When we were eight years old, my twin sister, Iris, saved my life. I’m serious. I had a fever and a terrible stomachache, and our parents were out at some party. The nanny was one of those no-nonsense types you get, and I was not then—nor am I now— someone who likes to air her private miseries for the delectation of others.

Iris was the one who noticed my gray, shining face, as I curled up in bed and tried to read a book. Twin sisters and all. She just knew something was awfully wrong. She made the nanny call up 21, or wherever it was, and have the maître d’ send for our parents.

Of course, Mother told Nanny she wasn’t coming home for any silly stomachache, and really Ruth should know better than to seek attention that way. She’d thought better of me. Nanny relayed this message with an air of triumph. I said Fine and curled back up, shivering as you shiver when a fever’s come on. So what did Iris do? My sweet, small, timid, delicate flower of a sister? She called up the ambulance service all by herself, that’s what she did, and a half-hour later they burst into our apartment, swept past poor astonished Nanny, and swiftly diagnosed a probable case of acute appendicitis.

Within the hour, they were wheeling me into the operating room at the Hospital for the Relief of the Ruptured and Crippled on East Forty-Second Street. Mother burst hysterical into the waiting room in her fur coat, I’m told, though by then I was under some combination of nitrous oxide and chloroform, so I can’t say for certain…

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