My mom said it would mean more to Elmira and Mrs. Zimmermann if I delivered my books to the doorman in person. “I’ll go with you, sweetie—just in case anything happens,” my mother reassured me. Her coming with me wasn’t reassuring. What I worried might happen was a chance encounter with Elmira or Mrs. Zimmermann in the lobby—a possibility I mentioned to my mom, as casually as I could. “I’m not going to say I should have shot Zim, sweetie—although I should have shot him,” my mother told me. Not exactly reassuring. We set forth from the snowshoer’s; we’d already brought our bed linens from Hell’s Kitchen to the Upper East Side. I should have known that the weather wouldn’t deter my mother from walking with me. It was right around freezing, and the forecast was calling for a mix of snow and freezing rain—wimpy weather for an old Vermont skier, my mom would have told me. She was sixty-seven, but she insisted on carrying the two books in her ski backpack.

We went a roundabout way to Park Avenue. I wanted to show my mother St. James’ Episcopal Church, the site of Zim’s memorial service. It was on Madison, between East Seventy-first and East Seventy-second—a few blocks south and a block west of the Zimmermanns’ apartment building—but my mom didn’t want to go inside the church. “I don’t want to see it, sweetie,” was all she said. “That stupid, futile war!” she suddenly cried out, only a block later—we were still on Madison. Two young men wearing stylish topcoats turned to look at her; I tried to see my mother in their eyes. Her hiking boots exaggerated her mannish way of walking; even when Little Ray was barefoot, she still walked like a jock. In her stretchy ski pants, her tightly fitted parka, with her ski hat pulled low, barely above her eyebrows—well, on a Madison Avenue sidewalk, let’s say my mom was more unisex than most. I saw our reflection in the plateglass window of a storefront for menswear; we looked more alike, and more like men, than the mannequins in the window. We looked more like two guys than those two fashion plates we’d passed on the sidewalk. “People here don’t even know how to dress for the weather,” my mother was saying. “I don’t mean you, sweetie—you’re not from here, and you don’t belong here,” she reminded me.