We were approaching the eulogies. My father wept steadily, and his breath came in sudden gasps. He looked sideways at me.

“You aren’t going to be able to read a eulogy,” he said. “Let Freddy do it.”

I didn’t say anything. Lofty religious words floated over our heads. The time arrived. Freddy stood up. “Are you coming?” he whispered to me.

As I looked up at the pulpit from which we were to read, I had a sudden image in my mind, so clear that the Gothic arches and the stained glass and the hundreds of mourners seemed to disappear. I saw my mother, dressed in the same dress she was wearing inside that closed coffin. I saw her walking up that long flight of stairs at my party. She was not leaning on anyone. With—as it had turned out—a tumor almost entirely obstructing her digestive tract, and another one wrapped around her spine, with a body ravaged from chemotherapy and lack of food, with a grasp on life as fragile as memory itself, she was climbing one step at a time, and as she climbed she was laughing and laughing and laughing. I saw her rope of big pearls swinging back and forth, and then I saw how her eyes lit up when they caught mine, and how she stopped laughing to smile, that particular smile that was my smile, that smile that had never changed, that she had smiled at me since before I had begun to remember. In that moment my funeral tears stopped. Then I reached further back, to my childhood, and I heard her saying, “When the time comes, you do what’s necessary. You do what’s appropriate. You do what’s right. That’s part of what it means to grow up, Harry.” And I felt that I owed it to her, at the very least, to stand up myself and say to all these hundreds and hundreds of people what she and I had always known and they, perhaps, had not.

So Freddy and I walked up together, and climbed the steps to the pulpit. We held on to each other as we climbed those steps. I thought of my mother telling us, when we were little, that she had had two children so they could love each other. “If you boys don’t stop squabbling, I’m going to leave you on the steps of the foundling home,” she would sometimes say in exasperation. I thought how pleased she would have been to see us together in this way. “Don’t worry,” Freddy said to me. “If you have a problem, just pass yours to me and I’ll finish for you.”