I can remember that walk back, the long stretch of the rue de Rivoli before I reached the hotel, my decisions about the Schubert. What I cannot now remember is how or when I heard about the visit to the doctor, which we had all supposed that morning would be a routine business. My mother had had her hair done first thing that day: I do remember that. Then she had gone to the doctor. He had taken her along to the American hospital for a scan. What is unclear is just what I did and when. I can remember being in my room after the ice cream and socks, and standing at the enormous gilded mirror, studying my lower lip and trying to guess how long it would take for it to heal. And then I can remember what came later: my memory picks up around dinner that night. But I have no recollection at all of what came between looking at my lip and dinner, except that I can remember seeing the radiologist’s report, which was in French. By the time I saw it, I had been told its gist. I can remember that the verb évoquer was used; the scan, it seemed, could “évoque une tumeur maligne.” Wildly, I told my parents—my French was better than theirs—that the verb ­évoquer referred to the most remote possibility. I knew that there was some kind of mistake, and I wanted to protect my mother from it. This was, fortunately, not out of keeping with what the doctor had said; he thought it most unlikely that there was actually a cancer. “One would feel better,” he had said, “if one had a look inside to see. It is the most ordinary kind of surgery.” My mother would have to return to New York. It was Saturday, and the afternoon was gone. There was no point leaving before the early plane Monday morning, which would get her to New York at eight-thirty a.m.

So we had thirty-six hours to spend all together, that first thirty-six hours of fear and sadness. How strange it is, though, that I can’t recall the moment when my father (it would have been my father who would tell) actually said that my mother might have cancer. Was I alone with him? With him and my mother? Were Helen and Freddy back from their walk by then? Were we in my parents’ suite? Some of the memories of those thirty-six hours are shaky; some are missing altogether; and some are too clear, so photographically clear that they seem not like memories but like the images that replace memories in the mind. Some moments from those thirty-six hours I have described so many times that I have no real hold on them at all, but there are others of which I have never spoken. That day my mother refused the offers Freddy and I made to go with her and my father. “The surgery is very simple. There’s no need for you to come home; you could all use a vacation. So long as it’s not cancer, I’ll be fine. But if this turns out to be cancer—then I’m going to need you by my side. If that happens, get on the first plane.” I remember like a series of snapshots our dinner that night at a modern restaurant that was just coming into fashion. It was August and so the usual favorites were all closed. I had heard of but never been to this one, and my mother had chosen it in part as a treat for me. I have never been there since. Someday, I may go back to bring to life the very memories that I now wish I could escape, but not this year, and not next year. That evening, the cut on my lip was so painful that I could hardly eat. I remember it all flat, all in two dimensions. I have no idea what we talked about.