After my father had been dead for about nine months, he began to appear in the kitchen. I’m referring to the kitchen in England, where my parents had chosen to live in their retirement. They were musicians, and what they wanted to do with their retirement was listen to music, and England is a place for that. They bought a small red-brick house in a village outside Reading, within commuting distance of London. After six months in quarantine, their dog was allowed to join them. They had been careful to buy a house with a fenced-in back yard, the fence hidden by a hedge ten feet tall. A munificent oak held court at the far end of the property, scattering a largesse of acorns for those squirrels willing to brave the dog.

The day came, of course, when the dog could no longer chase the squirrels and my parents could no longer make the long trip to London. My parents now watched telly most of the day; at nine o’clock at night, they moved to the kitchen for ice cream. My father scooped up three dishes, setting one on the floor for the dog. The three of them were crowded into a kitchen barely big enough to hold the appliances. The furnace was in there too, inside a cabinet, warm as a hand, so that being in the kitchen felt like being held in somebody’s palm. Whenever I visited them, I ate the mandatory bowl of ice cream and had that feeling of being held, being clasped and enclosed.

When the dog died, and my father no longer felt needed, sadness took over the house. Such sadness is not unlike what the English call “rising damp,” a pervasive mold in rainy climates. My father declined rapidly. He was diagnosed as having Alzheimer’s, and within a year, he was dead of a stroke. My mother weighed 78 pounds and had lost the use of one of her legs. She had end-stage emphysema. She could no longer manage the stairs. On my last visit there, which I had made wanting to see my father while he could still recognize me, I had gotten them a replacement for Blaze, the dog that had died. Oscar was a Shih Tzu who’d been born with a hernia that rendered him ineligible for breeding and who, at six months, was just a bit too old for consignment to a pet shop. Now he and my mother slept together on a single bed that had been set up downstairs in the dining room, next to the kitchen. When my mother wrote to me that she had seen my father sitting in his chair in the kitchen, I wondered if her mind was going too, and perhaps it wasn’t even Alzheimer’s—I knew from experience that losing someone you love can sensitize you to every memory of him, so that his memory is as present to you as he used to be. It would surely not be difficult to confuse the presence of the memory with the man himself. “Dear Nina,” my mother wrote back when I suggested this, “don’t be a dope. I do not have a sentimental bone in my body, and if your father is not in the kitchen, who the hell is sitting in there scarfing ice cream every night?”

I was, myself, when I read this letter, ensconced in my Green Bay Packers chair—a club chair I’d bought years ago, that had a Green Bay Packers emblem on it; the department store was eager to unload it because even in Wisconsin nobody had been a Green Bay Packers fan since the days of Vince Lombardi—with my own little dog curled up beside me. My daughter, Tavy, was rocking in her rocking chair in front of the radio. Madison, which is so relentlessly populist that it feels that every musical faction, like every political faction, must be served even if it means that everybody winds up feeling shortchanged, refused to have an all-day classical station, and just then, the afternoon jazz program began. My little girl will tolerate nothing but classical. “N-o!” she shouted, stamping her foot on the floor. It was clear that if she had been old enough, she would have retired to England.

I got up and turned the radio off. She had never met her grandmother—who was also her great-grandmother, since her biological mother was my brother’s daughter. I had adopted her.

“How would you like to fly in a big plane across the ocean?” I asked her.

“Can Teddy come?” He was sitting in her lap.

“Yes,” I said, “Teddy can come, but this little piggy will have to stay home.” I picked up my little dog, and he looked straight into my eyes as if saying, How can you do this to me after all we’ve meant to each other? “It’s only temporary,” I said to him. “I’ll be back.”

We Bryants clung to our animals as if they were our lovers, our lifelines. They helped us to have faith in ourselves. Maybe they were ourselves, or the most generous parts of ourselves. As the morning sun broke over the wing of our plane, light spilling ecstatically across the horizon, Tavy held Teddy up to the Pan Am window, pressing his button nose against the pane, showing him the sky, the clouds, the flashing blue-and-silver sea. “My nose is cold,” she said in what appeared to me to be some kind of sympathetic confusion, falling back into her seat.

“You mean Teddy’s nose, don’t you?” I corrected her.

“Teddy’s nose is a button,” she said, amazed by my stupidity. She looked at me as if I were crazy. She didn’t know I used to be. I smiled at her. “A nose by any other name would smell as sweet,” I said, pretending to catch hers between my fingers, making the tip of a nose with my thumb.

_____________

My mother, who had been tall and beautiful, slender and strong, was now a wrinkled doll propped on pillows. She was an island in a sea of cigarette wrappers and ashtrays, Kleenex and toilet tissue, Rollo chocolates in gold tinfoil and half-full cups of cold cocoa, and the complete works of Dickens. Oscar, all gold fur, a live Rollo, sat at her side. I tried to straighten up the mess at the same time I embraced her and introduced Tavy.

I had been worried about this introduction.

As she gazed at her grandmother, Tavy’s eyes grew rounder and rounder. They were green eyes—after the blue period of infancy, her eyes had turned green, though still a blue-green, elm-leaf eyes. My brother and my niece had both had true-green eyes, deep-green off-the-coast-of-Cozumel eyes; my mother’s eyes, now weak and cloudy, had once been hazel-green, sometimes golden, sometimes gray. These subtleties of hue may mean nothing to anyone else but I had observed them with fascination. It was as if there were two branches to the family: the bold branch, with green eyes and outrageous energy; and the quiet brown-eyed branch, the observers.

“Why are you staring at me?” my mother asked Tavy. She’d had a minor stroke a few years earlier and the left side of her mouth seemed to resist any attempt at speech so that her words came out slightly scrunched, determined but fugitive, softly slurred.

Tavy said, “You’re so old.”

“Ha,” my mother said. “You will be too, when you’ve lived as long as I have. And maybe by then you’ll have something more interesting to say.”

My mother had never liked children. Sometimes she would act as if she did, for the sake of her reputation among neighbors or co-workers, offering congratulatory comments over snapshots of newborns or reports of grade-school genius, but she would tell her own children, speaking about children-in-general, “They’re more trouble than they’re worth. After all, what are they going to be when they grow up? People!” Her dislike of children was minor compared with her contempt for adults, to which it was teleologically related. She would have liked it better if human beings could have grown up to be dogs or dolphins.

This was one reason I’d been worried about this introduction.

I was used to my mother’s ways but Tavy wasn’t, and I didn’t want her feelings to get hurt. “I’ll take Tavy upstairs and get her settled in,” I said, standing behind my adopted daughter. And with a protective hand on each small shoulder, I tried to steer her away.

Tavy twisted free, turning back toward the bed. “Are you going to die?” she asked.

I watched my mother’s parchmenty face crumple like a piece of paper history had wadded up and tossed into the trashcan of time. She had had such plans. Once upon a time, she had thought she would outlive my father by enough years to have a second, single life. She would travel to Scotland, take a boat trip through the Norwegian fjords; she would read every novel published before the 20th century (20th-century novels being by and large not worth reading), have affairs for adventure’s sake even if the sex was uninteresting, become a CEO, quite possibly an astronaut as well, and in short, live the life she had never had a chance to live. Instead, she was an unhappy invalid, confined to her downstairs, and so far from being single that her late husband was still hanging around the house.

“Take Teddy upstairs,” I said, pushing my daughter out of the room.

I sat on the bed and held my mother’s hand. Oscar growled.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she said. “All I do is cry. It’s so stupid. I think maybe I’ve got Alzheimer’s.”

“It’s not stupid,” I argued. “On the contrary, it’s completely logical. When your husband dies, you’re supposed to feel sad.” I said this knowing that it was a statement that would not carry much force for her. She thought sadness was a waste of time—if not precisely a fungus.

“I’m worried about him,” she said. “Why is he hanging around here unless it’s because he’s not happy there?”

“Maybe he misses you,” I said, “the way you miss him.”

She sank back onto the pillows. I pulled the afghan up and tucked it in around her arms and sides. “Yes,” she said, frowning, “that would make sense. Your father was never any good at being on his own. I always had to take care of him. But sometimes I got sick of it,” she added. “The responsibility.” She had closed her eyes; now she opened them again. “It’s lucky for him he was a good fiddle player.” She meant she wouldn’t have loved him so if he hadn’t been.

In the life she had actually lived, she had played second fiddle to his first in a succession of string quartets.

“Take a nap,” I urged. “I have to unpack and tend to Tavy. She’s worn out from the trip.”

“She’s a cute kid,” my mother said, but then she couldn’t keep from adding, “as kids go.” She closed her eyes again.

