You will not know my mother better for learning what went on in those clean but dingy hospitals with their linoleum hallways and their greenish fluorescent lighting. Better to remember how my mother with tired patience transformed those rooms, as she used to change her suite at the Ritz, with flowers, with the plaid blanket on which I first learned to trace a square in my early childhood (its autumn orange and dark yellow and rich green, curiously not my mother’s favorite colors, so immense in that dreary hospital). Surely it is better to remember the lace pillowcase, the little enameled clock, the pink bed jacket, the half-glasses in their red case that somehow humanized the adjustable Formica table. Better to remember how the little suitcase in which her things were brought to the hospital lay in a corner of the room, and made it possible to pretend that the room was a destination of its own, found at the end of a pleasant flight.

So also I remember with precipitate clarity those moments when my mother would be animated by a passing fancy or a quick insight or a comic thought, and how she would suddenly become herself again. In those moments we would all become ourselves again, as though we were furniture in storage which had been abruptly liberated from sheets thick with dust. Our backs ceased to ache and the muscles of our faces became operative again and our eyes came back to us, so that we could see. The hospital smells faded away. My mother made all the agony—it was doubly hard for her because so much of it was her agony—seem small and remote and unimportant. Sometimes we would find ourselves convulsed with laughter (“I’m afraid this silverware doesn’t manage a single kind word,” said my father, remembering the Ritz. “You wouldn’t, either,” my mother replied, “if you spent your life with this food. Poor abused forks, and these browbeaten, innocent spoons.”), until the nurses and patients from other rooms would come and gaze wistfully in the door, baffled at our happiness. I would glimpse other visitors arriving to see other patients, and would think how they might envy me my mother, who could for a few minutes at a time be herself just because we were, all four of us, together. And in those moments I remembered (as I sometimes forgot) why we were keeping the vigil around her, what it was to be one of the four of us.

Sometimes, on those occasions, I would go to the end of the hall and phone Bernard, for whom I might have a sudden rush of affection. When my mother turned back into herself, it was as though my emotions had been given back to me, and I felt that I had love to spare. Bernard responded to what happened to my mother only insofar as it affected me. “But how are you?” he would ask; and I was never, never able to get him to see how little meaning there was in that question, taken by itself. “How are you?” he would ask, and I would say, “My mother is in better spirits at the moment.” And when he would repeat his question, I would awkwardly manufacture moods of my own to fit his rhetoric of concern.