“Before I met your father,” she said, “I was in love with a man from Texas. And his family threatened to disinherit him if he married me, because I didn’t come from their kind of family. And he gave in to them, and I cried and I cried and I cried, for months and months and months, and I thought nothing would ever work out again. And when I met your father, I knew that where I came from was where he came from, and that we would never have that argument, and that it made sense for me to be with him, in the world I knew. I thought I was being so practical.” And her voice took on a tone of wonder, as though, twenty-seven years later, she were still incredulous. “It was the smartest thing I ever did, falling in love with your father,” she said. “If it hadn’t been for that boy’s Texas family, it would never have happened, and I might have ended up as one of those displaced people in a world that was foreign to me. In Dallas.” And she paused again. “Harry, I would love for you to be in New York. So long as you don’t move back for me.”

• • •

There is a place, along the highway coming into New York from the airport, where they had to build a wall because the view was too beautiful and was causing accidents. In my logical mind, I know that the world offers more startling highway views—that there are mountains in nature before which the New York skyline pales. I like to imagine that it was not so much the sheer majesty of the architecture as the associative value of the New York skyline—which to New Yorkers carries a familiarity made only more meaningful by the likelihood that the streets below will have been transformed. That view is about the way New York changes and stays the same, the way it is always home to the people to whom it is home. I told my mother about this, and she smiled. Then she asked, “Have they set a date for the release of your recording?”

“They have,” I said. “Finally. It’s going to come out in June. And they are going to include the Rachmaninoff.” There had been some talk of cutting the Rachmaninoff, and substituting early Beethoven. I had not been pleased by this idea.

“June,” said my mother. “We should have a party to celebrate that. It’s been so long that you’ve been working on it. Would you like to have a party?”

I always wanted to have a party. So we talked about the party, and I said I would start looking around for fittingly splendid places to have it, and my mother and I selected a date, and I said, “You should be through your chemotherapy by then, shouldn’t you? So we could celebrate that?”