I stood there a moment, looking at her—my mother, a creature of such complexity that it had taken me years even to begin to figure out how to untangle my self from hers.

She had set standards of self-discipline, hard work, and sound reasoning that had for years seemed, no matter how I drove myself, beyond my reach. Yet now, to my surprise, they didn’t seem high enough—they were predicated on a need to disown everything human, and so were still dependent on everything human, whereas I had arrived at a point where my ambitions simply grew out of my work. I had an inkling of where it might go, my work, and the world’s opinion of it or of any art had become irrelevant.

I wished she would consent to understand this. I wanted her to believe, with me, that in adopting Tavy I had not been betraying her or her ideals, that I was merely being true to myself.

Oscar was a little larger than a caramel-covered apple, and about the same color. His coat was a heart-meltingly beautiful gold with light and dark streaks. His squashed-in face resembled that of an ancient Chinese emperor or sage. He glared at me.

_____________

By the next day, Tavy and I had recovered from our jet lag. I put Tavy out into the back yard, the same way my father had let Blaze out for his morning constitutional. Oscar went out with her but he was back in seconds, his fur fringed in dew; he refused to leave my mother any more than was absolutely necessary.

When I wasn’t there, my mother managed with a patchwork system of part-time nurses, helpful neighbors, and a cleaning woman who came in mornings. In my honor, she had dismissed most of these. I spent the day plumping her pillows, fixing meals, helping her to the commode chair, emptying the commode chair, washing dishes, answering the telephone, handling business correspondence, bringing in the milk, doling out pills—and then there was Tavy. I hadn’t a minute to myself, and before long, I was exhausted. So when I bumped into my father in the kitchen, I told myself I was seeing things. The power of suggestion coupled with repressed hysteria and total tiredness was causing me to hallucinate. My father just shook his head, slowly, sadly, the way he’d always done when he was feeling pessimistic.

“It’s true,” he said. “I’m really here.” He sighed heavily, as if this was not only unlikely but lamentable.

“But why?” I asked.

“Search me,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “I don’t have any idea what’s going on. I’ve got a hunch it’s like what Satchmo said about jazz: if you have to ask, you’ll never know.”

He was nicely dressed in a pale green long-sleeved shirt and gray slacks. He had always cared about clothes, although he’d rarely spent any money on them for himself.

He was thin, with dark, thinning, but attractively unruly, hair that had the right amount of gray in it. He looked stronger than he had in his last year of life, but he was still frail. When he took off his glasses to rub the bridge of his nose where they pinched, I could see, in his large brown eyes, the intelligence that had made him who he was, before Alzheimer’s disease had come along like a thief, some sort of mental mugger, and snatched it away, leaving him someone he wasn’t. In other words, I realized, this was indeed the ghost of my father—not the ghost of the pitiful physical envelope that had contained an Alzheimer’s victim.

I wondered if something had happened to him that I was supposed to exact revenge for, so his wandering spirit could find peace. I wondered if this kitchen were the modern equivalent of parapets and that was why he was here. Was he restless? Had he been wronged?

I sat down at the table. My mother had dozed off in the living room, in front of the telly, after the seven o’clock news. “I don’t understand,” I said, facing him. “I thought ghosts, if there were any, would be the residue of souls who died violently or at any rate before their time. You were seventy-eight. You had emphysema almost as bad as Mother’s. You had arthritis. You had Alzheimer’s. A stroke was probably the best thing that could have happened to you.”

But even as I was saying this, I was remembering how alone he had been when he died.

He had been at the rest home for a week—not for his sake but to give my mother a rest. She could still walk unaided then, though barely, and she wore herself out day after day trying to take care of him. He thought that by going into the home for a short stint, giving her a respite, he could put off the day when she might feel compelled to send him there forever.

The day before he was to come home, she slipped in the bathroom and fell, hitting her head on the sink and also hurting her back. This was the bathroom she had tiled herself, a dark green paragraph of tiles punctuated here and there with the odd Dutch scene, Jack and Jill carrying pails, or a windmill in a tulip field. Confined to bed, she was unable to look after her husband, but his room in the rest home had been spoken for, so the doctor arranged to have him moved to a second rest home.

It wasn’t far—a few blocks down the street from the little red-brick house. His room was at the back and had a view onto a duck pond. It was Christmas Eve, and that afternoon the Salvation Army threw a party in the lounge for the “guests.” Every so often, my father, the musician, would recognize one of the carols and shout out a word or two—a kind of rudimentary singing.

After the party, back in his room, he was sitting in the chair by the window, gazing at the ducks, trying to comprehend how it was that he’d once been a small, obedient boy in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and then was a shy, intense young man in Chicago and Louisiana and New York, and then a middle-aged man in Virginia, and now had become a dotty old fool in a rest home in England, separated by illness and accident from the woman with whom he’d lived for over fifty years. He thought this would have been difficult to fathom even if he had not been senile. The ducks in the pond were so bright, as bright as paint. The sky was as gray as a goose, with pinfeather clouds.

Suddenly his heart seemed to double over, and his left arm, which had for most of his life been a kind of mast, holding his violin aloft in musical light, crashed against his chest with a killing weight.

He could still think, images were still vividly present to his consciousness even if the connections among them were sometimes scrambled, and what he thought about at this moment was his wife. “Is Mother all right?” he asked in the ambulance, on the way to the hospital. He pictured her at home, alone, ill and worrying about him.

But right after he asked about her, even before the ambulance had reached the hospital, the walls of his brain gave way too—it was a general collapse, his entire body falling apart section by section, being demolished by the great wrecking ball of age. “The walls of his brain were incredibly thin,” the doctor said. “There was massive bleeding.”

His lungs and legs were still working. The doctor had said my father would die before daybreak, but Christmas afternoon, a nurse found him wandering the hallways. “A reflex action,” they said; they said he could not have thoughts or feelings anymore. What did they know about his thoughts and feelings? He could still refer to himself as “I,” as in “I’m thirsty.” They decided not to give him water or food; he was starving to death. On the 27th, he died, unattended even by machines.

And so, he must have come back because he was lonely. I’d been right—he missed my mother. He nodded. “I never liked that little dog, though,” he said. “I couldn’t get used to his taking Blaze’s place.”

“Where is Blaze? Why isn’t he here?”

“Imagine being able to do what you want to do and being able to do it forever,” he said. “Blaze is in heaven, chasing squirrels.”

So animals did have souls, I said to myself, satisfied to wipe out one very disagreeable strain in theological thought.

“And you play your violin,” I said, sure that this was what he would want to do forever.

“No. After all these years, it just doesn’t feel right without your mother next to me on second, smoking up a storm and criticizing my intonation. How is she?”

“She’s okay,” I said. “Demanding. You know how she is.”

“She always kept us on our toes,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Don’t let her make you feel too bad about the kid,” he said. “She’s a cute kid.” (Like all parents, they sometimes quoted each other without knowing it. Or maybe he did know it—had been listening, invisible but not insensible, at the foot of my mother’s bed when I displayed Tavy to her.)

All at once, I wanted to know what he thought about the fact that the mother of his children didn’t like children, but I could hardly ask him this, directly. It might disturb him, and I didn’t want to make his restless spirit any more restless. “Do you really think Tavy’s cute?” I said.

“Adopting her was the right thing to do. And I think you need her.”

As he said this, his voice dropped to a spectral pitch, like an undertone, and I realized I could see the back of his chair through his body.

“You’re fading!” I cried.

“I always did fade about this time of night. Good night, Nina,” he said.

He was gone.

Oscar came tearing into the kitchen. He made a circle from the kitchen through the dining room and living room and foyer back to the kitchen—again and again.

“Oscar’s gone crazy,” I said to my mother, waking her up and helping her from the wing chair to her bed.

“Your father must have been here. He and Oscar never got along. They saw themselves as rivals for my time.”

He leapt onto the bed. He had a beard, a Confucian beard, and his eyes were clever. My little dog at home was not nearly so clever, but sweeter. And clever, just not so clever.

My mother wanted pills, a glass of water, a cup of cocoa, to make a list. Tavy was crying upstairs. “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy,” she yelled. I ran upstairs, downstairs, upstairs. I felt as if I were running back and forth between my past and the future.

_____________

Tavy never saw my father. Apparently, since she had not known him in life, she was not supposed to know him in death. He took an interest in her, however.

“You’d better get her started on the violin right away,” he said. “She’s already almost too old.”

He was resting his chin in his palms, elbows propped on the linoleum-top table.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I remember how painful it was when you gave me lessons. It felt like my arm was going to break off.”

