In the hospital, when none of my mother’s friends was on hand, she would stare out the window for twenty minutes at a time. When she spoke, her voice was out of focus, its essential form familiar but its details obliterated. My father and Freddy and I spent long hours discussing what line of treatment she would pursue and at what hospital, but my mother, in the face of the crisis, became passive; she seemed not to care about these questions. She displayed a lack of interest in how the spots of cancerous flesh were to be eliminated—she, who a few days earlier had had energy to obsess about how a spot on one of my ties might be got out. “What difference does it make which of these punishments you choose for me?” she would ask my father. “You go ahead and decide which is the best way for them to kill me, how gradual to make it. It’s all exactly the same.” And so it was my father who not only made the decisions but also took it upon himself to persuade my mother to move forward. He conveyed to her all the optimism he had extracted from the not-so-very optimistic remarks of the doctors. It was my father who wept at night, when my mother was sleeping a drugged sleep at the hospital, but it was my father who remained calmly wreathed in smiles for fourteen or sixteen hours every day in those hospital rooms. My father produced wonderful numbers: seventy percent of women in my mother’s situation were cured, and if she were chemotherapy-responsive this whole thing would soon pass from our lives like a cold winter. The hospital where we were sitting had statistics twice as good as any other hospital in the nation. Out of the air, my father produced thirty good friends of good friends, women who had had similar difficulties and were now in glowing health; they marched through the hospital room like members of a middle-aged cheerleading squad. My father would meet with the dourest members of the medical professions and come back newly encouraged, bubbling over with all the good news. And he selected a mode of treatment for my mother, a system to cure her, and pretended the decision was as logical as the choice of a car or an investment strategy.

• • •

On the day my mother went into the hospital, while Freddy and I were still in France, before anyone knew whether she had cancer, my father bought my mother an enormous bunch of perfect roses and scribbled on a white florist’s card, “Love, love, love. We will go on forever.” I kept that card when we left the hospital at the end of my mother’s first surgery; I thought it was an amulet, and I could not imagine, any more than my father could, that it might prove not to be true. Of course, the treatments were going to be terrible, but I had been brought up to believe that you recover from the woes of the body and of the spirit. Did I say that my mother was as fragile as a soap bubble, that I had always known she would die young? The touch of her hand on my arm, the way she would call out, “Hello, Harry”—that sound of hello could not, after all, fade or decay; its continuation could hardly depend on something as technical and fussy as chemotherapy.