The second photo was taken at the Metropolitan Club, just a month before my mother got sick. My mother was very fond of that photo, but I don’t love it as much as the others. My father has a banker’s contented smile, and my mother a doyenne’s grace. This time they are both holding glasses of champagne. My father is in black tie, with what is very clearly a white carnation in his lapel; I can’t think why he should have had a carnation on, but perhaps it had something to do with the function they were attending. My mother is wearing a black lace dress with a high neck, and she has on large diamond earrings, a diamond necklace, and a wide Deco diamond bracelet. A great dark sapphire sparkles on one hand; on the other, her diamond engagement ring. My mother’s smile in that photo is the smile of a woman who smiles out of habit, her smile for the photographer. She looks beautiful, but that is all she looks.

The third photo is the one Freddy took that week at Lake Como. My parents’ suite overlooked the lake, which meant it also overlooked the small orchestra that played each night until midnight. We had come up from dinner, and my mother, who was tired, had put on a nightgown and a flowered silk dressing gown. In the photo, she is wearing no makeup, because the chemotherapy had by then made her allergic to everything; for some reason, she has not yet taken off her jewelry, and so she has on, with her dressing gown, a necklace of black pearls, earrings of gold and onyx, and a gold bracelet that belonged to my grandmother. My father has taken off his jacket, but he is still wearing his shirt and tie. I don’t remember which tune it was that drifted up from the small orchestra by the side of the lake that evening, but it was some tune which for my parents had rich associations. I remember how my mother emerged from the bedroom, and stood for a minute in the door of the turquoise living room swaying in time, and how my father jumped up and went over to her; I think he may have been afraid that she would fall, because she had been suffering from dizziness.