“That’s ridiculous, Nina. Your arm couldn’t have hurt. Nothing is more malleable than a young child’s bones.”

I remembered it hurting.

“She takes ballet lessons,” I offered. In the Meadow Scene, she had been a bee, buzzing her way across the stage in a black leotard striped with yellow crepe paper.

When I said she took ballet, he started to fade. I knew he wouldn’t consider ballet music real music, and I said, “You can’t just fade whenever things don’t go the way you want them to.”

“I don’t see why not,” he said. “It’s one of the advantages of being dead.”

“Is that you, Avery?” my mother called from the other room. “What are you two talking about?”

She pulled herself along in her walker, entering the kitchen by degrees. Finally she was in her chair across from him. They looked at each other over the table, a doll-size table for doll-size people in a doll-size house in a doll-size country.

“Well, Ave,” she said, “it’s a hell of a note, isn’t it. I’m just barely alive and you don’t seem to be quite dead.”

“Would anybody like some ice cream?” I asked.

They both nodded. I dished it up into three bowls; it was vanilla. They wanted chocolate syrup so I heated the open can in a pot of water on the stove. It was an aluminum pot and I wondered if it had been a contributing factor in my father’s getting Alzheimer’s. I drizzled the syrup over the ice cream. Tavy was asleep upstairs, snug in her dreams. Oscar sat on the floor at my mother’s feet. Unlike Blaze, he liked peaches but not ice cream.

_____________

“What’s it like over there?” I asked, perching on the tall stool at the sink counter. I felt like an overgrown child in a high chair. There wasn’t room for a third chair at the table.

“I don’t really know,” he said. “I haven’t had much of a chance to look around yet. The climate is better, I guess. Not so much rain. I suppose that is because heaven is not an island.”

Was it a continent? Maybe heaven was the ocean, and our entire universe one small island in it. “Do you have to listen to a lot of harp music?” This had been nagging at me. The Mozart Flute and Harp Concerto was nice, but for an eternity?

“I don’t think you understand. Being dead isn’t at all like being alive. You don’t do things over there, you just are them. I believe it’s got something to do, with everything’s happening faster than the speed of light. Because everything happens faster than the speed of light, doing and being are the same thing. You don’t listen to music, you are music,” my father said.

“How lovely,” said my mother, who had always had a running argument with the world as it was. She thought it would be desirable to shed both the body and the ego, emerging as a work of art rather than a worker of art. In this, she reminded me of Van Gogh. Or Buddha or Einstein, for that matter, since she was in no way parochial about the forms of beauty.

“A poem does not mean but be,” I said, slightly disgusted.

“Close,” my father said. “But still not exactly right. There’s still meaning—nobody wants to eliminate that. It’s just that it now resides in what is, not in what isn’t. If you think about it, you’ll see that on earth it is always absence that is meaningful. And that is the source of all unhappiness.”

I found all this very disturbing. Although it sounded like a fine premise—heaven as eternal being—I was not at all sure I would in fact want to give up either creation or contemplation, which is what the premise seemed to entail. There had to be a separation between maker or thinker and the thing made or the thing thought about, or else there wouldn’t be any making or thinking. If unity was all, there was no relatedness—and I liked the idea of relation. I liked being in relation to the thing I was trying to bring into being and liked losing myself in that effort. I liked the idea that the idea of union was predicated on the idea of divorce. It wasn’t just the paradox that appealed to me; it was the idea of desire, of longing for achievement. Throwing that out would throw out a number of other things, too—the concept of development would go, for example, as in the sustained developmental passage of a Beethoven string quartet, and that was the linchpin of my philosophy of art. That was the baby I didn’t want tossed out the window with the bathwater. (I had seen Tavy not so much as an opportunity to revise the story of my own life as the chance to write a sequel. She was the extension of me; she was my self projecting itself into otherness, my self losing itself, ultimately to become herself—the way a novel, muscling its way through time, emerges on the last page as something that can suddenly be seen to be both inherent in and utterly different from the opening sentence.)

In brief, if there was no gap, no shortfall between start and finish, there was no possibility of becoming.

That is to say—if my father was to be believed, and though reticent, he had always been a man of truth—the continuous tense had, in heaven, epiphanically revealed itself to be a predicate.

“Let me get this straight,” my mother said. “Blaze is not simply chasing squirrels, he somehow is chasing squirrels. He is the very idea of a dog chasing squirrels. Similarly, if I wanted to fly, I would just be flying.”

I saw her with her arms outstretched—or at least the good arm outstretched, the other, flattened by stroke, tucked against the side—homing in on Heathrow.

“And if,” she said, taunting him (she was ever the tease), “I wanted to make love, though God knows I never would, I would just be love.”

“Lovemaking, actually,” my father said, a glint in his eye.

“I’d rather be the idea of flight.”

“Not the idea. The thing itself.”

“I like the ideas,” I said, feeling threatened, as if somebody were about to deprive me of them—as my father must have felt, as he sensed his illness encroaching on the private property of his brain. “I don’t want to give them up. They’re what make the things themselves interesting. A thing without an idea would be like a plane without an engine. It wouldn’t fly.”

“I should never have told you two about this,” my father said, fading. “I should have known that if anybody would have criticism to make about heaven, it would be the two of you.”

“You come back here, Avery!” my mother called. “It’s not fair of you to keep slipping away like this!”

But he was gone. I washed the dishes.

_____________

The house was in a close, a dead-end drive like a sclerotic artery to the heart of the development. Dogs and cats and children played on the front lawns and welcomed the paperboy, the milkman, the greengrocer, the butcher, the cleaning man, the window washer, the refuse collector, the television serviceman (in England, only the rich own television sets; everyone else rents), and the teenaged boy who came to mow my mother’s lawn.

To my mother’s house also came the doctor, the district nurse who bathed her, the physical therapist who exercised her muscles, the hairdresser who washed and set her sparse white hair, the elderly female postal clerk who came out of her way to bring the stamps she allowed my mother to order over the telephone, and the neighbors—even when the part-time housekeeper and the part-time private nurses and the handyman who did her grocery shopping and the woman who stopped in to get her breakfast for her were not, as they now were not, there.

Among the neighbors was a retired constable who now donated his time to the local volunteer squad, taking sick people to hospital and collecting them when they were well, accompanying the elderly on their visits to the clinic at Mortimer, and serving as my mother’s banker. The first of the world wars had shattered his family’s fortunes and diverted his own future from its expected course, through university, into the police academy, from which he had emerged as a staunchly conservative supporter of the class system. I never could fathom this peculiarly English tendency to applaud one’s own oppression. He was like a tall, silver-haired, barrel-chested bird alighting from time to time in our living room, bearing not twigs in his beak for our nest but the cash my mother had asked him to withdraw from her account. He was both kindly and argumentative. Like many Englishmen, he could never really believe that any woman would seriously oppose any of his opinions, and of course my mother opposed them all. In her old age, my mother had become radicalized. She sat in front of the telly making wisecracks about Maggie Thatcher. She styled herself a Social Democrat, but recognizing that her party hadn’t a prayer, was willing to throw in her lot with the labor unionists. Malcolm, the male bastion of suburban conservatism, thought these political sympathies adorably female and unbelievably ridiculous. My mother invariably responded by acting adorably female, right up to the point where he’d say something ridiculous, and then she’d spring the particular trap she had set on that occasion. They were devoted to each other and had great fun playing this cat-and-mouse game, each being convinced that the other was the mouse.

“The trouble with Reagan,” my mother announced from the wing chair one day as Malcolm towered in front of her, his back against the bay window as if he were shielding us from the world, “is that he’s so stupid it’s impossible for anyone to communicate with him. Now you take Star Wars. Everyone’s running around building satellites and laser guns because nobody has ever stopped to figure out that in Reagan’s mind this was a reference to Gunfight at the OK Corral. We could all get killed because he thinks being President of the United States is no different from being President of the Screen Actors Guild.”

My mother’s eyes were guileless, even blank: in age, they had the peculiar quality a television screen has in the dark when it is turned off, that ability to glow without light. It was the expectant thrust of her jaw, the way her chin was tilted slightly up—as if she were somehow ready to take it on the chin—that gave her away. I wondered how long she had been waiting to say this to Malcolm.

Malcolm has a high color. His face turned as red as the light on the washing machine in my mother’s kitchen; he looked like he’d entered a spin cycle. Tavy, who had materialized in the living room holding Teddy upside down by one leg, looked up at him. “Are you going to die too?” she asked.

“This child is a necrophiliac,” my mother said.

“Now, now, Tavy,” Malcolm said, bending down to confront her at eye level. When he said her name, it sounded like Tah-vy instead of Ta-vy. “You must not think that everybody’s going to die just because your grandfather did.”

