(From left) Ted, Edith, Mary Margaret and Camilla

"There was a great age different between the children," Mary Margaret said. "I'm six years older than Camilla, my sister, Edith is five years older than I. Arthur, our brother, is two years older than Edith. In a way, I suppose you could say we were all only children."

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At the center of this loose confederation of familial satellites was Mother, the former Margaret Perkins Rice, an icy patrician, as her middle daughter and namesake, Mary Margaret, described her, who her own children and grandchildren derisively called "Mousy."

Margaret Perkins Rice Lyman

"Her first grandson called her that because she was anything but Mousy," Mary Margaret recalled, her eyes glinting a bit at the thought of her nephew's cheeky impertinence.

The truth was Margaret Perkins Rice-Lyman never really showed much interest in her children. Not in her daughters at least. Perhaps she had a soft spot for her eldest, her son, Arthur Jr., Mary Margaret said. "But, of course, he was never there. He had been sent away to boarding school when he was very young. Still, I always thought that she would have preferred it if we had all been boys. I think when Camilla was born, she was miffed that she hadn't had a boy."

Mousy was aloof and caustic. She lacked any real curiosity about the world around her, Mary Margaret recalled and preferred the company of the cardboard-cutout characters of the cheap romance novels of the time to any real contact with her children. "My mother didn't really know how to express love. She was so bottled up inside, as I now know, that there was no way she could reach out to any of us."

For the most part, she left child rearing to a rapidly re-circulating cadre of nurses, nannies and governesses. Though not outright abusive, "some of the nurses that she had were not always the nicest people in the world." Mary Margaret recalled. "The truth is, I don't believe Camilla ever felt nurtured by our mother. I don't ever remember seeing anyone hug her."

Maybe it was an accident of breeding, a special gene that permits the lonely rich to survive the frigid isolation that afflicts those born to fortune. Whatever it was, Mary Margaret and Edith managed to survive their mother's icy haughtiness and occasional bursts of open hostility. The older girls had the poise and the looks to find solace in the social world of their prestigious day school, the Windsor School in Boston, where all the Rice girls before them had gone. They had learned to find comfort in the time-honored pastimes of the New England aristocracy, a world of horse shows and cotillions.

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