Clarice heard the story so often in her childhood that it became as familiar to her as “Cinderella” or “The Pied Piper.” When relating the long version of the ordeal she suffered giving Clarice life, Beatrice often employed overripe fruit as stage props. For the short version, she simply pressed the back of her hand to her forehead and whispered, “It was a horror show.” Freshly snatched from death’s door or not, an hour after Clarice was born her mother was fully made up, coiffed, dressed in a satin bed coat, and propped up in her hospital bed,
