It was on one such evening that I finally told my mother about my recording contract. I had looked forward to the occasion for too long, and by the time it came around I had lost the sense of urgency with which I had carried the news to Paris. It was becoming absurd and inconvenient that she didn’t know yet, and I made my announcement more to have it done with than because I longed to tell her. We were at a commercial break, and my mother said, “I was just looking at the review you left me from Zurich. I like it.”

“He was unusually musical for a reviewer,” I said. “I’ve never met him, but he’s a friend of a friend of Bernard’s, and I gather that he’s charming and incredibly scholarly and very highly regarded in Switzerland.”

The program was starting again, but I seized the moment. “I wanted to tell you something,” I said.

My mother looked tense.

“I got a recording contract,” I said. “I’m making a record. A CD. It’ll go into distribution in about eighteen months.”

My mother looked almost blank. “But that’s incredible, Harry,” she said. “When did you find out?”

“Just before Paris. But I was waiting for a good time to tell you,” I said. “It’s on the label I wanted, too. And they’re going to let me do the Schubert, the sonata in B-flat, and the Rachmaninoff, even though I had been worried about whether those pieces really go together.”

“Oh, Harry. How wonderful for you.” She looked back at the TV for a moment. “That’s more or less what you played in London, at that museum, when your father and I were there. I liked that program.” She hit the mute button on the TV, then turned back to me, her face glowing, and she sat up on her side of the bed, and for a sudden moment it was as if her cancer were gone. “Harry, how nice of you to save a piece of good news for me. I remember when you were a little boy, how you used to get up in the mornings and go play the piano. Your father and I would look at each other and I would say, ‘Well, it’s probably time to get up anyway.’ And he used to joke that I had given birth to a genius, and that someday people would throng to hear you.”

“Genius is maybe a bit premature,” I said.