It began bank at her birth, or at least her baptism, when she was named Clare Colston for the mother of her Richmond grandmother. Although this fact endeared her to her relatives in Richmond, it endangered her in Lexington, a dark, alien, and mountainous land ruled by her other grandmother, Margaret Lewis Marshall Marshall. The grandmother for whom Clare's older sister, Maggie, was named.

Every June their parents used to dump the two of them up there while they tootled off for two weeks of vacation—two bleak weeks for Clare, two blissful weeks for her sister, who could do no wrong in Lexington just as surely as Clare could do no right.

If there was one thing in the world that Grandma Marshall could not abide, it was a child who was timid, a child who hid tear-splotched postcards from her mother underneath her pillow, a child who slunk around the halls, jumping back as if she had just seen a snake when her own grandmother happened to walk past her, and worst of all, perhaps, a child who would come creeping in, in the middle of the night, and tiptoe all the way around the enormous walnut sleigh bed her grandparents slept in to wake up her grand father, whispering, "Come help me. Please. I can't make the water stop running in the John."

The madder Grandma got, the more timid Clare got. Finally, one Easter night when they were visiting there, as Clare lay in bed she heard her grandmother saying to her mother downstairs: