What did she do? Her intelligence cast into perspective the terrors of the given moment; she made life into a meaningful progression, rather than a random splatter, and ordered childhood’s terrible chaos. To love people by knowing them is the most difficult kind of love to sustain, since no one can hold up that level of perfection we hope for, even demand, in the people we adore. My mother could only know people; she could not have preserved ignorance and distance had that been her fondest wish; and knowing me, she nevertheless loved me entirely and completely. It would be a gross inaccuracy to call my mother uncritical: she criticized my choice of ties, the objects in my home, the whole way I lived my life. But she did it all because she felt in the very core of her being so urgently and so clearly involved in my success or failure. In the face of any pleasure of mine, she evinced a quiet joy so intense and so poignant as to ennoble all my happiness. When something saddened me, she came and joined me in my pain, so that I was not alone there; she mitigated sorrow itself for me. You do not necessarily love people for what they do; nor does heroism lie always in action. Those single examples of valiant courage, those stories that sons might tell of their mothers rescuing them from the lions: my mother had never done anything of the kind. She would immediately have come running if the lions had roared in my direction; but we lived in New York, where the lions are gradual and evanescent, and where the defenses against them are made of a slow accumulation of dialogue rather than of a sudden thrust of steel. Such courage as she had does not lend itself to representative anecdotes.

I looked at Helen and shrugged. “It’s not anything she’s done, or that she does,” I finally said. “It’s just the way she is.”

“That’s what I thought you’d say,” said Helen.

“That’s the most important thing,” I said. “More than what she does.”

“Of course,” said Helen. “But it’s also the most inaccessible to other people. Including Bernard, I’m sure.”

“If he really listened to me, he’d get it,” I said.

Helen looked at me long and hard. “The only way to explain that kind of love to someone who hasn’t known it himself,” she replied, “is to give it to him.”

To this piece of admirable advice I had no ready response, and so, with redoubled energy, Helen and I focused on the packing.

III: My London

III

MY LONDON