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Until October of the year my mother died, I lived shrouded in a pure and immutable mourning, and I saw all the world out of focus. But one crisp afternoon, when I had gone out to do neighborhood errands, I chanced to hear from someone’s passing car window a song from the forties. I caught only half a minute of music before the light changed and the car sped away, but that half minute brought back to me a memory of Venice. Before our first family trip to Italy, when I was six, my mother had said, “Rome is overwhelming, and Florence is beautiful, but Venice is like fairyland.” And though in the month before that trip she had told me about Medicis and museums, about the Pitti Palace and the Arch of Constantine, she had refused to say more of Venice than that: “Venice is like fairyland.” And so for me Venice was forever fairyland.

When I was perhaps twelve, my mother and I went there, for reasons I no longer remember, without my father or my brother. I think it may have been that my school vacation and Freddy’s were out of alignment, and that we could not all travel at once. On the last day of that holiday, my mother and I went for a long walk, which took us through some of the southern parts of the city, and then led us into Piazza San Marco. We would have had to walk only another two minutes to get to the hotel. My mother was tired; it was the end of the afternoon, the hour at which she always went back to have a bath. But I was so full of delight at being in Venice—and it was our last day—and she suddenly turned to me and smiled, and suggested, to my astonishment, that we not return to the hotel yet, that we sit instead for a few minutes in one of the cafés of the square.