The city in which my mother got sick was one in which I had spent a lot of time on my own. I knew it on foot and by métro as my parents, driven by hotel chauffeurs, could never know it. But Paris remained my mother’s city. In my mother’s Paris we would devote hours as short as minutes to the roses in the garden of the Musée Rodin, or we would stroll along the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and contrast this year’s elegance with last year’s, or we would sit in the sun (it was always radiant sun in my mother’s Paris) in the Place des Vosges and consider Victor Hugo. Sometimes we would go to the Jeu de Paume to look at the heavy apples in the Cézannes, or to lose ourselves in the colors of the water lilies under the Japanese footbridge. At dinner, we would perhaps gaze at the Tuileries from our table at a restaurant untouched by time, our faces dimly lit by the heavy light of candles reflected on an Edwardian ceiling of pleated rose-colored silk. Oddly, there was never impassable traffic in my mother’s Paris; and the French were never rude to us, or even brusque; and the streets were always as clean as though they had been swept in honor of our coming. “Look,” my mother would say at the end of an evening. “It’s our moon over Vendôme.” In my mother’s Paris the moon was always full, the better to cast that fairy-tale light in which we would return to the hotel near midnight.

There was always music in my mother’s Paris. Once or twice we were all there when I was performing, and my parents would come to some remote concert hall or church to listen to a recital. Even when I had no such engagements, music seemed to follow us. The piano player at our favorite bar would recognize us as we came in, and would play the tunes my mother liked best, tunes that I had learned after listening to him, and that I sometimes played for her at home, trying to imitate his light fingerwork and symmetrical arrangements. We knew why he was playing what he was playing, and my mother would shoot him an unforgettable smile; but everyone else assumed he was inspired only by the time of night, the sight of a waiter with four glasses, and the shifting light that drifted through the old glass of the windows. Secret recognition is the best kind of recognition, and my mother’s Paris was full of it; it seemed to me that everyone, from the chauffeurs who drove us around town to the vaguely aristocratic men and women who took tea in the hotel garden, turned to pay silent tribute to my mother when they saw her. The city was not so much a place as an eternal coronation.