I attempted to explain all this to the engineers and the producers, and finally I played like a trump card the narrative of my mother’s illness. My agent had some long discussions behind closed doors, and prevailed on them to let me redo the whole thing a few months later. “Listen,” he said to me. “This is not easy to arrange. You’d better get it together between now and then. Maybe you want to rent a real piano to take to this hospital in New York where your mother is, but you’ve got to do something.”

I practiced more than ever. The Schubert was much trickier than I had expected. I played it accurately, and, at least in general, with feeling, but I seemed not to be able to get the magic of the first movement, and I knew that there was magic buried there.

“I’ve heard you play that first movement well,” my mother said one day on the phone. “I think it’s a matter of mood for you. Really I do. I just love that one phrase, that little melody we talked about last time you were home, which you play particularly well. It’s all tone of voice, and carrying the feeling of that one phrase into the rest of the movement.”

“Tone of voice,” I said.

“Yes,” my mother said. “Do you remember, after my third chemotherapy, I’d come home from the hospital and I was feeling so sick, and I thought I just couldn’t eat anything. Your father was at the office and Freddy had gone back to school, and you and I and Janet were all alone in the house. You kept coming back to my room to cajole me with smoked salmon and poached eggs and that ghastly carrot bread you’d bought. Do you remember that day?”

“You were in bad shape,” I said. “You kept saying how weak you felt, and I thought you should have something, or you’d really just collapse.”

“I felt as much like eating smoked salmon as I did like flying to the moon,” said my mother. “Salty fish. On that stomach. But you kept telling me that the doctor wanted me to eat, and I finally said I would have some dry toast. You came back with that toast and a nectarine, and I sat there and ate the toast, because I knew that I had to have something. And then you waved that nectarine at me. And you said, ‘Oh, Mom, what about the nectarine?’ And you sounded sad, and anxious, and forlorn. And so I ate that nectarine—which I will tell you now was mealy on top of everything else.”

“You ate two bites of the nectarine.”

“It’s incredible that I ate any of that nectarine at all. Who buys nectarines in November, Harry? Ripened on a plane. Pretty to look at but inedible under the best of circumstances. Which those were not.”

“It had vitamin C in it,” I said.