We had not informed the neighborhood of the intricacies of Tavy’s appearance on earth, so Malcolm didn’t know that Tavy’s grandfather was also her great-grandfather.

“If you die,” she said, looking him in the eye and gnawing on Teddy’s leg, “you can have some ice cream.”

I looked out the bay window, both fascinated and embarrassed while she went on to explain her statement.

“That’s what Grandpa does,” she said. “He has ice cream every night in the kitchen.”

“And do you say hello to him?” Malcolm asked, humoring her.

There were blue tits and coal tits crowded together on the evergreen, and a small brown wren in the sumac bush. The Woodbines’ Burmese cat was watching the wren closely.

“No,” she said. “I can’t see him. But Mommy and Grandma do. I hear them talking to him when I’m in bed.”

Malcolm stood up, knees cracking. He brushed Oscar’s dog hairs from his trousers. “She certainly has an active imagination. I guess it’s an artistic family, isn’t it, Eleanor.”

“More’s the pity,” she admitted.

“I should think that artists are well-nigh obliged to be a bit illogical,” he continued smoothly. “They say there’s only a fine line between genius and insanity.” He glanced slyly at my mother, as if he’d scored a decisive point.

I excused myself and went out to the kitchen and sat down in my father’s chair at the table and laid my check against the cool linoleum of the table top. Because my father had made this table, I felt like I was placing my cheek next to his.

Nobody in the other room, I was thinking, knew how close I had come to crossing that line, once upon a time.

I opened an eye and realized that Oscar had followed me and was looking up at me. It was the first time he had treated me like something other than a potential enemy. I picked him up and began to stroke him. My little dog at home had density, solidity, a firm, round stomach emphatically real, not to mention greedy. Oscar fell across my lap as lightly as silk; he seemed to be made of cloth, I was wearing a live, gold skirt.

From the other room I heard sounds of laughter. Malcolm called out, “I’m leaving now!” and I heard the door shut behind him. I shook Oscar off and went back into the living room. Tavy looked worried. “Mommy, do I imagine things?”

“Of course you do,” I said. “Everyone does.”

“But do you talk with Grandpa, or not?”

“Why not?” I said. “Why shouldn’t people talk to the dead? Where are you going to find a better bunch of listeners?”

“Take it from me,” my mother added. “Your grandfather makes a whole lot more sense than Ronald Reagan. Even dead. Even with Alzheimer’s.”

_____________

Despite these brief (but for me, how shining!) moments of communion among my mother, my daughter, and myself, there was more often a tug of war going on, with me as the rope.

I was nervously aware of my mother’s deep skepticism about me, her feeling that my having elected to live with and care for a child made it doubtful that I’d complete the work I had always insisted I would do. She looked at me with the corners of her mouth turned down in disgust and even fear, as if I’d betrayed her, as if my action had been a wanton assault on everything she’d tried to teach me. To myself, I thought, Beethoven had his nephew—why shouldn’t I adopt my grandniece? But I had more sense than to say that out loud.

When Tavy was being cute, I felt vindicated—but also guilty, for proving my mother wrong. And when Tavy was cranky or mean, banging a spoon against the floor just because she enjoyed the distress it caused us, or screaming until she seemed to have turned into a tiny human horn, all noise and out of tune, I avoided my mother’s eyes, guiltily fearing a told-you-so look. All this guilt was getting me down, and I would no doubt have felt sorry for myself if there’d ever been any time to, but my days were cataracts of busyness, chores cascading from dawn to dusk, one long waterfall of obligation.

I had tried to do right by them both, and they both seemed to think I had failed them, I had abandoned them, each for the sake of the other.

_____________

What I would have liked was a stiff drink. What I got was ice cream.

In the kitchen that night, my mother and father and I discussed my brother. “It was our fault,” my mother, in a breast-beating mood, said, referring to his spectacular decline and fall, which had ended in his death from alcoholism. My mother got into these self-blaming moods but perhaps they were more an expression of her perfectionism than of pity. “We had no money and couldn’t give him any of the things he wanted. When he was a freshman in college, he had only one pair of pants. One day your father discovered he had nothing to wear under them.”

This fact dazzled me. I had never understood exactly why we had always been so broke. According to my parents, my brother and I had made excessive demands on their finances, yet my brother had no underwear. Birthday presents were a Hershey bar. We seldom got books and never lessons or anything like that. Maybe the violins, the bows, had consumed all the money. Maybe we were just poorer than I ever really understood.

“Alcoholism is a sickness,” I said, “a disease. People know that now.”

“He could have quit,” my mother said. “People do.”

“There’s a problem here,” my father interjected. “At what point does addiction override free will? If you quit drinking, are you still addicted?”

“Members of AA refer to themselves as recovering alcoholics,” I explained, “no matter how long they’ve been dry.”

“But then Mother is right, drinking isn’t purely a disease. It’s a disease you can choose to have or not to have, and what other disease do you know of like that? Believe me,” he said, “I could have used a choice when it came to Alzheimer’s.”

We were all silent for a minute. To lose your mind, I was thinking, what a sorrow, what a shock.

In the hospital, I had thought I was losing mine: it used to disappear for hours on end, then slip back, like a teenager into the house, at the last minute.

I’d never told my parents about any of this because they had said that they did not want to hear any bad news; they had had crisis-ridden lives, burdened with debt, they said, and they wanted no more stories of trouble. We were a family with secrets—where the money went, who was crazy, who slept with whom, whose child was whose, how anyone felt.

“You’d better be careful that Tavy doesn’t start drinking,” my mother continued. “Your father had a sister who drank.” My father clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth at this mention of Aunt Millicent, a husky-voiced redhead who had died at age seventy surrounded by empty vodka bottles, but who, he thought, my mother should now be willing to let rest in peace. “And your brother?—”

“Your son,” I reminded her.

“And I suspect Babette drinks, wherever she is.”

Babette was Tavy’s biological mother, a teenaged runaway last seen heading for California. No one knew what to think about her. Suppose she was a hooker. Suppose she had AIDS.

Suppose, I thought more happily, she was a starlet in scarlet, a bikini’d bathing beauty in oversized sunglasses, lounging on a rubber raft in a Beverly Hills pool, tiny American flags decaled on her insouciant toenails?

“You don’t know that,” I said. “Babette could be a teetotaler.” Though this seemed unlikely, if she was hanging out around a pool in Beverly Hills. “And it’s a little early to worry about Tavy’s drinking habits.”

My father said, “What a morbid conversation this is.”

“You’re dead, Avery. What do you expect?”

A still moon shone in through the kitchen door, which had a key-lock, a latch, and top and bottom bolts because a couple of years ago my parents had gotten worried about the wave of granny-bashing that was rolling over England. I undid all the locks and let Oscar out. He trotted down the narrow walk that led from the patio, along the hedge, ten feet tall, on the right side of the lawn, to the second patio, under the oak tree, where rhododendrons and rose bushes bloomed.

In the moonlight, his gold coat gleamed like a pound coin. I wondered again why my family had always fretted so about money. (I knew that money was one of my major themes, waiting for a critic who could trace and analyze its appearance in my various works.)

Oscar sniffed at the bushes, then raised his head and looked at the hushed night sky, as if listening to some constellatory music only animals could hear. Out there, in that darkness, there might be answers to all our questions. Or there might be just more questions. I shivered, unsweatered in the cold, and called to Oscar to come in. He turned around to look at me, and though he was at the other end of the lawn, in the dark, I could have sworn he was right in front of me, bright as dawn, hypnotic as a gold watch. In the cool dampness of the English dark, he was like some strange changeling, a silky, sulky midsummer sprite.

_____________

I slept in my father’s bed. Tavy was on the cot in the extremely small room that my mother had used as an office for keeping the household finances. No one used my mother’s bedroom; the fiction was that when she was feeling better she would move back upstairs.

On the wall facing the headboard of my father’s bed was a window, and next to it, a framed photograph of my father’s violin. The violin had been auctioned at Sotheby’s. The photograph was actually four small photographs: from a book featuring his violin, among others, he had cut out four plates and had taped them behind four “windows” razored into a piece of cardboard; then he labeled the mat in his flowing composer’s hand, and put a frame around it. I now wondered why he’d never felt entitled to have a photograph professionally made and framed.

The window faced west, so night clung to it as long as it could. As light began to reach down from the upper story of the sky, doves cooed under the eaves as if to welcome it. Magpies and hummingbirds sent out their own BBC signals—Better Bird Casting. Still half-asleep, I listened to that dreamy music as if it were a score—the score, the one I had always been trying to find out.

