We were to fight and argue, the three of us, through much of the summer that followed, but on the day of my mother’s funeral we could not let go of one another. My father’s misery was so terrible and so immediate that neither Freddy nor I could look away from it even for a minute, though it also weighed on me to feel that I had to support a grief besides my own. Freddy and I walked on either side of my father as we headed down for the funeral. We went through the great bronze doors with the merciless faces of Old Testament sages carved in them, and we passed through the main sanctuary, and we came to the chapel where the funeral was to take place. I had made perhaps fifty telephone calls the day before, but sad news travels with astonishing speed. Hundreds of people had come to the funeral. All my mother’s old friends were there, and all of my friends, and all of Freddy’s friends. People who worked with my father were there. Janet was there, and Robert, and the man who used to do my mother’s hair, and the woman who did her nails, and the seamstress who altered her clothes, and the doctors who had got to know her during her illness. The children of her friends were there, and the parents of some of my friends, and people with whom I had worked, and people with whom Freddy had worked. Friends of my grandmother’s, people I had thought long dead, were gathered in a few pews near the back. Our relations were there, even the cousins whose names I could never keep straight. It was a sea of faces. “She was so wonderful,” I heard, and, “She was so kind to me,” and, “What a magical woman she was.” Of course, people do say those things at funerals, even at the funerals of people who are not wonderful and not kind and not magical, but I believed then and believe now that that mass of people had come to the funeral because they had all, in fact, been touched by my mother; and I wondered as I looked around at them where my mother had found the time to be so wonderful and kind and magical to so many.

The three of us stumbled up to the front row of the chapel, and after various people had come up to us and embraced us, the funeral began. I looked up at the soaring pilasters and at the high points of the ceiling and at the dark colors of the stained glass. I heard the beginning of the service. I thought it was impossible that my mother could be in the polished wood coffin at the front of the room, under its wreaths of pink peonies. I noticed that the peonies were not as pink or as full as the ones we had had for the party, and realized that I should not have let the funeral home arrange for the flowers. I noticed that the coffin seemed short, as though they would have had to crunch up my mother to fit her in, but I decided that this was probably an optical trick played by its proportions.