She was watching my father check in with the particular expression she wore in Paris with my father, an expression of trust, of pleasure in the luxury around her, of certainty and self-assurance, and most of all of love. Every time we went to Paris, she fell in love with us all all over again, and you could see it in the lightness that came to her walk, in her new delight in the same old restaurants and museums, in the way her hair was brushed, and in the particular tenor of her laughter. You could see it in the way she would sustain her energy for long strolls, in the way she would get dressed quickly after her bath and her nap, in how utterly sure of herself she suddenly was and how utterly sure of all of us. My mother always looked younger than she was, in the way of glamorous women, but in Paris she became really young again. I used to feel, there, that I had been given the opportunity to be with my mother as she might have been before I was born, before she was married.

I went to France for that terrible trip planning to have a long-overdue argument with my mother, but when Helen and I came out of the bar the evening my parents arrived, I found all at once that I could have just stood forever, looking at her in that pale gray suit on that gilded chair; it was as though seeing her made me whole. I had grudgingly agreed to go on this holiday to vent my anger, to settle the terrible differences my mother and I were having at that time. But when the moment came, the holiday seemed to stretch in front of me like a piece of music whose delights, obscure on the printed page, become perfectly obvious as soon as you touch the keys. I felt lucky, as lucky as I had always felt in my childhood, when I believed my mother to be the envy of all the children with preoccupied or plain or distracted women uncertainly calling their names.