“I fell off yesterday.”

“That’s part of the game, sweetheart. Don’t let it get you.”

I had been eleven when he disappeared. One day he was there, handsome and debonair. The next he was gone, and I was not to talk about him.

“Why not, mother? Is he sick?”

“I can’t discuss it, Patricia.”

“Will Lydia go too?”

“I hope not.”

That had satisfied me. And Lydia had not gone. She had stayed in her house next door, a little less gay but still lovely, with only the touch of gray in her black hair to denote any change in her. As I grew up I realized what had happened, but it had been Lydia, not Don, who had been a part of my daily life. It was Lydia who had cabled to my school in Switzerland when my father died, and met me in New York on my hysterical return.

“It’s all right, Pat darling. He didn’t know what he was doing. The doctors say—”

But I knew, even then. He had given up his horses the year before and dismissed Weaver, the old butler-houseman who had been with us as long as I could remember. He had managed somehow to send me abroad, but the winter before that must have been one of quiet desperation on his part. I used to meet him with the car in the evenings, and he would alight from the train gray of face and weary.

“Had a bad day, dad?”

“Not too good.”

One evening he told me that he had enough insurance to care for us in case anything happened to him. I did not take it very seriously. He had always been there, a small cheerful man, dapper and neat, the background of my life. And six months later they found him dead in a hotel bedroom in New York. He had registered under another name, and it was two or three days before he was identified.

I was remembering this as we sat there that night, a new moon hanging over the hills across the river, Lydia quiet with her hands folded in her lap, and only next door my carefree childhood, and the bench at the foot of the garden where my mother had sat, evening after evening, alone and quiet after Father’s death.

She did not survive him long. She managed, after a year or so, to give me a debut of sorts: an afternoon tea, she in black and I in white organdy holding a bunch of roses. Lydia had made the dress, and I still have it. But Mother never really rallied. She went on for a few months after that, looking lost and helpless. Things were pretty bad, however. One day the house went up for sale, and on our last day there she made a sort of pilgrimage from room to room. Then she went out into the garden. Much of it she had worked over with her own hands, and I watched her anxiously from a window.