We were in Paris for just a few days, time to do some shopping and eat a few meals, time to shake the ghosts of the previous summer. It was as though my mother wanted to give us back the Paris we had always known through her. She wanted to give memories to Freddy and to me, but she also wanted to have the full pleasure of her own memories, and she pulled them all out, one after the next, as though they were the flowers of a hundred summers. Much has been made of the pathos of men whose strong exteriors mask breakable souls, of the ones who, beneath their cowboy hats and rough skin and murderous ways, are riddled with insecurities and anxieties. Too little has been said of the drama of those whose surfaces are fragile and mutable, who have all the mannerisms of delicacy, but who keep hidden at their center a devastating strength. You cannot live in this brutal world with the fragility of sensibility that my mother had unless you have concentrated much of your force in some hidden place. As my mother’s core became stronger that month, her discourse with the world became more and more delicate, until it was virtually transparent.

After Paris, we headed for Italy. From time to time throughout my childhood my parents would go off for a week to Lake Como, and it was the one spot to which Freddy and I were never invited. “Someday, when you’re older,” my mother would say when we were little, “you’ll have a girl to take to Lake Como. It’s not a place for family holidays.” But by now we were past resisting the romance of our own family, and at last we went, all four of us, to Lake Como, to stay in a stuccoed pink villa hotel with rooms that looked straight into the sunset. My mother had to conserve her energy that week, and she spent most of her time sitting on the terrace outside her room, reading books and doing her beloved crossword puzzles. She always had a cup of chamomile tea or a glass of mineral water at her side, sparkling water without ice and without lime in a stem glass. She wore loose clothes that did not press too much on the scars from her surgery. In the afternoons she would take naps, sometimes also in the mornings, or just before dinner; she saved up her energy so that when she was awake and we were all together she could be free with it. Liberally, almost squanderously, she gave us all that was best in her.

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