But when my father drew closer, he must have seen that she was not so weak after all; he took her in his arms and they danced, laughing, around that room, to the sounds of the orchestra that floated through the half-drawn shutters. They danced that way for the length of the song, and it was a long song. In that photo my mother has the smile I know best. It is the smile of what-the-hell, the smile of the-world-is-full-of-possibilities, the smile of so-long-as-I’m-with-you-nothing-matters. She has on her brave smile, her reckless smile, her determined smile, the smile that was the reason for that whole trip. It is the smile of being afraid but knowing that there have been and may again be moments of not being afraid. She is looking straight at the camera, the camera from which her eyes somehow darted in the pleasure of the wedding photo; she seems to be looking beyond the camera at the time when the photo will have outlasted her. And my father has the nostalgic smile I have always known best on him. He is looking down and at my mother, apparently unaware of the camera. And you can see how this moment of happiness is recalling other moments of happiness, perhaps even that moment when my mother appeared at the end of the aisle in her white wedding dress; and you can see how happiness itself fills him with sorrow. So smiling and so sad he looks, with my mother’s tiny, thin hand, a shadow even of the tiny, thin hands she had always had, clasped in his own.

• • •

Ten days later, my mother and Bernard finally met over dinner in London. How much weight I had placed on that moment! And like so many moments given too much weight in advance, it seemed extravagantly insignificant when it finally came. Bernard said only that my mother seemed tense and rather uncomfortable, which was perhaps understandable. My mother said that if a daughter of hers had brought Bernard home, she would have thought him a perfect son-in-law. “He seems very nice, and very presentable, and I hope he makes you happy,” she said. There was a trace of the old brittleness in her voice, but she kept it to a trace. She even went so far as to invite Bernard to come to stay with us in New York.

“In our house?” I asked my mother afterward.