And then in my chair there in the past I heard footsteps behind me and heard a voice saying, “Billy, it’s getting too warm in the living room. I’m going to change into something cooler. You mustn’t look.”

She had stopped talking before I recognized with a distinct shock that it had been Mother’s voice. It was the same cadence that I had remembered, but so much more youthful, so much… so much richer, than when I was grown up. I heard more footsteps. I heard her opening a drawer somewhere in back of me.

On the inside of the closet door to my right was a full-length, framed mirror. The frame was enameled in a creamy yellowish-white. A few men’s jackets hung in the closet—gray and brown ones—and I knew they were Daddy’s and that Daddy was away. Daddy was almost always away. Somehow I was glad he was.

I could see the mirror without moving my head. All I had to do was open my eyes slightly and look to the right. The mirror reflected the bed and part of a white-painted dresser, with silver-backed brushes on it and two photographs. One photograph was of me as a baby, the other was of Mother herself; they were both in yellowed ivory frames.

And then someone came into view in the mirror and something deep in me thrilled to see. It was Mother; I could tell even though her back was toward the mirror because she was walking toward the bed. Her waist was slim and her step was light and youthful. She turned and looked past me toward the mirror and smiled. She must have been smiling at her reflection, seen across the room. She was so beautiful, so shockingly, overwhelmingly beautiful, that my heart almost stopped. Her hair was jet black and bobbed; her skin was creamy white. Her lips were scarlet, her eyelashes long, her neck and jaw smooth and perfect and the scarlet of her fingernails matched the scarlet of her lips. Her eyes were big, dark and mischievous. She was wearing a blue dress with a short pleated skirt and shiny silk stockings with no shoes. She sat on the bed, still smiling.

I saw her with the eyes of a grown man who knows a beautiful woman when he sees one, and I saw her also with the eyes of a six-year-old child—an only child to whom his mother is the most wonderful thing in the world. The combined effect was devastating. I was hypnotized. I did not move a muscle.

Then she pulled up her dress lazily and began to unfasten her garters. When I saw the cream white of the insides of her thighs I felt for a moment as though I would faint. I had never seen anything so exciting in my life. I remained frozen in my little chair. She took her silk stockings off, laid them beside her on the bed’s pink coverlet. The room was silent; from somewhere outside I could hear the chattering of a squirrel. For a moment I tried to turn my eyes away from the mirror, but I could not do it.