His face squeezed into a wide smile. He remembered Mary Morgan all right, one of the old school teacher friends our mother used to talk about, Mary Morgan who was unmarried and Catholic, and who got pregnant and jumped one night off the top of a player piano in an attempt to bring about a miscarriage. For us the story of Mary Morgan’s desperate leap has the sheen of legend about it, and shares space with my mother’s other girlhood legends. Brave little crippled Grace, for instance, who went to DeKalb Normal in a wheelchair, and another friend, someone called Lily, who had the habit of signing her letters, “Lovingly, Lily,” one word swimming coyly beneath the other (an example is preserved in my mother’s “memory book,” floating loose between pressed gardenias and locks of hair).

Barclay and I were having this conversation about Mom and Mary Morgan and Grace and Lily in a downtown bar that serves good roast pork sandwiches. Barclay works as a systems engineer in Houston, and normally, when he comes to Chicago, I invite him out to the house for a family dinner. I wondered if he thought it was funny that I’d suggested we meet down in the Loop like this instead, and that I hadn’t even mentioned Ray and the children. Maybe he thought I was being evasive. Probably not; he has a calm, incurious nature. He’d put on weight, I saw. Even his fingers curving around the wine glass looked puffy. What do you do for love? is the question I would like to have asked him. I imagined the words leaving my mouth and entering his soft body. No, impossible. We talked instead about our mother’s friend Mary Morgan whom neither of us had ever met.

“Do you suppose it worked?” Barclay said. He meant, did she have a miscarriage, and the question surprised me. “Why, I don’t know,” I said with amazement.

Why didn’t I know? This was an old story, after all, and I’d heard it from our mother countless times. The picture was vivid: a carved oak piano draped with some sort of fringed scarf; a woman in a flapper dress with flushed Catholic cheeks is climbing first up onto the keyboard and then onto the top of the piano itself; she crouches, then springs, and there, frozen in mid-air, she has remained. Rings of surprise surround her spread-eagled body which is weightless in flight, but determined, righteous, and stiff with terror.

“Either it worked or it didn’t work,” said Barclay in his committee voice. Then he said, “Maybe she died.”

I said no, I didn’t think so. We would have remembered that.