“Why not, Harry? If it’s what you want. Why not have Bernard to stay with us at home?” Sitting at dinner with the two of them—and Freddy and my father—I felt a profoundly hollow sense of triumph. So many years had gone into the abstract of effecting such a meeting as this, and when it finally happened, I felt only that all that energy might have been better used elsewhere. If I’d only spent it on Bernard himself, I thought, then perhaps I would really love him. That night, I lay by his side, and discovered again that he was a stranger. When I tossed and turned, he reached out to comfort me, and I could not tell him to leave me alone; nor could I say, as perhaps I should have, how sorry I was. That night was my last chance, and I failed to avail myself of it; I lay beside him in the tactful silence that had become the language of our sufficient affinity. In retrospect, I can see that I had loved him in the way of the Metropolitan Club, and that I had never managed to do more than that. Nor, to be quite fair, did he manage much more than that for me. I understood, then, that he and I would never make it to Lake Como.

VI: October

VI

OCTOBER

Some days, I dream of a life without sequence, a life all mixed up like a crazy salad, in which, when you suddenly yearn for a week of childhood, you can have a week of childhood, in which, when you miss the quality of your grandmother’s voice singing, you can find again your grandmother singing, in which, when you want a stretch of the calm maturity of middle age, you can settle into a stretch of it. I would love to move back and forth, to have days saved like summer flowers caught forever in winter ice, days that I knew were waiting for me. What use was it to try to spend every waking moment with my mother in the months of her worsening illness? I somehow had the idea that if I spent every moment with her, the accrued hours would fill in for all the time I might not be spending with her for the rest of my life. If only I could have held some of those days for the occasions later in my life when the need for my mother, that vivid longing that comes with the sharpness of a fever, seeks only the fact of her presence to answer—for what I wanted was not to be with my mother every second of every day (a program well calculated to drive us both mad), but to be with my mother from time to time for the rest of my days.