I couldn’t lie in bed for long because my mother wouldn’t permit it. At five-thirty, there’d be a huge pounding noise coming from the ceiling below, and I’d wake in a rush of adrenaline, thinking alarm. She was beating on the ceiling with her broomstick.

“If I don’t have to sleep,” she said, “I don’t see why anyone else should have to.” She actually said that to me, as I stared at her, bleary-eyed, from the foot of her bed. I was wearing an old shirt over a cotton nightgown, and socks that had caused me to slip as I ran down the stairs, banging my hipbone bad enough so a stabbing pain would sometimes radiate up my back. I wanted to tell her that her “toughness” was no longer cute. That it may have been cute fifty years ago, but now it was indistinguishable from a lack of consideration for other people.

But I just stared at her, amazed she could say such a thing and too afraid of hurting her to confront her. I’d always been afraid of hurting her. The thing was, the older I got, the more I began to be angry about this. “We don’t want to know about any problems,” she’d said, but I wanted her to know me. This anger . . . it was as if part of me was regressing. At this rate, when I reached her age, I’d be a withered-up three-year-old, wanting everyone to make up for my mother’s selfishness. It was figuring this out—that generalized anger, anybody’s generalized anger, stemmed from a belated desire to have someone make up for early neglect and was a kind of regression—that saved my temper: I realized I was dealing with a three-year-old. And I already knew how to deal with a three-year-old.

Tavy, Oscar, and Teddy were taking tea in the living room. With each day that passed, Oscar had become a little less grudging toward Tavy, and now he was lying on his stomach on the green carpet, a thimble-sized teacup of painted wood just beyond his punched-in muzzle. Teddy was sitting up, leaning against the wing chair. Tavy was pouring.

When I saw the miniature dishes, bright golden wood painted with a delicate row of blue and green flowers, I felt myself being carried back in time, tugged out to sea by the strong undertow of memory, that current of images and sensations that has so much to do with the direction we take in life but which we are usually unaware of.

I fixed breakfast for my mother, Tavy, and Oscar. “You forgot Teddy’s breakfast,” Tavy said, looking at me accusingly. I gave him a dog biscuit, but then Oscar wanted one too. I unlocked the kitchen door and shooed the trio into the back yard.

_____________

On the brick patio under the oak tree, they played in the summer light. They were like creatures from another world, a world of timelessness whose dimensions had spread out by mistake and gotten ensnared with ours; otherwise, these small aliens would not be known to us even to the temporary extent that they were. I leaned against the doorjamb, letting my spine sag. I wanted to weep, thinking that one day Tavy would be my age. I would be a demanding old woman. One day Oscar would make a last trip to the vet. One day even Teddy would go to the vast grave of teddy bears, the stuffing knocked out of him, ears and eyes and button nose beyond repair.

“Come here,” my mother yelled, snapping me out of my sad reverie.

I had helped her into the wing chair in front of the telly, but the screen was dark. She was reading a biography of Dickens. She lit a cigarette. I had to keep an eye on her because whenever she opened a new pack of cigarettes, she performed a ritual coda by touching the lighter to the cellophane wrapping, starting small fires in the ashtray.

“Yes?” I said.

My mother the pyromaniac watched as the cellophane flared and died, the bitter odor of burning plastic a sudden, sharp note on the air. “What’s going to happen to your work now that you’ve got Tavy to take care of?”

I knew that she had been waiting to ask me this just as she had waited for the right moment to taunt Malcolm with her remark about Reagan.

“It’s going to deepen,” I said. “It’s going to widen.”

I understood that she would feel compelled to argue the opposite case, since she had always believed that having children had hampered her. “It’s not that we didn’t want you,” she rushed to assure me. “But you don’t know what you’re getting into. All I did for years was worry about you children.”

This last statement was not true, but it must have seemed true to her. She wanted to believe it. It even occurred to me that maybe the reason it had not been true was that if she had paid any attention to us, it would have been true. Maybe she had turned away from us not out of disinterest or selfishness but fear, feeling that, if she were to acknowledge our existence, the attendant responsibilities would suffocate her.

Thinking about her blighted life, she started to cry. More and more, she was doing this, swinging between moods. She’d be angry one minute, disconsolate the next. If you said something to cheer her up or comfort her, she’d look at you with those clouded eyes that didn’t seem to see you and say, “Ha.” Like that: “Ha.”

I yanked a Kleenex from the box and handed it to her. She let it drop, slamming her fists into her chest as if some internal mechanism had suddenly gone haywire and pulled her arms up short. The same screwed-up guy wires had twisted her face into a look of agony. I thought, Oh God, oh God. I grabbed the buzzer for the Lifeline Unit. A voice came over the speaker: “Mrs. Bryant? Mrs. Bryant?”

“This is Nina Bryant,” I shouted. “I think my mother is having a heart attack.”

In no time, there was an ambulance in the driveway. Malcolm had come over and was standing in front of my mother, trying to persuade her to let them take her to the hospital, where they could run tests to see if she had indeed had a heart attack. The ambulance drivers waited at the door to the living room, caps in hand. Tavy and Oscar had come in from outside and wandered among the grown-ups as if among tall trees.

“I don’t want to,” my mother said. “The last time I was in hospital, I had to stay awake all night because a lesbian kept trying to pinch me.”

The three tall Englishmen stared down at the carpet. I knew my mother sounded crazy to them: scrunched-up old ladies weren’t even supposed to know words like “lesbian.”

“It’s true,” I said, as if my mother were on trial and I was her defense lawyer. “I was there once when it happened. The woman was ninety-three but she was horny. The nurses just laughed at her and took her back to her own bed, but from my mother’s point of view, it wasn’t funny at all.”

Imagine what it would be like to be unable to get away, unable to get out of your own bed, lying there in the dark, feeling like prey.

“It’s important to find out whether or not you’ve suffered a heart attack, Eleanor,” Malcolm said again.

“Important to whom?” my mother said. “It’s not important to me.”

“It’s important to me,” I said, and she started to cry again.

_____________

She wanted to die, or at least she said she did. She made jokes about how, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t seem to pull it off. She said if she could just die, she’d give God a piece of her mind. It was a hell of a way to run a universe, she’d tell Him: all this evil and illness, death and decay and bad art.

She said she wanted to die, but the truth was she was afraid to. She had so much invested in being herself. Dying meant giving all that up, and nothing scared her as much as giving up.

I attributed this fear of surrender to some early-developed sense of being easily overwhelmed, perhaps in response to having two sisters enough older than she was that it was like having three mothers. Or maybe the loss of an Edenic childhood, lived among cypresses and water moccasins and bright birds as flamboyant as flying graffiti, in a bayou in Louisiana, had translated itself into lifelong anxiety about further loss. Or maybe, as the youngest, the baby of the family, her father’s favorite, she had felt forever cheated, after she discovered that no matter how good a daughter she was, she was not going to be allowed to remain his daughter forever.

I think she had been shocked to find herself an adult, and with more than her fair share of responsibility. She had done her best to recover, tossing out all childish things in a wholesale psychological housecleaning. In the battle to define herself against whatever it was she perceived as a threat, she had defeated the almost pathological shyness of her youth and gone on guard against all revelations of vulnerability. The result was—my mother, the seventy-eight-pound warrior on 24-hour-a-day alert. She had not surrendered to herself; she wasn’t about to surrender to anyone else; she could not bear the thought of surrendering to death—she kept thinking there had to be a way she could do this on her own terms.

It was because she hated the thought of surrendering that she disdained politicians. It was why she disliked sex, though she said the reason she didn’t like sex was that it was about as interesting as having someone stick a pencil in your ear.

And yet, what a passionate romance she’d had with my father for fifty tumultuous years.

Now, in her old age, she was as small and brown-spotted as a mushroom, growing in the forest of her bed. Her skin, creased as leather, was as soft as suede. Her breasts had vanished, receding when they became no longer relevant. And this was a woman who had been five-six-and-a-half, with outstanding legs.

I made more of her beauty than she did. She hardly ever wore makeup; for her, her beauty was just a fact, like her height.

