My parents' bedroom was at the rear of the addition's upper floor. I had not gone in the room on Sunday, merely glanced through the door-way, seen that Mrs Gordimer had not made up that bed, and shut the door. Now, before I could reconsider, I opened it and stepped inside.

The light from the hall-way showed me a slice of the room: floor-boards, carpet, bed, lamp-shade, wall. I made my way around the bed to the lamp on the night-table, and switched it on.

A simple room, considerably smaller than its counterpart in Pacific Heights. A single, built-in wardrobe for clothing, a small dressing-table for my mother, a private bath-room, and, on the opposite side of the room, French doors leading out onto a balcony wide enough for two chairs and a low table. And between the doors and furniture, bookshelves.

Those shelves, laden and much used, made this room more a boudoir than a chamber for sleeping. Books in the bedroom—serious books, and in great number—were considered an oddity; that I had known even as a child. However, I did not know, then or now, if my mother's intentions had been to bring the best of the outer world into her private chambers, or to keep her private life insulated from the world.

In either case, this room was where she spent what free hours we gave her. My father would take us swimming or out in the boat, and when we looked back at the house, Mother would be here reading, either on the balcony or just inside the glass doors. And it was not that she was shutting us out, for we were welcome to join her, with our own books or choosing one from her shelves. Other activities, board games or cards, were taken elsewhere; books from the shelves generally remained in the room, with cautious permission granted rarely for their removal. It was a room where my mother's worlds overlapped. A holy place, as it were.

Odd, I reflected: In Pacific Heights, I thought of books in association with my father and his library; here, it was my mother's books that dominated, while my father pursued more active forms of entertainment.

I went forward to the shelves, finding them as neat as they had always been: spines pulled evenly half an inch from the edge, a book-end at the right end of each row to allow for additions, every book, large or small, novel or theological treatise, English, Hebrew, or other, arranged by the author's last name. I had asked her once, when I was first reading—was I six? No, it must have been the previous year, if we had gone to England shortly after the 1906 fire—how she could order names when they were in different alphabets, and she had showed me how to transcribe Hebrew letters into their Roman equivalents. Thus, I saw stood easily between Hightower and Hindermann. I used the same system on my own shelves. When, that is, I could be bothered to shelve them properly.