I suppose that my mother and I may have stopped being in a rage with each other before I started seeing Helen, though it seems to me that I noticed how we were no longer angry only in the weeks after I started seeing Helen. It was, so far as I am concerned, one of the great miracles of modern times that my mother lived long enough for us to make peace. For though I had loved my mother entirely for my whole life, though our flashes of intense hatred had never really undermined our adoration of each other—still, there was no ease between us until that moment when I finally held Helen in my arms. Bernard had been a pawn between my mother and me, but Helen—Helen knew me. She was as kind as Bernard, and she knew me. I became the person she knew. My feeling for Helen was not a matter between my mother and me, but it absorbed what had for so long stood between my mother and me, so that the remaining barriers could at last drop, to reveal entire the straightforward and fitting love my mother and I had for each other. The madness went out of it, at last, and we loved each other simply as sons and mothers have loved each other all the days of the world.

I did not know it then, but there were only four months left for my mother. She and I were given just four months of wisdom after a lifetime of folly, four months of peace and a measure of serenity. Four months! It seems so terribly short a time, and on sad days I imagine what it might have been like to have had five months, or six, or another forty years. Four months was hardly time enough for us to register the truth of this new relationship we had found. I am profoundly aware that had my mother’s lethal cells multiplied more rapidly we might never have had those months. A fate as arbitrary as the weather, which served to take my mother away, gave us with equal indifference that almost holy time before she went, the Helen time, when we could live in the compass of our pleasure in each other, while I had for myself the pleasure of Helen.

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