“I think,” my mother said, with a tone of authority that made it clear that what she thought was what other people of insight would also think, “that what you want early in life is different from what you want later, and that happiness comes of understanding early what you will want later, and finding it.” She ate a few bites of her salmon (my mother never liked fish much) and looked through the glass at the Bois de Boulogne. The meticulous waiters served the food on large plates. The vegetables were laid out in patterns as colorful and intricate as the plan du métro. I had duck. Freddy had lamb. Helen and my father both had monkfish. My Parisian friend had sweetbreads. I had been to this place for lunch with my mother on a dozen previous occasions, but I noticed as though for the first time how fresh the bunches of white roses and freesia on every table were, how enchanting the view of the Bois. I noticed the afternoon sun and the elegant cut of the waiters’ uniforms. I took in what each of us was wearing, the way my mother’s hair was brushed, how her hand lay on the table—I noticed then, though I was of course both nettled and frightened, how perfect it all was.

I can tell you in a sentence that my mother was dying, and in a way there is nothing more to be said about that. Or I can tell you every detail, and try to give you the quality of that lovely, terrible Sunday and of the other days like it that were to become our way of life. To us they were vital days, their details immemorial. My father expected everyone to understand at once that my mother was more important than anyone else, that her suffering was more terrible. I didn’t expect the doctors to understand that; I didn’t expect headwaiters to defer to her on that basis; I didn’t expect everyone who came to our parties to notice it. But at some useless level I was as much in the habit of believing it as he was. And in this we were fools. Illness is not the great equalizer, but it is a seven-league step in that direction.

• • •

When we finished lunch, we went for a stroll in the Bois. We made a little pilgrimage to admire my father’s favorite copper beech (my father has favorite trees in parks across Europe). We talked, as always, about how overtrimmed French parks are, and my mother said how she always wanted to bring children into the Bois and send them running across all those prim lawns. We wondered at the well-behaved twins with a nurse walking ahead of us, stopping to admire the beds but never touching them.