Frequently—this is the way with seating plans—we would go off to some lovely restaurant and sit far apart. I would spend the evening in insignificant conversation with those members of my parents’ outer circle who were the evening’s novelty. What I remember is that feeling of being within reaching distance of my mother, that neither of us had had to part from the other just yet. When at the end of such an evening we would get back to my parents’ apartment, I would go in and sit at the foot of my mother’s bed for hours, talking about the marginal people, the restaurant, whether her duck had been good, whether the mint sauce on the chocolate torte was a big mistake (my mother insisted that sauce was made by folding toothpaste into crème anglaise), about whether I had spilled something on my tie and about whether it was likely to come out if I rubbed talc on the spot. (“For heaven’s sake,” my mother would say. “Just put it out for the dry cleaner. Everyone but your grandmother gave up on those tricks twenty years ago.”) We would go on talking, and from time to time my mother would say, “It’s getting late; I should go to sleep,” and I, inventive in those precious moments at the edge of night, would ask questions that reached as far back as her childhood, or beg advice, and, sustaining her interest in an absurd line of topics, would keep her awake and even—so it often seemed—alive for an hour or more. In a clear tone she might have used to give driving directions, my mother would answer my questions. They were often questions she had answered many times before, but she gave me those familiar answers a last time, so that I could remember them. We would keep time at bay for a little while, by being together, until finally it would get so late that my mother couldn’t stay up any longer. Near midnight—and my mother, rigid in her ways as a wrought-iron fence, had never stayed up until then unless there was an occasion—I would heave myself out of that bedroom and go downtown and practice obsessively or talk on the phone, doing anything to keep the time full enough so that I did not need to be reminded that in such a way at a future time we would say good night and mean all the nights that there had ever been or would ever be.