“Look who I’ve introduced to each other,” she said to me with a laugh when I approached. Nick had just slapped Bernard around the shoulders by way of response to a passing remark. I talked to them all for a minute, about something that was little more than nothing. Then I took Helen and headed with her toward one of the buffet tables.

“I love you, Helen,” I said.

She shook her head. “No, you don’t,” she said. “It would be lovely if you did, but you don’t.” She smiled at me, a sad smile. “Where’s your mother?” she asked. I said that my mother had just left and I said that I hoped everyone was having fun. I said that I hoped she, Helen, was having fun. “Listen,” Helen said. “Maybe someday you will.”

“I will what?” I asked.

“Love me,” she said. “Or have fun. Or both.” And then someone else came along to greet us, and we lapsed into sociability.

• • •

I have been looking at the photos from that party. There are seven pictures of my mother, the only seven pictures that were ever taken of her in a wig. She is laughing in most of them, though in one she is staring out with a look that is not quite a look of laughter. She is with her laughing friends. The other pictures—there must be four hundred other pictures—show the friends and the flowers and the pinkness of the light. There are a lot of pictures of me, and I am laughing in all of them. It’s easy to remember that my watch was broken, that I always felt that I was neglecting someone, that my mother was ill, that Nick was flirting with Bernard, that Helen told me I didn’t love her. It’s easy to remember all those things. It’s harder for me to remember how I came to laugh so much and for so long. The pictures of me at that party seem as remote as the pictures of my mother, but I know myself well enough to know, looking at them, that I was not pretending. I can tell, looking at them, that I, too, must have had a wonderful time at that party; it must have been one of the happiest events of my life.

I remember an ordinary day uptown, some years ago, before my mother got sick, when she said to me, “I look in the mirror in the morning and I see a fifty-year-old woman. When I was your age, I thought that by the time I was fifty I would have turned into a whole different person, a whole different kind of person, a fifty-year-old person. Now I look in the mirror and I see a fifty-year-old woman looking back at me, and I wonder, how did I get to be fifty? And I don’t understand why no one ever told me that I would just go on being myself, that I would just eventually find the same me aged fifty, with grown children and a marriage and houses to run and the essence of my life behind me.”