• • •

The date of the release of my CD was drawing closer, and my mother said she was counting the days. Meanwhile, we had to attend to the party. There was a great deal that she had intended to do but in the end was unable to do, and so she left more and more of it to me. “Elegant, Harry,” she said. “I hope this is going to be an elegant party. I hope you’re not getting carried away with yourself, and that it’s not going to be too showy. Remember that parties are about the guests, and that the flowers and the setting and the food should be so beautiful that they almost disappear. If they overwhelm the people, it’s not a good party.”

I had been to enough of my mother’s parties to know that. But I had such glittering aspirations of my own; I wanted a party that was as romantic as Love in the Afternoon, in which every detail astonished. It was my mother, extravagant in her way as the day is long, who told me to tone it down. And she also remembered all those sensible details that my mind skipped over. “Don’t serve the herbed chicken in lettuce leaves,” she said. “The leaves break and people spill the chicken down their fronts.” Later she told me, “Don’t serve anything on skewers; people end up holding the skewers and they don’t know what to do with them.” Another time she said, “Make sure there are flowers in the ladies’ room, but make sure the arrangement isn’t too big. Nothing is more irritating than flowers that take up all the space where you want to put your handbag.” But when I asked (for the third time) which of two salads she thought sounded better, she put a hand on my arm; that new tone crept into her voice, that last-four-months tone of hers. “Harry,” she said. “Don’t keep worrying about the salads. Either salad. It doesn’t matter.”

I quoted her back to herself. “It all matters,” I said.

She turned on me a funny look, a new look. “No,” she said. “It doesn’t. Very little really matters. Life is . . . a lot of the things I used to think mattered—I was wrong, Harry. A lot of them really don’t matter at all.”

When I looked at her with an expression of surprise, she laughed. “Serve the tomatoes,” she said. “I like tomatoes.”

• • •

In the end, my mother was too weak to do more than give advice. I threw my own party. It was as though I were in training for the parties to take place after her death, because it was not my kind of party, not like the party I had almost thrown for Bernard. Some days my mother and I still argued, but she would cut short the arguments.

“If you make up your mind that you’re dying, you’re sure to die,” I said once, when she was being negative.