Lately, since I’ve had lots of time, I’ve reread his earlier books. A man I know, a man I thought I was in love with, teased me about being on a Hemingway trip, but it’s really an inverse journey. I see these books differently now; what I thought were unconscious evasions, I now see as skillfully told lies, lies that have given me a new respect for Hemingway and the way he coped with a difficult life. I even started to think that perhaps I could cope with my own.

Then Aunt Ingrid’s letter arrived, not a Christmas letter, not a birthday letter, but a letter that arrived in April in reply to my own unseasonable note. First she told me about the weather in San Diego, which is always superlative, and then about the complete lack of cooked vegetables at the Center. She expressed surprise at hearing from me and regretted that I hadn’t sent news about Ray and the children. She assumed, though, that they were all fit and fine.

On the second page she explained that she had very little recollection about my mother’s year of illness. She vaguely remembered a sickness of some kind, but was sure it was of shorter duration, six weeks at the most. She suggested influenza and then, as an afterthought, eyestrain. She went on to say, “I can’t for the life of me see why you want to delve into all this ancient history.”

The tone was rough, cross; she meant to put me in my place and she did. I couldn’t really blame her. Lies, secrets, casual misrepresentations and small failures of memory, all these things are useful in their way. History gobbles everything up willy-nilly; it doesn’t care a fig for distinctions; it was all the same. My mother’s illness has the same weight as a missing finger or a wooden leg or a fizzled-out love affair. Eventually, everything gets stuck between a pair of parentheses or buried in the bottom of a trunk.

I was thinking about this when the phone rang. It was my husband Ray suggesting we have dinner together. Why not? I said. We met at a place on Rush Street known for its good authentic Basque food, and afterward we sat talking for an hour or two.

He told me the saddest thing that had ever happened to him was seeing the movie Easy Rider, and then coming home and climbing into a pair of striped pajamas and going to bed. I asked him why he’d never told me this before, and he said he didn’t know. I accused him of being secretive, and he smiled and said he’d probably learned it from me.