THE PLAYHOUSE.

From an upstairs window, I see my father walking away down his snowy lawn. He moves uncertainly, his hands cupped around his eyes like an Arctic explorer in a whiteout. It takes a moment to realize that he is peering through my mother's old Olympus camera, aiming it here and there. The set of his shoulders suggests dissatisfaction with what he sees this Christmas season: the bare apple trees, the frozen pond. Turning to face the house at last, he lowers himself onto one knee and pans across the stone exterior, slowly now.

My father, Dorie Friend, is a historian and a highly rational man; his Easter Island-size head is stuffed with knowledge. In our family, he was in charge of logic and money. He husbanded our declining fortunes--a decline that, as he recognized, mirrored the broader Wasp ebb, the outflow of maids and grandfather clocks and cocktail shakers brimming with gin.

My mother, who utterly ignored this decline, was in charge of everything else. She set the tone. Elizabeth Pierson Friend was Lib to her oldest friends, classmates at Smith who possessed all the graces. They were stylish and sparkling women, prepared by birth--and since birth--to charm the Burmese Ambassador, but Mom gave particularly good value. She took occasions so seriously. "After much ado," she e-mailed her friends about one party, "I had settled on a periwinkle blue dress: Fortuny-like silk pleats in a tea-length skirt, horizontal tucks in a long-sleeved tunic top. A necklace of eight strands, each a different size, of silver-gray freshwater pearls, twisted to almost choker length. " Slim and vivacious and determined, with a pouf of chestnut hair and snapping blue eyes, she drew you out at the table, exclaiming at just the right moment, and her own conversation built to comic exclamations.

There was the story about how she had received a terrific rush in her early twenties, with a date every night, including a series with a tremendously tall young man who later supervised the secret bombing of Cambodia. And then, suddenly, the phone didn't ring for two weeks: "And I thought, So this is menopause." There was the story about a trip to India, during which it became necessary for her to hide a suitor's turban in an icebox. Before you could wonder, Why an icebox, exactly?, she cried, "So there I was, dancing cheek to cheek with a Sikh!" When my father first heard that story--overheard it, actually, from an adjoining booth in a New Haven diner--he thought, Who is that horrible woman? When he heard it for the second time, years afterward, it was too late.

She spelled certain basic words as if she were Corsican (snug was "cosi"; gloves were "mittons"); trespassed wherever a stylish driveway beckoned; sobbed if she caught a bad cold. Her character was chatoyant, like a cat's eyes, candid and then suddenly bleached and desolate. But her darker recesses were usually masked by virtuosity: a gifted cook, painter, and designer, she had also shown early promise as a poet. As a sophomore at Smith, she came in second to Sylvia Plath in a poetry contest judged by W. H. Auden (who, when my mother was introduced to him a year later, delighted her by saying, "I believe I know your poems"). "Just as well I didn't win," she'd say. "Head in the oven, and so forth."

From time to time, I find myself studying a photograph of her taken in the summer of 1962, when she was pregnant with me, the first of her three children. She stands on the lawn in a blue maternity dress, looking pale and watchful. A soccer ball rests under her bare right foot. Soccer was my father's sport, and would be mine, but she liked to flash out into the yard and perform "the high trap." He would toss the ball high into the air and she would judge its fall perfectly and smother it with her right sole. And then, in triumph, depart to rule her own realm, which consisted of tomato sandwiches, gossip, bread-and-butter letters, strong handshakes, chore lists, and worrying.

It all fell under the heading of keeping the house in order, wherever the house was, culminating, in 1989, with this one in the Philadelphia suburb of Villanova: the house being photographed by my father. After years without a home to make her own--in Buffalo, in the sixties, my parents had no money to speak of, and then for nearly twenty years they lived first in an imposing pile belonging to Swarthmore College, when my father was the college's president, and then in a rented bungalow--this house was her epic work. An anonymous fieldstone relic at first, the place soon grew thick with her, with the snares and honeypots she concealed in plain sight: the bottom kitchen-drawer pull that rewarded you with a small, collapsible stepladder; the closets stuffed with Christmas gifts, so that you couldn't approach a doorknob without having her call out, from three rooms away, "Ooh, ooh--don't go in there!" Walking through the Villanova house was like reading a series of Rorschach blots that inked out her emotional history (except that she hated blots of any sort). She had it all planned, having long considered how best to arrange a house and its contents, including us.