For me, her beauty was a standard. And it was a clue, as if, by deciphering it, I could understand why her youth had been so different from mine. It was interesting to me to imagine her at twenty, say, with her hair cut in a “windblown” style, and wearing a white coat bought specifically for walking along the shore on those lovely gray days in Gulfport when the breezes were cool and there was spray from the surf and a hint of storm in the air. She would look out over the Gulf in the direction of Mexico and South America, constructing the future as an exotic landscape just over the horizon. She danced the nights away with her boyfriends, who were plentiful, at a waterfront pavilion in Biloxi. Her mother had made her a white organdy evening dress, trimmed in red, for the Valentine dance, and a black-and-white striped dimity with a black velvet sash for afternoon parties. Sometimes she and her friends went to drive-in movies, or they organized torchlit expeditions to spear flounder in the shallow water at the base of the seawall. In the afternoons they sailed, or played putt-putt on the miniature golf course by the municipal pier, or drove up and down the beach road, stopping occasionally for Cokes and hot dogs.

When I was the age she had been then, I attended a banquet with my parents. During dessert, the man sitting next to me turned to me and said, as if this were a fact I had to be forced to face, “You’ll never be as beautiful as your mother.” As soon as the coffee cups were cleared away and the dancing had started, I got the car keys from my father, excused myself and went out to the car, let myself in and curled up in the back seat and cried, long into the sycamore-scented night. I cried on the drive home. I cried all weekend, shut up in my room. My mother’s response to all this unexplained self-pity was, as usual, disgust, but I was afraid that if I told her what the matter was, she would feel guilty. I didn’t want her to feel she’d let me down genetically. My father came into my room and tried to get me to talk, but I couldn’t tell him, either, because he would get worried that there was something going on between my mother and the man who had spoken to me, because he was always worried that he loved her more than she loved him and she might fall in love with someone else and have an affair and leave him. To make himself more attractive to her, he had recently spent $900 on Arthur Murray dance lessons, in secret, so he would be able to dance with her at the banquet. I didn’t know how to dance either, but girls weren’t supposed to need lessons.

“Do you remember when Daddy went to Arthur Murray?” I asked her.

“Ha,” she said.

“Ha?”

“Nobody’s dancing now.”

She had such a sad look on her—her mouth dragged down and trembling, her eyes like one-way windows that she could see out of but you couldn’t see in. She was wearing her favorite outfit, a pink “sweatsuit” with a pastel-blue bunny over the heart. She had high cheekbones and in profile still looked like the young Katharine Hepburn.

_____________

Though she read constantly, she also liked to be read to. I sat at the foot of the bed, squinting, under the pale light of the overhead fixture, at the microbe-sized print in her gilt-edged “fine” editions with ribbon bookmarks. Tavy would join us, her small face screwed up in tight concentration as if she were following every word of Barchester Towers. One afternoon my mother broke into my reading to ask, “How far back can you remember?” I started to answer her when she said, “Not you. I’m talking to Tavy. Do you remember lying in your crib?” my mother asked her. “Do you remember the curtains in your bedroom blowing in over your crib? I do.”

Tavy stuck her thumb in her mouth.

“I remember tying and untying a gauze bandage on my big toe,” my mother went on. “I remember the lavender kimono I was wearing when my parents took me to the hospital to have my tonsils out—and that was before I was two. It seems like the closer you are to these events, like Tavy, the better you’d remember them, but it’s just the opposite, isn’t it? They come back to you as you get older. Isn’t that ironic!”

“Probably the older you get, the farther back you can remember,” I said. “Probably one day you have a blinding recollection of being born, and in the same instant you die.”

We looked at each other and started to laugh, a few collusive giggles at first and then we laughed harder and harder. Tavy just looked at us and continued to suck her thumb. I was afraid she thought we were laughing at her, but I couldn’t seem to stop long enough to explain. I didn’t know how to explain. Later, I wondered what she would remember of this.

_____________

I knew I was not paying enough attention to Tavy. Not that she was alone—Malcolm frequently looked after her, and she had become a great favorite in the neighborhood. She was also gifted at the art of amusing herself. Lately she had taken to giving song recitals to Oscar and Teddy, who sat on the floor facing her. She revised the texts of these songs with abandon. “Where, oh where has my little dog gone?” became “Puppy gone. Where, oh where be?” “Oh come, let us adore him” was transformed into “Oh come little outside door him.” There was one song she liked to sing that may even have been an original: “Oh Jeesy, Jeesy, Jeesy, they all play with toys, and they don’t take up the nickels.”

But I knew she felt I had deserted her. When I put her to bed at night, and she stared up at me without saying anything, or rolled over onto her pillow without throwing her arms around me to say goodnight first, I wanted to apologize. I wanted to apologize when she was good, because she was an active, risk-taking, free-spirited kid who was supposed to be misbehaving, who was supposed to be apologizing to me, and if she was being good, it was because she thought I had lost interest in her and believed that the only way for her to get my attention back or please me was by changing her ways.

I knew what it felt like to struggle to impress one’s existence on a parent by impressing the parent.

But Tavy did have an existence, and my mother might not have hers for much longer, so it seemed to me my first duty was to her.

But I also acknowledged that I might have been seizing on that fact to excuse another, which was that I felt ashamed, in front of my mother, to have been found out as a human being, a female human being at that, one with a desire to be a mother herself that had been so uncontrollable that she had dared to adopt.

And I felt ashamed, before Tavy, to feel such shame.

It was a mess. I was trying to be—I was—both mother and daughter. And I didn’t want to lose my mother.

_____________

Since we didn’t know for sure whether or not she had had a heart attack, I thought I’d better go on the assumption that she had. From the local health service, I got pamphlets on how to do CPR. But I knew it would be an iffy matter, blowing air into lungs already rendered half-inoperative by emphysema.

She would not consider a nursing home; that would’ve meant giving up Oscar.

They were a pair. She and Oscar would sit up side by side in the single bed, the one smoking a cigarette and drinking cocoa, the other chewing on a rubber shoe.

Malcolm said that after she died, he would take Oscar.

_____________

Because my mother was always cold, the house was usually sealed tight, even though it was summer. I imagined we might live there forever. I imagined us whirling through space and time like Dr. Who in his telephone booth: there was no telling where we would end up, except that wherever it was, it would be in our little brick house.

And if we were in our little house, we were probably in the little kitchen, talking. Sometimes just talking, and sometimes talking things over.

My mother liked to talk about how she had met my father. He had been even shyer than she, so that she had had to propose to him. When he said yes and asked her to set the date, she said, “Two o’clock.”

Their timing wasn’t great. It was 1933. The Depression years burned away any vaguely romantic notions they may have had about life. And made them afraid—if they had not already been afraid. They lived in an unending expectation of catastrophe, to which my father’s reaction, had he been free to have one on his own, would have been flight, and my mother’s was fight.

It could sometimes be hard to get past her “tough talk.” My father would simply let her go on. While she criticized whatever it was she was criticizing, he placed his fingers on the edge of the table, spreading them wide, the heels of his hands hanging over the edge, raising the knuckles so that the tips flattened out, then letting the heels of his hands fall again so that the fingers became as straight as clothespins. He used to do this as if he were studying his hands, or even admiring them. They were strong hands, flexible until he developed arthritis, unexpectedly large. Suddenly I saw him as he had been in 1933, matinee handsome, darkly intense, completely naive, and decked out in the wardrobe he’d acquired with his first paycheck—a white linen suit and yellow-and-white polka-dot bow tie with matching handkerchief protruding from the breast pocket.

_____________

As I stared at him, the green shirt and gray slacks reappeared and then re-metamorphosed into the white linen of yesteryear. It was confusing: his younger and older selves seemed to take turns appearing and disappearing like the images on the playing cards Tavy had at home, which were one thing when you held them at an angle and another when you held them straight up. I blinked my eyes to bring him into focus.

It occurred to me that this was more or less the way my father had always related to us: wavering in and out of focus.

I had a question I wanted to ask him. It seemed to me that it had to be a question that was on my parents’ minds too—my mother’s to ask, my father’s to be asked—and yet no one had dared to bring it out into the open. I thought the time had come. “You know,” I said, as a kind of prologue, “this was a family in which there were always a lot of secrets. Too many, if you ask me—”

“Ha,” my mother said, interrupting triumphantly. “Nobody asked you.”

“You’ve got ice cream on your top,” my father said to her. He tore a paper towel off the roll and rubbed at the spot. (Paper towels had always been handy in this household, because my parents were always bringing up phlegm; stress and nicotine had undone their once-young bodies so!) “Pink becomes you, Ellie,” he said.

“Ha.”

She was going to start crying again, overcome by his compliment. I was determined not to be deflected. Into the space of that instant during which her mood was shifting, I rushed with my question. I asked my father if he had seen my brother “over there.”

My father pushed his empty bowl away with a sudden show of revulsion, as if he wanted to disown the ice cream—or his love of it. He crossed his legs. He took off his glasses and squeezed and caressed his nose where they pinched and settled them back on his face. I remembered that on sunny days he used to wear tinted lenses that clicked onto these regular glasses, and when he didn’t need them, he’d flick them up where they overhung his face like little dark-green awnings.

