Skeletons in the family cupboard

In 1906 Susannah Lessard's great-grandfather, the architect Stanford White, was shot dead on the rooftop theatre at Madison Square Garden. The story reads like the plot of a thirdrate melodrama and has, indeed, become part of theatre history: the killer was the husband of Evelyn Nesbit, a beautiful young actress with whom White had had a lengthy affair. For Lessard, however, growing up on the lavish estate White had designed for her grandparents, the event cast a kind of silent shadow over her family - "the silence about him was something dark right there in the light," she writes. But as it turned out, her great-grandfather's was not the only monstrous skeleton in Lessard's family closet, and the final chapter sees the author and her sisters seated in a room on that same estate, amid the slanting rays of a new year's twilight, calmly discussing the sexual abuse they had all suffered at the hands of their father. Lessard may have started out to write her great-grandfather's biography, but she ended up tracing a finely-etched (pardon the pun - Stanford White was the original dirty old man who used to invite naive youngsters to "come up and see my etchings") portrait of a disturbed and disturbing family.