When I arrived in New York from England, the facts of our life were much as I had left them, but my relationship to those facts was changed. During my mother’s first hospital visit, I had learned how things were to be, and it had been like learning Chinese. Never in my life had I confronted anything so alien, so bewildering, so different in its very structure from all previous experience. By the time I came back from England, I was conversational in this new language. The patterns of illness had become familiar, and though I did not like them and did not feel at ease in them, I was able to function in them. Absence does not so much make the heart grow fonder as give the heart time to integrate what it has not previously absorbed, time to make sense of what happens too quickly to have any meaning in the instant. This is always true. If it is in absence that people forget each other, it is also in the quiet pause of absence that, minds running in symmetry, people come to know each other; there is sometimes as much intimacy in the span of continents as in the shared hours before dawn. While I was in England, playing my concert and having my twenty-four-hour virus, I came to know anew both my mother and her illness, so that when I returned to town I greeted her ailments almost as comrades. In good faith, I started on the saddest period of my life. But we were a happy family, and so I also started, in some much more obscure way—obscure at that time even to me—to take possession of our happiness.

• • •

I came back to surprise my mother. I surprised my mother on her birthday over and over again, and every single time she was surprised, until at last I was as much amazed by her astonishment as she was surprised that I had come to surprise her. It never occurred to me not to go home for my mother’s birthday in the first year of her illness, since it was from her that I had learned my own sense of occasion. It was my mother who taught me that you could never put too much faith into birthdays or Christmas or graduations, she who built these into feast days such as no jousting knight had ever dreamed. My mother never tired of these holidays: she built them out of spun sugar on a foundation of thin air, and nothing delighted her more than to see how Freddy and I spiraled upward in her candied architecture.