“No,” he said.

We were silent, absorbing this news which wasn’t really news since we’d half-known that if my father had seen him, he would already have said so, but which nevertheless seemed to increase in ontological stature by being spoken out loud. Then my mother said, “I was hoping that even if God had made the mistake of allowing evil on earth, He might have seen the error of His ways. But no, He had to go and create hell. What kind of God loves evil so much He can’t get enough of it?”

“You’re jumping to conclusions, El,” my father said. “First of all, the fact that I haven’t seen him does not necessarily mean that he’s not there. Secondly, even if he’s not there, it doesn’t necessarily follow that there has to be a hell.”

“Where else would he be?” I asked, taken aback by the brusque note in my own voice. I seemed to be saying that was where he belonged. Nina, I reminded myself, if you can’t excuse even your own brother from hell, who’s going to excuse you?

But then I thought, That’s what we need a God for: to grant forgiveness where the rest of us can’t quite manage it.

My father was saying to my mother, “Let’s not beat around the bush here. The truth is, I never saw all that much of him when we were alive. I had to earn a living. I had to support us all. The result was, I never had time for him when he was little, and after he got bigger, he didn’t want to have anything to do with me. He refused to believe that I had wanted to have more time with him. Well, if we didn’t see each other on earth, there’s really no reason for us to see each other now.”

What he had just said was only partly true. My brother had had seven years of basking in the parental sunshine before I came along. But my attention had been flagged by something else he said. “Do you mean,” I asked, finally registering what he’d said earlier about jumping to conclusions, “that you don’t know whether there’s a hell or not?”

“Of course I don’t know. How could I know? Hell is about not-being, and as I’ve already explained, the whole idea of heaven is that it’s about being. It’s not about not-being. Being can’t know nonbeing because it would entail a self-contradiction.”

“Then let me ask you this,” I said. “If being can’t know nonbeing, how can goodness know sin, which is also a kind of absence since it means ‘missing the mark’? And unless goodness can know sin, how can God know time?”

I was thinking that questions like these might have been why theologians had come up with notions like limbo and purgatory. Probably you went into that line of work out of a hunger for absolutes, an addiction to drawing dichotomies, but by the time you reached middle age, you felt surfeited, you were tired of your lifelong binge, and you began to develop a secret craving for what was relative, for the in-between, maybe even, at least on rare, indulgent occasions, for the indefensibly vague. Oh my God, maybe you became a closet Hegelian.

My father said, “You were always one for the questions, Nina.”

“As long as we are on the subject of specific persons,” my mother said, “I have a question.” A kind of timidity invaded and softened her voice. “What about my mother?” she asked.

My father laughed. “How could St. Peter turn away someone who was buried wearing her Presbyterian pin for perfect attendance?”

“Is she happy?” my mother asked—and I knew she was holding her breath for the answer, though she had very little breath in her lungs that she could hold.

“She’s with your father,” my father said. This time, when he reached for a paper towel, it was to dry the tears on my mother’s wrinkled face.

_____________

These nightly conversations were telling on my mother. In the morning, she looked haggard, the skin on her face not just passively sagging with age but tugging at her, trying to pull her down into old age and death. There was a tug of war going on, between her fighting spirit, which could not bear the thought of surrender, and a deep desire for peace. She had so little use for the world, and yet here she was, syllogistically obligated, by her own sense of herself as someone whose essential nature it was to oppose, to side with the world, opposing death. She was a lover of abstraction now having to align herself with the world of physicality against abstraction. This battle was being fought daily, even while she was talking with my father. He drew her to him by his physical magnetism, but he himself—being a ghost—was an abstraction. These contrary vectors were exhausting her; they seemed almost to generate a friction that was wearing her down. Day by day, she seemed less there. Her bones were shrinking away from her skin, as if she were getting ready to molt. As for flesh, there was hardly any left. Just the dress of skin over the sewing form of her skeleton.

From lavender kimono to pink sweatsuit with a pale blue bunny: this was the haute couture of a life, the sartorial arc of her passage on earth.

It was high summer. The neighbors to our left had gone to Spain; the neighbors to our right, the Woodbines, were in Florida (which Mrs. Woodbine, who had traveled the world over, insisted was the place on earth she found most different from England, more “exotic,” she said, than Turkey, or Egypt, or even Sri Lanka). Malcolm and his wife had sent us a postcard from Devon, where they were walking twenty miles a day. The neighborhood was like a ghost town, and would have been even without my father’s nocturnal visitations. Even when the ice-cream man came in his truck, the bell as clear and cool as an ice cube in the sweet lemonade of daytime, only one or two children dashed out from their houses, ten pence in their palms.

Some mornings we sat out on the patio, my mother wrapped in blankets, her face turned toward the sun, Tavy digging in the stone-potted geraniums, Oscar snoozing, the extravagant curlicue of his tail a kind of cadenza to the theme of his body, bluebirds and swallows threading their song through the bright seam of day. Butterflies floated on currents of air so light they were imperceptible—a phenomenon we knew existed, from the evidence of the butterflies, but which was inaccessible to our senses. My mother slept. For a few minutes, I felt as if time had stopped. Then a shadow passed over the sundial of mother’s face as if to remind me what time it was—and what time was—but nothing else moved except the butterflies with their delicate, soundless bobbing, Tavy’s busy little wrist and spoon, and Oscar’s twitching tail. Far off, an airplane homed in on Heathrow, but from where I sat, it seemed more like a bee making for its hive. I had the sense that I was intimately familiar with this scene. Not that I had experienced it before in exactly this way, but that I had been somehow prepared for it, perhaps had experienced it before but from a slightly different perspective, perhaps my mother’s or Tavy’s or that of someone who wasn’t with us now.

_____________

Maybe time, I thought, was like light and functioned sometimes as waves, sometimes as particles. Maybe some of the time it flowed from past to future (or, as Augustine thought, from future to past), but maybe at other times it bunched itself up into a lot of not-quite-infinitesimal quantum-like balls, bouncing around like crazy, some kind of pinball machine, the universe a penny arcade, somebody—who?—racking up one hell of a score.

_____________

It was so strange, living through these weeks during which my mother grew ever more contingent and delicate, almost, in a sense, younger, because her mind, while retaining its wizardly sharpness, was relinquishing its scope, narrowing the range of its interests to concentrate on the one central fact of existence, the self, while my daughter, my mother’s great-granddaughter, blossomed like some sort of small, rustling bush, progressing from toddlerhood to little-girlhood.

Tavy was walking with assurance now. Instead of looking always as if she was just about to trip, or as if she thought the world was not merely round but about to spin out of control, she raced through the house as if she were training for the four-minute mile. “Who’s got happy feet?” I’d say, and she’d break into a silly dance and collapse giggling. For a moment, I felt redeemed: I was a good mother and I had a happy child. So what if she had sneaked into Malcolm’s kitchen when his back was turned—he had been babysitting her for the day, giving my mother a breather from the commotion Tavy couldn’t help creating—and grabbed his jar of pickled walnuts, expensively sold at Harrod’s, and carried them outside to feed to the squirrels, turning them all into baffled gourmets?

But it was hard on my mother, all this energy, this top wound up at birth and set to whirligig her way through a long, probably headlong, life. I suggested to her that we should leave, but she wouldn’t have it. She knew what was coming and didn’t want to face it alone. She had panic attacks that she wanted me to be there to see her through. When people have panic attacks, they feel as though they can’t breathe, but I think it was because my mother couldn’t breathe that she had panic attacks. When you have emphysema, there are times when no matter how hard you try to breathe, no matter how much air you manage to suck in, it seems to do no good because there aren’t enough air sacs left in your lungs to hold the air. You try to breathe, you make the motions of breathing, but you still don’t have any breath. Some stony gargoyle is squatting on your lungs. Some mysterious statue has been planted right in the center of your chest, and the intricately branched bronchioles beneath won’t grow, the bellows won’t blow. It’s like being suffocated from the inside.

I fixed her a supper of peaches and cream. It was one of the few things she’d eat, though even with this, the bowl would be on the floor for Oscar before she’d finished half of it. I sat beside her, a human vending machine for Kleenex, paper towels, cortisone pills, blood-thinner pills, laxatives, cigarettes, matches, chocolate. We were deep into summer, having left a trail of shiny litter, but it was a trail which would never lead us out again. The leaves on the old oak tree were a restful, sleepy green, as if they’d manufactured all the chlorophyll they needed and could now relax.

