Her mother’s relatives in San Francisco were forgotten, shut out, generally ignored by the extravagant and selfish man whom they held responsible for her death. Deanna knew little of what had happened, only that “Mommy died.” Mommy died-her father’s words on that bleak morning would ring in her ears for a lifetime. The Mommy who had shut herself away from the world, who had hidden in her bedroom and a bottle, promising always “in a minute, dear” when Deanna knocked on her door. The “in a minute, dears” had lasted for ten of her twelve years, leaving Deanna to play alone in corridors or her room, while her father flew his plane or went off suddenly on business trips with friends. For a long time it had been difficult to decide if he had disappeared on trips because her mother drank, or if she drank because Papa was always gone. Whatever the reason, Deanna was alone. Until her mother died. After that there had been considerable discussion about “what in hell to do.” “For God’s sake, I don’t know a damned thing about kids, least of all little girls.” He had wanted to send her away, to a school, to a “wonderful place where there will be horses and pretty country and lots of new friends.” But she had been so distraught that at last he had relented. She didn’t want to go to a wonderful place, she wanted to be with him. He was a wonderful place, the magic father with the plane, the man who brought her marvelous gifts from faraway places. The man she had bragged about for years and never understood. Now, he was all she had. All she had left, now that the woman behind the bedroom door was gone.

So he kept her. He took her with him when he could, left her with friends when he couldn’t, and taught her to enjoy the finer things in life: the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, the George V in Paris, and The Stork Club in New York, where she had perched on a stool at the bar and not only drank a Shirley Temple but met her as a grown woman.