It was as though I had been practicing all my life to love Helen. If my mother had not developed cancer, I might have gone on practicing and practicing and never got to the thing itself, to the fact that I loved Helen with more of myself than I had known I had. But I don’t think so. It would certainly have taken longer, but I think I would sooner or later have realized that Helen was, at the very least, a shadow of the love I had been seeking all of my life. I learned so much in the course of loving my mother and being loved by her; and though Helen was a different matter entirely, the quality of that love between my mother and me was relevant to my relations with Helen as it had never been relevant to what I had with Bernard. My mother showed me how love is the business of life. She made a singular and perfect world out of her love for my father, and his love for her, and her love for me became a part of that. My mother showed me a love made of bricks, rather than of straw or sticks, a love powerful and inviolable enough to withstand every one of the disasters of which any life is made. My mother showed me how to live in love. But Bernard was the one who showed me how to live outside love, how to move through it and around it; he put windows into that strong house of bricks. It was with Bernard that I learned that what you touch does not automatically become your own; it was from Bernard that I learned the nature of love’s strange and wondrous equalities.

Helen and I took things slowly and privately: I had been able to pull my relationship with Nick to psychological bits, turn it into phrases and rhetoric, and so contain it, but my relationship to Helen did not allow for such analysis. There were two things I never told my mother: one was the lonely narrative of my life before Bernard, and the other was the amazing fact of my love for Helen. I couldn’t tell my mother about my life before Bernard because it would have horrified her too much; and I couldn’t tell her about Helen because it would have made her too happy, and I needed at that point to have a secret, something that was entirely mine. If I had once confided in my mother, I would not have been able to tell what was her delight and what was mine, and I needed, for as long as possible, to preserve my happiness, this happiness, as my own.