I was not sobbing or weeping; I just sat with tears running down my face, enough tears to fill the large glasses on the table, to water the garden outside, to make up for the rain that was not falling much that autumn. My mother took my hand in hers again, and squeezed it. “I don’t know how much time I have left,” she said. “Maybe very little. Maybe not so little. But I want us, all of us, to have as good a stretch as we possibly can. I want to get all the joy there is left in my life, and I want to leave you with as many happy memories as I can. I’m sorry I had to tell you all this, right now, but now it’s done. Don’t cry yet, Harry. Wait and cry later, if you have to.” She paused and looked out. “Look at that perfect yellow rose,” she said. “A perfect rose, growing right here, in the middle of Manhattan.” And so I looked out the window at the rose, which was indeed perfect. “And Harry,” said my mother, smiling. “Can we please try not to fight, at least for a while? And would you try not to fight with your father and with Freddy? Would you try, at least, not to fight about nonsense?”

And so I finally laughed, as, in the end, I always laughed with my mother. “OK,” I said. “No fights. But you have to promise me that you’ll try to get well, really try.”

My mother laughed, too. “I’ll do my best,” she said. “Now, how many people are you going to try to squeeze into this party in June? Could we manage something elegant that is not a mob scene? Could you restrict yourself to friends about whom you actually have some feeling?”

As we ate dessert, my mother described the terrible food at a wedding she’d attended the previous week, soup “like library paste with small chunks of wood” and the meat “which had been put in to roast the same week the invitations were printed” and the cake “with icing you could have roller-skated on.” We began to spin out the plans for my party, and it became magnificent. We both laughed and laughed and everything we were imagining seemed so real to me that I could not hold on to the fact that my mother was planning to kill herself, and had just told me all about it.

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