But I didn’t have a problem. I had dreaded having to stand up in front of everyone, without some genius composer’s music to shield me, but once I was there I wanted the time to last forever. I had been told that my mother was in the coffin down below me, but in the deepest part of my mind she was just where she had said she would be, sitting on my shoulder. I spoke slowly and with great certainty, giving each word as much weight as I could. The party the previous week had been so joyful as to be almost a lie: there had been no space at it for the terrible grief and anguish of my family. This funeral was so sad as to be again a lie: I needed to bring into it some of that quality of joy that my mother had brought to me and to all these others. I spoke for less than five minutes, and it was no time at all, but it was also a time as long as eternity.

Then Freddy read his eulogy, and I noticed that he had captured things about my mother that I had not captured. And then he read my father’s eulogy, which was not so much about my mother’s character or qualities; it was like the scream of a wounded animal, long and relentless, the scream my mother had not produced when she died.

• • •

Helen came along to the grave site, and after the burial, when they had lowered my mother into the earth, I turned and saw Helen through the glistening air, and I heard again my mother saying to me, “Helen is a good friend.” I could not demand more comfort from my father or my brother because they were busy demanding comfort of their own, but I could turn to Helen and collapse, and so I did that. Helen came back to the apartment with us, and she stayed almost all the time during the weekend, while we received mourners. People poured and shifted through the house. My father wept in front of everyone, and I disliked that intensely. Freddy and I comported ourselves like hosts, and introduced people to each other, and made sure that everyone was comfortable. Every night, when the people left, my father would tell us, Freddy and me, that we had to stay to help him to get on with his life. “You can move back into this apartment,” he told me.

I said I would stay through the weekend, and that beyond that I would not even consider it.

He told me that I was selfish and impossible.

I told him that he was selfish and hateful.

Freddy told us that we had to stop battling. He reminded me that I had promised my mother that I would help to take care of my father.

I said that I would take care, but that I would not go on sleeping in that apartment.