“I don’t think you want to sound so hard,” she said. “I love you, Harry; I’m trying my best to do what will make you happy. Don’t take such a hard tone with me.”

I was in a bad mood that day. “You don’t love me,” I said accusingly. “You’re obsessed with me, and you keep trying to drag me down into your illness. You don’t love me at all. If you loved me, you’d stop striking these dramatic poses all the time and keep on fighting this cancer.”

All she said was, “I wish it were up to me that way.”

• • •

By the time I got my first advance copy of the CD, I had been at enough production sessions so that I knew every second of my own performance by heart and was thoroughly sick of it. I had seen the cover art, and I had seen the designs, and when the messenger came over with the thing itself, I felt no thrill, not even a tremor. I went uptown, and found my mother propped up in bed.

“Hi, Harry,” she said. “I thought you were doing errands all day today.”

I held out the CD. “It’s the first copy,” I told her. “It’s for you.”

She took the disc in her hand and for a long minute she sat and looked at it. The sense of occasion I had not had on seeing it an hour earlier came now. My mother turned the CD over and over, and she clicked the box open and looked at the disc itself, as though she could read its sounds with her eyes. “This is really it,” she said at last, in a voice of satisfaction. “I made it through. I made it through long enough to see it.”

“That’s really it,” I said, and it was as though I had not known, until then, what it was.

“When you were little,” she said, readjusting her pillows and sitting up very slightly, “you were afraid of so many things. You were afraid of the dark, and of playing games, and of thunder, and you were afraid of other children. I recognized all that fear in you, because I was in some ways a very frightened person myself. There are so many things I never did because I was afraid—jobs I never had, people I never met or got to know. I didn’t want you to grow up frightened, to be a frightened person. I used to say to you, ‘Think of life as an adventure.’ Do you remember?” She looked down at the cover photo, me at the piano. She read the little biography on the back of the CD, and then she looked at the photo again. “And you believed me, even though I didn’t really believe that myself. You believed me. Step by step, you did more and more things, and you began to talk to other children. It was so hard to push you out into the world. And then you began to do it on your own. I just watched you and held my breath. I wanted to think that you could set the world on fire.” She looked at the CD. “And look. Look who you’ve turned into,” she said. Then she looked directly at me, and she smiled. Her face was full of joy. “Look who you’ve turned into!” she repeated. “I don’t know when or how it happened. All that worrying I did, and now look who you are.”