“I was your age when my father died,” she said to me one day. “I remember so little about him. I hope you and Freddy will remember me. I’d like to be remembered.”

I told my mother that she was not going anywhere and that I would remember her for a good long time because she was going to go on reminding me of herself.

“You go on thinking that,” she said. “Maybe it’s true.”

I told her that I could never forget her anyway.

“I suppose you’re going to be heading back to London soon,” she said. “Remember me when you’re in London.”

I did not tell her, for the moment, how my father had yelled at me that morning, and told me that it was selfish and wrong for me to go to London and abandon the family to suffering, right when Freddy had to return to medical school. “Of course I will,” was all I said to her.

• • •

That was all in the afternoons. In the mornings, my mother was sad. She woke up weak and tearful and exhausted, unable to face the day. I woke up each morning afraid, and lived a strange blank minute before I remembered that there was some reason for what, in the first moments, seemed like irrational foreboding. In the mornings, my mother would sit in the kitchen and stare vaguely into a cup of chamomile tea so weak it was hardly more than hot water, and her face would sag, and her hands would shake, sometimes so badly that she spilled her tea, and she would seem like an old woman. My mother on those mornings frightened me; it took all my discipline to go into the kitchen. In the mornings, my mother’s pain was fresh, like a wound picked open by the night. At the other end of the negotiable days, she would rail against fate; in the evenings she was furious. “This is so unfair,” she would say, gritting her teeth until her jaw shook. “What have I done to deserve this?” She was silently outraged at friends who could come and go as it might suit them, drinking the tea Janet seemed forever to be making, eating a cookie or two, going outside with an ennobling awareness of their own concern. She was furious at the days, furious at her own body, furious at the food she did not feel like eating. It was as though there were a big festival going on outside, to which everyone in the world but she had been invited. My father and Freddy and I stayed in to keep her company, but we could at any moment have gone out where they were dancing, and she was under lock and key. She hated us for that, too.