Nancy Hale

Old Isabel Lanier, the actress (remembered for her Viola and Portia) backed her Audi out of her friend Esther's drive. She paused. For a moment something stopped her from driving home to her own retirement cottage, identical to Esther's except for th [...]

WHEN I was young—really young, a little girl— we used to play a game, one of those universal games that go under different names in different countries. "I packed my Saratoga trunk to go to Europe," each player began by reciting, "and in it I p [...]

A young female relative telephoned me the other morning to ask whether she had to accept an invitation the wife of her new boss kept pressing on her, and especially whether she had to ask them back. "They're so pompous! Just because I work for him [...]

"But the development they've begun down the road is the worst yet," Catherine Smith wrote in her letter to Ruth Greening, back home in Maryland. "I'm glad you can't see the Point now. Not much like the place you loved so when you visited me, all ba [...]

Increasingly—perhaps because there are so few of her sort around any more—I think of my Aunt Nancy. My first, strong picture of her is before she was married: golden, curly hair ablaze, singing in her high and happy voice, "Yip I Yaddy I Yoodly [...]

The Toimi died a few days ago, a month after his older brother Arne Ronka. They both lie buried in the stone-marked graveyard just behind the glacial boulders, by the sea. I knew Arne, and I miss him. He looked to me, when he was a young man, like [...]