Identical Twins and Their Husbands NOW THAT SHE''S in her sixties and starting to think about mortality, Ellie told me she worries about who will die first, her identical twin sister, Emma, or herself: "I''d rather go together." If one of them were widowed first, they''d want to live near each other--which might require moving away from her grandchildren. "I would rather be with my sister than with my grandchildren," she admits. "We have the same interests, and we shouldn''t set our lives aside for the grandchildren, although I wouldn''t like leaving them." Ellie''s fears of losing her twin triggered a memory from my early childhood, one that I''d always tried to push out of my mind. I grew up in Manhattan, and a pair of identical twin girls lived in our apartment building. I would always see them with their mother in our elevator. As a small child, I was fascinated by these duplicate girls.

We weren''t quite the same age, and I didn''t know their names. I knew them only as the twins. They were always dressed in identical outfits. I can still picture them in their plaid dresses, blond bangs, and ponytails. One day, my mother and I got into the elevator, and I was surprised to see only one twin with her mother. "Where''s the other twin?" I asked, because I''d never seen them apart. Either the mother or the child--I can no longer remember which one--immediately burst into tears, and no one answered my question. My mother yanked me out of the elevator when the door opened, and as soon as we were alone, she told me I should never ask them that question again.

She explained that one of the twins had run into the street and had been killed by a car. Not long after that, the family of the twins moved away, but whenever I''ve thought of them, I''ve always felt dreadfully guilty about my question, and I''ve never forgotten the image of that mournful little girl staring at me. Even as a child, I understood that this was an unspeakable tragedy. I''d never known any other child who had died, and I''m sure I thought the surviving twin was now only half a person. Reminded of this tragedy by Ellie''s concern about one twin dying before the other, I felt a new pang of guilt for my insensitive question. Why was I feeling so guilty? I began to wonder if I''d really known the answer before I asked the question--did I feel guilty because I''d been purposely cruel? Then I started to wonder how old I was when this happened. Had I been old enough to know better than to ask? I immediately called up my sister, Sandra, to ask if she remembered the twins and if she knew what had happened to them. As usual, she remembered many more of the details than I did.

My sister is two and a half years older than I, so she was usually better informed whenever anything like this happened. She remembered that the twins fell between us in age, which is why they weren''t our playmates or classmates. Much to my relief, she said the girl died around the age of six or seven, so I would have been about five or six. Too young, I thought, to have been malicious in asking the question. My sister assured me that no one in our family would have talked about it or warned me not to ask about the absent twin. I probably have always felt horribly guilty about this incident because I''d obviously upset my mother (who rarely criticized me) as well as upsetting the twin and her mother. And I''d often been told that I asked too many questions. Or maybe I always felt guilty because I had a sister, and here was a child whose sister had died.

My sister and I pooled our memories of this event: The twin had been hit by the car on the street just behind our apartment building-a street that was supposed to be closed to traffic during the daytime. It was where all the children in my building would roller-skate or jump rope or play with marbles. My sister remembered that one of the twins was named Iris, which rang a bell in my mind, and Sandra remembered, as I did, that the family disappeared not long after the accident. We decided the family must have moved because staying where the twin was killed would have been unbearable. One reason I go into this personal digression is because, like so many women I interviewed, I find it comforting to have a sister who can remember all the mundane and dramatic things that happened around us as children. I always find it uniquely reassuring to discuss childhood memories with my sister. She''s my connection to my past, the only person who can help me remember what happened. The memory of this event also helped me to understand what Ellie was saying about her attachment to her twin sister and why it would be harder for her to adjust to losing her sister than to losing her husband.

Ellie is a pretty and vivacious woman who looks much younger than her nearly seventy years. She began our interview by talking about her inauspicious beginnings. Her mother was unmarried and living in a small Midwestern farming town when she became pregnant with Ellie and Emma. At the time their mother became pregnant, she belonged to a religious Catholic family and community. Becoming an unwed mother was certainly not acceptable in their mother''s world, and neither was an abortion. So she decided to move to Chicago in order to have the baby in secret and give it up for adoption. She told everyone, including her family, that she was leaving town to get away from an engagement that hadn''t worked out. In fact, her boyfriend had more or less broken off their engagement when she told him she was pregnant.

When they''d gone to a priest for counseling, her boyfriend had agreed to marry her but said he didn''t love her. The only other person she confided in was her older sister, Anne, who went with her to Chicago. Ellie continued the story: I learned all this, secondhand, fifty years later, from my aunt Anne. My mother had agreed to give her baby up for adoption. But when she gave birth to two instead of one, she wanted to keep us. My aunt Anne stayed with her, and they lived in Chicago. One of them worked nights as a telephone operator, and the other had a job during the day as a secretary, so someone would always be with the babies. We were almost a year old before her family found out about our existence.

My aunt was never able to have children, but throughout her life she took in every niece and nephew whenever her sisters needed help--one child who had tuberculosis and another when his parents divorced. My grandmother came to see my mother in Chicago and told her she didn''t care what people thought, she was bringing us home. So we lived with my grandmother until my mother met my father when we were two and a half. My mother was selling shoes at the time, and she came home from the movies one night, all excited. She''d met Bill Blake, a professional musician who played the organ and piano in movie theaters, churches, orchestras, and skating rinks--he moved around a lot, wherever he got work. He asked her for a date, and she fell head over heels with him. They eloped because his family was strict Lutheran (his father was a minister), and they wouldn''t have approved of his marrying a poor Catholic woman who was five years older and who had two illegitimate children. Once they got married, the Blakes wanted my parents to keep our birth history a secret, and my mother''s family agreed.

So we grew up believing that Bill was our father. We never learned the truth until after my mother died. We always questioned her about what it was like to have twins, but she never wanted to talk about the events surrounding our birth. Our father said he went away to college and that''s why he was away when we were very young, but it never added up to us--how could he go to college when she had babies? Since she was five years older than our father, we just decided that she didn''t want to talk about it because she was sensitive about her age, or we thought that maybe she''d had to get married. We moved away from Wisconsin in 1940, when we were seven, and stopped for six weeks in Ohio and then moved on to Georgia, where my father played in a small trio and worked in a piano bar. For five years we stayed in Georgia while my father worked in different cities around the state. During the second grade, we went to three different schools and we always lived in hotels. In 1945 we moved again when my father got a job in Florida and we settled there.

We cried our eyes out because we didn''t want to leave Georgia and our friends. Their marriage wasn''t happy. My father was a nice-looking man, and he was out every night, working in bars. He''d play poker through the night, and I know he had at least one long affair. My parents would get separated, and get back together. Their quarrels were very traumatic to us. He''d be out drinking and then my mother would drink and stew. We got up and made breakfast for ourselves and went to school.

We''d walk home and make our own lunch and walk back to school. At night, we stayed home and did our homework or we''d go to the movies. My mother let us do what we wanted. She didn''t keep track of us, and my father wasn''t around much. When we were thirteen, my mother got so fed up with him she told us about his affairs. She''d found love letters that a woman had been writing to him for two years, and she threw the letters on the floor and said, "Look at this." By then, the affair was over, but she always kept bringing it up. In 1952, when my father was thirty-eight, he had surgery for an ulcer; and he stayed in the hospital for three weeks, fighting an infection.

We got a call that he was running a very high temperature, and we had to rush to the hospital from home. I was with him before he died, an.