Katie, seeing me now as Mother, asks questions, like a five-year-old, peppering them at me, demanding that I have answers, except that they’re not five-year-old questions, they’re not so easy, and the answers I know, I can’t give her.

“It’s funny,” she says reflectively one night at dinner. “When I’m here, with you, I’m one person and I feel as if I’m being honest. I don’t think I’m putting anything on for you. Then I go back into town to the hotel and something happens on the way, something tightens up, and by the time I’m there I’m somebody else, I’m smiling, charming, whatever, and I get terrific service, everybody knows me and they take care of me; except that they don’t see me. Do you see what I mean?”

I nod. I know. I think of dinner parties and selling dresses.

“I’m one person with Daddy, another with Jean (who is his younger red-haired wife who is very calm, like Stephen,) and when I’m with the two of them together, I’m somebody else altogether. Elliott thinks I’m really flighty and silly, and it’s my own fault because when I’m with him that’s how I am; he’s so solemn, he brings it out in me. I haven’t been myself with Elliott for — years. Some of my friends are serious, so I’m serious with them, and some of them have a lot of fun, so I turn into a kind of ring-leader. It’s scary, you know, it really is, I sit there and I think, ‘Okay, which one of these people am I,’ this is when I’m alone of course, and I guess I’m all of them, except none of them feels right, none of them is me, dead-on. And yet up here with you I feel like I’m being me, and I don’t care because I trust you not to hate me, whatever I do.” She stops, and I nod again and smile.

“I suppose that’s it, isn’t it,” she says finally. “I don’t trust them not to hate whatever it is I really am. That’s weird, isn’t it? I know so many people, and I guess I don’t trust any of them. Why do you suppose that is? I wonder what I’m afraid of? They’re all nice people, Daddy and Jean and Elliott too. What am I afraid of?”

She goes off thoughtfully, and we do not talk about it again. I think maybe she is figuring it out; perhaps it will be different, now, when she goes back.

Would it be different if I went back?