We all felt guilty for being out in a city of lights and fashions, but though we talked without a break about my mother, and though I found myself lapsing horribly into the past tense as I spoke about her, we also felt reassured somehow by the palpable evidence around us that the world goes on. We adduced that we, too, would go on; we proved to ourselves that this was not the end. It was not the eternal ocean that told us that; it was the bright lights, the absurd clothes, and the chocolate ice cream in the café. The next day, Friday, Freddy and I caught the morning plane, and headed for home.

• • •

Is the picture I have started here entirely accurate? Perhaps I was angrier that week than I remember, but I think, in fact, that when I first saw that my mother might be sick, my anger got put away somewhere, and my mother became as glorious to me as she had been in my childhood. Though I had gone to France to sever ties, I knew that I could not squander what might be a limited time on undermining a perishable intimacy. In fact, my mother was not always exactly as she would have wanted—even her control did not run so far—but she was always striving to be as she would have wanted, and it is really too late to take her to task for her occasional lapses from grace. In the first weeks of her illness, my mother was to reveal more clearly her terrible brutality. She could be harsh, and she was demanding, and she could be selfish. I will tell you about these things, because my mother’s love, like any love, came at a price—but that is not to say that it was a compromised love.

Her world rose and fell by me: for I was as vast to my mother as she was to me. My mother wanted me to have a perfect life, more perfect even than hers, because she sincerely believed that the surest way to be happy was to be perfect. That is why she was so embattled about Bernard before she got sick: he was, to her mind, an imperfection in human form. Though I often disappointed my mother with my irregularities, she believed that I had what it would take to be perfect, and pushed me toward it. God knows the agenda is an absurd one; the battle for perfection that occupied so much of my energy and of my mother’s is obviously a losing one. But I would not know how to give it up—or, at least, I would not have known then.

II: Home Again

II

HOME AGAIN