Neither of us could believe that our mother had told us only half the story. We agreed that we must have blocked out the ending, the moment of actual impact. “Maybe it was a nervous breakdown,” Barclay said, getting back to the subject of our mother’s year of illness.

This was a good possibility, and one that had also occurred to me. Our mother had been a nervous woman. Insomnia, hives, headaches, fits of harsh weeping, all the usual symptoms. “Mom’s in the sadhouse again,” our father would tell us from time to time. But that sad self was her later self, the self that came into being after the betrayal of her veins and the stringy deterioration of her hands. I see her as cool skinned and calm, as a young woman in her sunny Cortland schoolroom, rather like Barclay in the matter of personality.

Barclay said, “Maybe it was one of those mysterious girlish fevers women used to get. Or, what do you call it-wasting disease?”

“No one’s had wasting disease since the eighteenth century,” I told him.

“How about TB?”

“Impossible. She’d have gone to the San.”

“Mono?” he flung out. We tried to think if people had mono in those days, it sounds so much a disease of our own generation. But no, it’s an old illness; we remembered that it was once called glandular fever.

“That’s a real possibility.” I drummed my fingers on the dark wet table, pleased. Barclay, what a good man he was, sensed my pleasure and poured me more wine from the bubbly-sided carafe. Glandular fever. People who had glandular fever had to go to bed and stay there, perhaps as long as a year.

“Why don’t you ask Auntie Ingrid?” Barclay suggested.

“I suppose I could.”

“You still write back and forth, don’t you?”

“Twice a year. Christmas and her birthday. I think she’d go through the floor if I just wrote to her out of the blue and asked her about a thing like that.”

“Well, if you really want to know....” He let his voice trail off mildly, but managed to suggest I’d been wasting his time with my speculation.

“Maybe I will,” I decided. “But that’s not to say I’m going to find anything out. You know how secretive our family is.”

“Oh, I know that,” Barclay said.

In my mother’s family there were two amputations, Auntie Ingrid’s finger and Uncle Harvey’s leg. Even in a family with nine children this seems to me unusual.