Truth we call it, and it's a game. But there's truth and there's truth. And too much truth can be perilous.

The canvas of our lives was Greenwich Village. In the years after the Great War we created with broad strokes, with style, and I must acknowledge, with brilliance. We had come here to be our true selves.

In this small enclave of narrow, crooked streets lined with old brownstones and small shops, tearooms, cabarets, and speakeasies, we created our art, and we played.

Oh, how we played.

We'd come, a grand group of us, to Croton, where Fordy and Kate Vaude lived the domestic life, and where some of our Greenwich Village friends had let houses all along Mt. Airy Road. Now and again, Fordy and Kate would throw a house party, and we'd all arrive by train or motorcar, if we were lucky, for a weekend of conversation, wit, booze, games, and the lure of making love in a rustic setting. Food was the least of attractions. It was the company we kept.

The last time we'd come to Fordy and Kate's, we'd played with a round-robin ghost story, making it up as we went along. Larry Langner, who's gone uptown on us and formed the Theatre Guild company, made a play of it, The Haunting of M. Vaude, and our own Jig Cook, the heart and soul of the Provincetown Players, took the play and mounted it for the Players. I played the ghost of a woman who takes revenge on the man who'd murdered her. One critic said, "The ravishing Olivia Brown, poet one moment, actress another, continues to dazzle us."

On this particular night, to the accompaniment of the voluble fire in the grand stone hearth, we'd settled round the big trestle table in the kitchen of the farmhouse in Croton, gin lavishly replenished.

"Drink up," Fordy said. "There's plenty more where that came from." Fordy had the moolah all right, thanks to some sort of Wall Street job by day, which also allowed him to keep a studio in the Village, where he pursued what he claimed was his true calling as an artist.

Amid hoots and whistles, Paulo said, "I'll have the name of your bootlegger." He gave my "ravishing Olivia Brown" thigh a loving fondle.

We'd been playing charades, but our play had gone dyspeptic, and in unspoken desperation, we'd turned to Truth.

It's deceptively simple. One of us is chosen. We then decide on the character, mannerism, even feature - it could be a nose - of the chosen one, and we each write a paragraph "biography" on a piece of paper concerning, let us say, the chosen's nose. Any approach may be taken, be it sensual, humorous, or serious.

We try to be literary, and clever, but we don't always succeed, and sometimes, as you can imagine, things get personal, even savage.

Folding our anonymous paragraphs, we deposited them in Dave Wolfe's soft felt trilby. As I did mine, our fingers grazed, and Dave winked a sultry eye at me as if we had a lover's secret. Dave, a Jew, dark and mysterious as a sheik, was writing a novel. He'd been encamped for the last few months at our friend Max's cottage across the way while Max was in Paris.

After a good shuffling, each paragraph was read aloud by a "reader," chosen by all of us, the "reader" never, of course, the subject for the round.

We'd even inveigled the Vaude nanny, a slim, severe girl named Adelle, to join us, as Harry had gone out for a walk, holding, he quipped, no brief for Truth. Harry is H. Melville, a private investigator with whom I work from time to time. I inherited him, along with my house on Bedford Street in Greenwich Village, from my great-aunt Evangeline Brown. Her will left the downstairs flat to Harry in perpetuity.

The Vaude farmhouse was a comfortable old place with low ceilings and wide floorboards. The hearth gave off enough heat to keep us from the chill outdoors. Gin did the rest. The faces of the Truth players at the table appeared to me through an undulating mist. Our hosts, Fordy and Kate. Dave Wolfe. My Paulo. Bunny Wilson, one of my editors at Vanity Fair, and his girl, Daisy. And Adelle, the nanny.

We'd played several rounds as we worked our way through the hooch, and then the game slipped and took a bad turn.

In the days, the weeks, that followed, I would relive the strange intensity of each successive game we played that night and see it as foreshadowing the horror that was to come.

On the last round, Kate Vaude was "reader," and in her fanged presentation, each "biography" became spiteful and petty. And this last time, it was directed at poor Adelle, in particular, her heavy-lidded eyes, moistly myopic behind thick glasses. One of us, not I - as I do not write mediocre or mean verse - had written:

With Judas eyes does she betray
Thus will not live another day.

There was more, though perhaps not nearly so sinister. Adelle's reaction was bewilderment, and something else I couldn't quite fathom. She sat in stunned silence, listening to the cruel barrage.

"I love all my friends," I said, attempting to lighten the mood, "but not right now. See what a bad impression we're making on Adelle."

"Adelle knows it's a game," Fordy Vaude said in his condescending manner. "Don't you, my dear?" He took Adelle's "biographies" from Kate and tossed them into the fire.

Adelle responded with a small, stiff smile. The "something else" was fear. "You're quite right. I've played the game before." She excused herself and went upstairs.

What a nasty and competitive lot we can be when we drink too much. But still, we don't hold grudges. And we do not be-grudge one another's achievements.

The unsettling atmosphere eased with Adelle's departure and our move from the kitchen to the parlor. Harry rejoined us, and we sat around the fire, drinking, smoking, and talking well into the night.

Later, Jack Reed - writer, editor, poet, journalist ... lover - came and sat with us, in spirit only, for he was newly dead in Moscow. Already revered among the writers and artists who lived in the Village, he'd gone to Russia and reported on the Revolution, achieving international renown by writing its story: Ten Days That Shook the World.

Alas, my arrival in Greenwich Village coincided with Reed's return to Russia, so we had never had a chance to meet, but I'd read his stories and poetry, his plays. I'd seen in his photograph a man of some size, whose wild hair, burning dark eyes, broad intelligent forehead, all spoke to me of adventure and romance. I felt his magnetic force. Who could not?

As tales of Reed rose Bunyonesque, laughter filled the room, and I felt his presence linger like that of some departed lover. Just one last cigarette and I'll be gone.

Eventually we wore the night away, and all our talk and wine turned to making love.

Detaching myself from the arms of my sleeping lover, I left our bed and glided down the stairs. The farmhouse was more than cold, the fires having gone out, our attentions elsewhere. Passion, with a jug of wine, could keep us warm.

As I passed through the parlor, stepping round cleaving bodies on makeshift pallets, a girl I didn't know peered bleary-eyed at me over the bolster of the sofa and then sank back into Dave's arms. I knew it was Dave from the brown corduroy shirt, which only he wore. I wondered briefly why he hadn't gone back to his own house just across the road.

The kitchen was dark save for the flicker of a candle near the hearth. I stood silent in the doorway. Someone had had the same thought as I. Someone, on her knees, was pawing through the ashes in the cold hearth. She turned her face into the light for a moment. Adelle.

I ducked into the hallway and listened to her soft tread upon the stairs, the even softer closing of a door.