Born in Pennsylvania, in Scranton, a town she scarcely remembered except for vague recollections of smoky air and dirty little houses. When she was seven her father, after a careful analysis of his assets and liabilities, realized the impossibility of increasing the former to the point where they compared favorably to the latter and, after setting his house in some semblance of order, drove his car to the outskirts of town, and blew out his brains with a. 45-calibre automatic pistol.

She remembered little of her father. He had smelled of liquor and cigars, he had held her on his lap and had told her wonderful stories.

That was about all.

After the funeral, after the settling of accounts, she and her mother had moved north to Syracuse, in New York State. She had aunts and uncles there. Her mother worked and Rhoda went to school, and during her third year in high school her mother went to the hospital for an operation, and just eighteen months later, and a week before Rhoda graduated from high school, her mother died.

There was a little insurance money and there was a scholarship, and she went to Harpur College, in Binghamton, and majored in English. She worked nights clerking at a drugstore and she worked summers counseling at a girls’ camp at Lake George. After four years she had a diploma. She took it to New York and carted it around from one publishing house to the next, looking for an editorial position. A trade journal publisher hired her as a receptionist.

She met Tom Haskell there. And dated him, and took his ring, and married him. And lived with him for two years in an apartment on East Eighty-Fifth Street just a few blocks from the park.

“You’re done with it now,” her lawyer had told her. “Glad to be Miss Rhoda Moore again?”

“Yes, very glad.”

A brief touch on the shoulder. “You’re free now. You had a rotten time and he was a pretty rotten man, but you don’t want to let the experience sour you on men in general. We’re not all bad. You’ll take it easy now, relax a little, start building a new life. Pretty soon you’ll meet some guy and get married again. You’re a young girl, Rhoda and you’ve got a full life ahead of you. That’s a cliche, I know, but it happens to be true. You’ll remarry, and you’ll choose a better one this time, and it’ll work for you.”