Only after he said that it was cancer did I realize how fundamentally I had persuaded myself that it would not be. My mother had a cancerous cyst in her abdomen, and the disease had spread into certain internal membranes. The tumor had been removed, along with various expendable bits of anatomy, but it was not possible to remove enough of my mother, and so chemotherapy was prescribed as the only way to deal with the spread of the disease, a spreading not of what is fittingly called gross tumor, but of tiny pinpoints of malignancy. We did not know how high the chances were that the cancer would be entirely eliminated. We were all stuck on the word “cancer,” as though its consonants and vowels were the razor spikes of a barbed-wire fence that ran between us and how we had been. It was a word too full of obvious drama, like a bad TV movie, like a modern version of grand opera—and my mother, musical though she was in general, hated grand opera. “All those maudlin women shrieking endlessly before they die,” she used to say. “So implausible and so tedious.” The chemotherapy was scheduled to occupy nine months, and we were told that it would make my mother very sick for a week or so each month when it was administered. We also learned that it would make her lose her hair.

There is a fine line between tension and emotion; an excess of one can eliminate the capacity for the other. I had been so anxious for so long about the result of that test that I could feel only a sense of sorrow, not so much sorrow about the specific fact of cancer as sorrow that the irresolution was going to continue. It was like tumbling into something open and endless. For at least an hour Freddy and Helen and I all sat still in our hotel room, stiff on our chairs, staring at the ceiling and having nothing very much to say to one another, because there is nothing much to say about disease. After that, we booked our tickets to go home as quickly as possible—there were no flights until the morning—and packed our bags. Then we found ourselves once more in our rooms, and I did not want to play the piano, and it struck me as altogether intolerable to sit for another minute staring at those walls.