For better or for worse, when my mother was planning our trip to the south of France, I was living with Bernard and trying to love him, and Freddy was stepping out with Melanie. Melanie was as much interested in the rest of the family as she was in the theory of special relativity. I disliked that girl partly on my mother’s behalf, but I disliked her also for her icy self: it was bipartisan antipathy. Freddy announced that he wanted to bring Melanie along to France, and my mother, aware that one of the two women in Freddy’s life was likely to seem small, and anxious lest it be she, acceded. Holding fast to her notion that fair was fair (that equality was equivalence), she said that if Freddy was allowed to bring a girl on the trip, I was allowed to bring a girl as well. If I’d had any dignity I would have refused, but I was still proud of my mother’s Paris, and so I asked Helen, who had a few months earlier broken off her relationship to a man who worked in film, and was now rather at loose ends. I asked her to come stay at the Ritz, to travel to Saint-Paul de Vence, to bear witness to the infinite lightness of our attractive family discourse. I invited her also because I felt that I needed someone on my side for this trip, and that Helen, though she admired my mother, would always be behind me, whether I was right or not.

We all met in Paris. Helen and Freddy and I arrived variously in the course of the afternoon; we were all coming from different countries. Helen and I checked into our room; Freddy was to have his own. We had dinner in the Espadon, at the back of the hotel, and then went for a drink in the bar. I had just been given a contract to make a recording, my first recording, with the label I had most wanted, and I knew how much this would mean to my mother. They were going to let me do the Schubert and the Rachmaninoff; I had signed the contract an hour before leaving. I did not mention this over dinner with Helen and Freddy, nor did I plan to tell my parents that night. In some angry part of my heart, I was considering keeping this success completely secret, to punish them.

“I really hope we aren’t going to spend this entire vacation talking about you and Bernard,” Freddy said, picking at his feuilleté. “I hope you’re not going to fight with Mom every day. I have to go back to medical school at the end of this trip, and I want to have a holiday.”

Helen cut him short. “I think Harry’s going to settle whatever he feels he has to settle with your mother, and then he’s going to relax for a little while and get a tan and hear some music, and not go spinning out of control. Isn’t that true, lamb chop?” She turned to me.