

Their characters and personalities were totally different. Diana was a much more serious woman than my mother was, more studious and intellectually inclined. And the worlds they occupied, the lives they lived, were not remotely similar. Diana was something of a workaholic, running her antique business and loving every minute of it. My mother was a social butterfly who did not care to work, and who fortunately did not have to. She lived on a comfortable income derived from investments, family trusts, and a small allowance from my father. Why she accepted this from him I'll never know.

My mother was actually somewhat quiet and shy. At times I even thought of her as being repressed. Yet she was a social animal, and when she wanted to she could exude great charm.

My mother-in-law was much more spontaneous and outgoing, filled with a joie de vivre that was infectious. I always felt happy when Diana was around; she had that effect on everyone.

Two very disparate women, my mother and my mother-in-law. And yet they had always been amiable with each other, appeared on the surface to get on reasonably well. Perhaps we were the bond between them, Andrew and me and the twins. Certainly they were thrilled and relieved that we had such a happy marriage, that our union had been so successful, so blessed. Maybe the four of us validated their troubled lives and diminished their failures.

The two of them sat down, continuing to chat, to catch up, and I rose and walked to the far end of the kitchen. Here I busied myself at the sink, pulling apart several heads of lettuce, washing the leaves scrupulously.

My mind was preoccupied with marriage, my mother's impending one, to be precise. But then my thoughts took an unexpected curve, zeroed in on my father. His life had not been a happy one, far from it-except for his work, of course. That had given him a great deal of satisfaction and still did. He was proud of his standing as an archaeologist. His marriage had been such a disappointment, a terrible failure, and he had expected so much from it, he had once confided in me. It had gone hopelessly awry when I was a child.

What a pity my father had never been lucky enough to have what Andrew and I have. Sadness for him filtered through me; I was saddened even more that he had never found love with someone else when he was a younger man. He was sixty-five now; that was not old, and perhaps it wasn't too late for him. I sighed under my breath. I blamed my mother for his pain, I always had; he had never been at fault. In my eyes he had always been the hero in a bitter, thankless marriage.

As this random thought surfaced, floated to the front of my head, I examined it as carefully as I was washing the lettuce leaves under the running water. Wasn't I being just a little bit unfair? No one in this world is perfect, least of all my father. He was a human being, after all, not a god, even if he had seemed like one to me when I was growing up. He had been all golden and shining and beautiful, the most handsome, the most dashing, the most brilliant man in the world. And the most perfect. Of course. Yes, he had been all those things to me as a child. But he must have had his flaws and his frailties, like we all do, hang-ups and weaknesses as well as strengths. Should I not perhaps give my mother the benefit of the doubt?

This was so startling a thought I took a moment to adjust to it.

Finally, I glanced over my shoulder at her. She was calmly sitting there at my kitchen table, talking to Diana, methodically making her famous potato salad, one she had prepared so religiously every Fourth of July throughout my entire childhood and teenage years.

Unbidden and unexpected, it came rushing back to me, a fragment of a memory, a memory prodigiously beaten into submission, carefully boxed and buried and thankfully forgotten. Suddenly resurrected, it was flailing at me now, free-falling into my consciousness. And as it did I found myself looking down the corridor of time. I saw a day long, long ago, twenty-eight years ago, to be exact. I was five years old and an unwilling witness to marital savagery so shocking, so painful to bear I had done the only thing possible. I had obliterated it.

Echoing back to me along that shadowy, perilous tunnel of the past came a mingling of familiar voices which dredged up that day, dragged it back into the present. Exhumed, exposed, it lived again.

My mother is here, young and beautiful, an ethereal, dreamlike creature in her white muslin summer frock, her golden hair burnished in the sunlight. She is standing in the middle of the huge kitchen of my grandmother's summer house in Southampton. But her voice contrasts markedly with her loveliness. It is harsh, angry, and accusatory.

I am afraid.

She is telling my father he cannot leave. Not today, not the Fourth, not with all the family coming, all the festivities planned. He cannot leave her and her parents and me. "Think of your child, Edward. She adores you," she cries. "Mallory needs you to be here for her today." She is repeating this, over and over and over again like a shrill litany.

And my father is explaining that he must go, that he has to catch his plane to Egypt, explaining that the new dig is about to start, telling her that as head of the archaeological team he must be there at the outset.

My mother starts to scream at him. Her face is ugly with rage. She is accusing him of going to her, to his mistress, not to the expedition at all.

My father is defending himself, protesting his innocence, telling my mother she is a fool, and a jealous fool, at that. Then he tells her more softly that she has no reason to be jealous. He vows that he loves only her; he explains, very patiently, that he must go because he must do his work, must work to support us.

My mother is shaking her head vehemently from side to side, denying, denying.

The bowl of potato salad is suddenly in her hands, then it is leaving her hands as it is violently flung. It is sailing through the air, hitting the wall behind my father, bouncing off the wall, splattering his dark blue blazer with bits of potato and mayonnaise before it crashes to the floor with a thud, like a bomb exploding.

My father is turning away angrily, leaving the kitchen; his handsome face is miserable, contorted with pain. There is a helplessness about him.

My mother is weeping hysterically.

I am cringing in the butler's pantry, clinging to Elvira, my grandma's cook, who is my best friend, my only friend, except for my father, in this house of anger and secrets and lies. ''

My mother is storming out of the kitchen, running after my father, in her anguish not noticing Elvira and me as she races past the open door of the pantry.

Again she is shouting loudly. "I hate you! I hate you! I'll never give you a divorce. Never. Not as long as I live. Mercedes will never have the pleasure of being your wife, Edward Jordan. I swear to you she won't. And if you leave me, you'll never see Mallory again. Not ever again. I'll make sure of that. I have my father's money behind me. It will build a barrier, Edward. A barrier to keep you away from Mallory."