When the waiters had gone out, we all sat down, and for a moment there was the bustling sound of napkins being unfolded and glasses of wine being poured and people asking for the salt and all those slight room-service negotiations about whose glass of water was whose and whether the bread would fit between Freddy and me and whether we really needed to have the teacups on the table at the same time as the salad. My mother commented on how pretty it all looked. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have someone at home who could wheel in a table like this, flowers and all, at fifteen minutes’ notice?” she said. “Someone who would then come back and wheel it out when you got through, and you wouldn’t have to think about any of the food or the dishes again?”

“Nice flowers,” I said. “Nice plates. Nice silverware.”

My mother looked for a moment and then held up a fork. “Do you like the silver?” she asked. “I think it’s heavy-looking. Hotel silver. It doesn’t smile at you.”

“Does our silver at home smile at you?” my father asked.

“Of course, Leonard,” she said. “It smiles at you and says, ‘Pick me up.’ Haven’t you ever noticed?”

“Does Grandma’s silver say, ‘Pick me up’?” I asked. I had inherited my grandmother’s silver two years earlier.

“Grandma’s silver says it, but very quietly,” said my mother.

And somehow from then on we flew, telling each other all the stories that the plates and glasses and forks and knives had confided to us over the years, and my father repeated the anecdote that one of the red glass plates had told him about my great-aunt Elizabeth, and the evening wove itself into fantasy and hilarity, so that in the end we left behind the terror of the day. Freddy took the part of the dish that ran away with the spoon, and I was a champagne flute, and my father was the blue teapot, and my mother was the two silver candlesticks with the curving feet that had stood in the middle of the dining-room table all my life. Helen played along effortlessly. In this state, one short of dreaming, my family passed an evening as bright as any we had ever had together. With Helen half participant and half audience, we felt once more unassailable, and the mortality lingering over our heads seemed as remote as mortality had always seemed.

Though it embarrasses me to admit it, I was distracted throughout by the cut on my lower lip, which was so immediately and maddeningly and constantly painful that I could not really focus much on anyone else’s complaints. These defenses are conveniently on hand in the face of tragedy, and they countermand it, allowing us to stay in the comfortable world of detail, safe as room service. I also felt that I had my news about the recording contract, and that there might not be another appropriate moment for it, and I kept wondering whether I should interject it somewhere. The Schubert and the Rachmaninoff. But I didn’t say a word.