“Wow!” he said, genuinely astonished. “Do you have any control over it?”

“Well, yes. It’s more or less a matter of willing it.”

“But, my God,” he said, “then how can you have a sleeping problem? You can make yourself an infant whenever you want to and just sleep.” He shook his head in exasperation. “Like a baby.”

She pursed her lips. “It just doesn’t seem right, Barney. For a grown-up person…” Her voice trailed off in a way he recognized, a way that meant, Don’t pry into my sorrows, Barney. I have sensitivities you wouldn’t understand.

When she was living he wouldn’t have persisted, but things were different now. “Come on, Mother,” he said. “If you really wanted to sleep it certainly wouldn’t strain your dignity to be a baby.” Then the stupidity, the narrowness of her struck him and he said, “Jesus, there’s something terrific about being a baby for a while.”

She shook her head adamantly, giving the look that meant, “I knew you wouldn’t understand.” Finally she said, in a confidential and pained voice, “Barney. There’s no one to change the diaper. It’s… humiliating.”

He stared at her in disbelief. Of course. All those matches in the bathroom, those bottles of Air Wick. The way she made him run the lavatory tap when he peed, and aim for the edge of the toilet, so she couldn’t hear it. The horror on her face if he farted.

And then something else struck him. “You’re both the same ages you were when you died. Why don’t you make yourselves younger? Why be old?”

She looked at him wonderingly and for a moment her everlasting guard seemed to be down. “Why not be old?” she said.

It rushed upon him, overwhelmed him. There they sat, on his New York terrace, both in their physical sixties, with pale, sagging bodies, false teeth, bags under their eyes. And by choice. They could be whatever age they wanted to be in whatever Limbo they had their existence.

He stared at her. “Make yourself young for me, Mother,” he said.

She seemed not to hear him. She had fallen into some kind of guarded reverie.

Throughout his adult life Barney had suffered a frustrating disparity between sexual desire and sexual performance. Years before, a psychiatrist had uncovered memories of Barney’s mother undressing in front of him, when Barney himself had been three and four years old and had slept in a cot in Mother’s room. “Now don’t peek, Barney,” she would say, and pull her dress over her head. He always did peek, at the peach-colored slips, the flared rayon panties, the dark triangle of hair between her legs.

When, in the psychiatrist’s office, he tried to remember his mother’s face at those times, tried to remember more than her hips and breasts and underwear, he was never able to. He could not remember his mother with a face other than the sagging old woman’s face her ghost now wore.

“What was that, Barney?” Mother said, smiling faintly.