“I can be your mother’s helper, Sylvia,” Aurelia adds selflessly. “Just as Grammy and Grampy were for me when you were small, after Daddy died. And if you wanted to go back to teaching full time, I could take early retirement and raise the children. That would certainly be easier for you than piecing a living together poem by poem.”

Sylvia is nearly faint with the confusion of their egos, their repeating histories, hardly able to breathe, afraid of what she might say—unshaped, uncensored, undefended by the veil of dramatic personae, the reliable justification, however shallow they both fear it to be, of art. She feels so entwined, so smothered, Sylvia is not sure who is whom, tight in her mother’s cobra squeeze. Now Aurelia is grasping for the children, too, the words that she has sacrificed so much for—the usurpation Sylvia has fought and defied since she was twenty. She knows this: She does not want to be her mother.

“This is so generous of you, Mother, but I just can’t. I need to stay here and struggle through.”

“But why, Sylvia—” her mother persists, trying to push past Sylvia’s resistance, “—when you have a family who would do anything for you? I worry about you there alone, especially on Christmas. Why should you struggle through when you could live here, all of your family and old friends around you, good schools, and opportunities for the children—”

“Mother,” Sylvia says, her resolve condensing in the winter cold, “I’m not ever moving back to America.” Is it her imagination, or has the street suddenly gone silent, the schoolchildren and their tide of shouts washed back into Victorian brick?

“There’s no need for you to struggle when we’re here to help you. You can’t have much of a Christmas for the children if you’re working so hard,” Aurelia argues, her dream of rescue bobbing away. “And I was so looking forward to the joy of having my grandchildren in our home for the first time.” The true mother of her daughter, Aurelia has enough pride not to ask for an invitation to visit that she knows is not forthcoming.