Under the high hedge, a hedgehog rolled itself into a prickly ball at Oscar’s approach.

My mother asked me to plump up the pillows behind her back. Her legs, under the blanket, were so pathetically thin that they seemed to me to be, as she never was, apologetic. They seemed to want to apologize for being helpless, and I would have patted them in the reassuring way that you pat children or pets, except that the cortisone my mother took made her skin so thin that it tore like tissue paper, you could punch holes in it with your fingers.

Sometimes, at night, or in the early morning when the tree and sky and the chimney across the way that topped the tall fence at the end of the lawn presented themselves in the frame of the window like a painting, lying in my father’s bed I cried, not knowing what else to do. I cried quietly so I wouldn’t wake Tavy or get my mother’s broom handle going. To cry in front of my mother would have been, somehow, to steal the limelight from her, since this was her tragedy, not mine; and I didn’t want Tavy to see me cry, because it might make her feel insecure. So I kept my crying a secret from both of them, but I couldn’t keep it a secret from Oscar.

Oscar came into my room, curious and wanting breakfast, and jumped on the bed. He put his face next to mine as if to ascertain that what I was doing was, in fact, crying, and then he sat down next to my face and simply watched me until I stopped. I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, I whispered to him, but you’re my mother’s dog, and Blaze is in heaven with my father, and I miss my dog, who is in America. I felt such a wave of longing for my own little dog, who had been through so much with me, and who would soon be the only creature left on earth who knew who I was, who had experienced what I had experienced in the past eventful decade. Not even Tavy knew me the way my dog did. I was so tired of trying to understand what everyone else needed—I wanted someone who understood me.

Oscar was unmoved. When I still didn’t get out of bed, he sat on my chest, his plumy tail feather-dusting my teary face, blocking my view. I got up, crawling into a pair of jeans and one of my father’s shirts. I had always thought it would be creepy to wear a dead person’s clothes, but now I found it comforted me. It made me feel close to him.

_____________

On the way downstairs, I peeked into Tavy’s room. She was still asleep on the cot in the room that was my mother’s office. The sun had crossed the windowsill and highlighted the open book of her face. She had her thumb in her mouth. She liked to pick a piece of fuzz from the lightweight summer blanket, stick it on the knuckle of her index finger and then suck her thumb. It was a kind of padding, I guess, designed to prevent her knuckle from irritating the tip of her nose. I laughed at the thought of such a sensitive little nose.

Through depths of dreams, she felt my presence. She stirred, kicking at the sheets and blanket. She opened her eyes, in which I was afraid to read how much she knew: I did not want to know if she knew that to the extent to which I was my mother’s daughter, I was not free to be my daughter’s mother. The sunlight shining on her face seemed, rather, to be radiated by it, every strand of her hair gleaming, streaming into rays. She held open her arms and I reached toward her, leaned into her. I sat on the bed, squashing Teddy, and picked her up and held her, held her tight.

Oscar, his tail as erect and sweeping and haughty as the Arc de Triomphe, posed at the doorjamb, facing into the hallway, poised for the trip downstairs.

_____________

It began as an ordinary day, a day like any other: breakfast for all, the toothbrush tray and a sponge bath for my mother, the News at One. In the afternoon, I read to my mother from Wuthering Heights, and Tavy listened while she colored in her coloring book. After supper, after the evening news, I took Tavy upstairs and put her to bed with Teddy, and my mother and I talked for a while in the living room. Then I put her to bed. She could no longer traverse the distance between the wing chair in the living room and the cot in the dining room even with the walker. I tucked her in, brought her a glass of water. “Is there anything else I can get you before I go up?” I asked.

“Do you think he’ll come tonight?”

“If you want him to,” I said.

“I don’t want to die alone.”

She had never come flat out and said that before. It gave me the willies. “Why are you talking about death?” I said. “Dinner wasn’t that bad.” I had fixed her a soft-boiled egg but burned the toast.

“Will you stay down here tonight?”

Oscar was curled up on the pillow, on top of her head like a golden crown. She looked so small, so vulnerable. Her cloudy eyes were like leaded window panes. She was a little house that everyone had moved away from. “I’ll sleep on the couch in the living room,” I offered.

“If you hear Daddy, please wake me up.”

“I promise,” I said.

In the living room, I lay down on the couch, still in my clothes. Then, like a victim of carbon monoxide poisoning, I fell into a colorless, odorless sleep.

_____________

When I heard him in the kitchen, I rolled off the couch and went in through the foyer, trying not to wake my mother.

He was so handsome—he looked the way he had looked in his youth, dark and quiet and earnest and dedicated, a man who, though he was much too Protestantly reserved ever to talk about his beliefs, thought that there had to be a God and that it was clearly a God who loved him, the proof being that He had let him be born after Beethoven, which meant he could spend his life playing Beethoven string quartets. This was the greatest miracle of my father’s life and he never ceased to be wholly thankful for it.

I simply could not understand how he could now be content merely to be a string quartet or even string-quartet-playing. Why, he had never even wanted to be Beethoven—that was a hubristic ambition his daughter might plead guilty to, but all he had ever wanted was to play Beethoven. “You must miss playing the violin,” I said, desperately wanting him to be what, who, he was. Himself—not an idea or a predicate, even an eternal one. Himself.

“It’s like I told you, Nina,” he said, patient with my impatience. “My intonation has just gone all to hell without your mother around to criticize me.”

Then it was clear to me, what he was saying. “No,” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

I felt cold. I felt as if I’d just been pulled, dazed and trembling, from an icy pond into which I had stupidly, stupidly stumbled. I was shivering with realization. I wanted to un-realize what I had realized. Maybe if I didn’t know what was going to happen, I thought, it wouldn’t happen. It would be the reverse of predestination.

“There are solo sonatas,” I said. “There are records with one part missing. When Mother was busy, you used to practice by yourself. I stayed in my room, listening. In the hallway, listening. For years. In the end, you said, every member of a string quartet is responsible for himself. Or herself. Nobody can play your part for you.”

“That’s right,” he said. “That’s the first thing you learn when you shut the door to the practice room and start to play scales, for the first time. It’s like anything else that matters. Nobody else can do it for you.”

“I don’t know if I agree with that,” I said. “When you played the violin, when Mother played, it was like my heart was playing its own chamber music. I mean, I have always applauded you both. I hope you know that.”

“Thank you,” he said. And I realized that I had stumbled into the same pond all over again and that, no matter how I tried to circumvent it, that pond would always be there, waiting for me to fall into it and surface shivering and forever changed. My father’s formal thank-you had signaled the fact that we had come to the end of something, but I still didn’t want it to be over. I was an audience clamoring for an encore, while the musicians backstage just wanted to put their instruments away and go home. “Will you wake her?” he asked.

I hesitated. “Do I have to?”

“I’m here because she didn’t want to do this alone.”

“But you just said everything that matters has to be done alone!” I was still the star pupil, aggressively blasting holes in everyone else’s argument so no one could draw a bead on mine.

“Death can’t matter,” he rebutted me, “because it isn’t matter. Life matters, but death doesn’t. Please bring her in here.”

He had become so commanding—a presence, in spite of his nonexistence. He was more real to me, at that moment, than he had been since I was a child, an infant even.

I remembered that I had seen him naked once, not so many years ago. He had talced himself after a tub bath and was drying himself off with a large towel. He had looked so pale, from the talc, almost snow-white, and yet so—embodied. That was how he looked now: pale as a ghost but embodied.

When I had seen him like that, naked, I’d ducked into the next room, not wanting him to know, not wanting to embarrass him. I ducked into the next room now.

_____________

“He’s here?” She said the words as soon as I touched her shoulder. She raised herself off the pillows. Her hair, tousled from sleeping, was sticking out in wispy white corkscrews. It looked like smoke, as if her scalp were smoldering. Or like fog—the white, twisted columns of fog that drift silently through bayous.

“He wants to talk with you,” I said.

“He’s come for me.”

“I don’t know what you mean!” I cried.

“You know perfectly well what I mean, Nina. Don’t be an ass about this.”

“It’s hard on her, Eleanor,” my father said, as we pushed through the swinging Dutch gate into the kitchen.

“It’s harder on me.” She sank into her chair. “Nina, fix us some ice cream, if you don’t mind.”

I got the glass bowls from the cabinet and spoons and scooped up four dishes of ice cream, placing one on the floor for Oscar in case he decided he liked Rum Raisin, but he refused to come into the kitchen, He stayed by the gate, inscrutable as the Dalai Lama.

Because it was night, because my mother was old and cold, the furnace was on. We three were held in the kitchen as in an embrace.

I forced myself to eat the ice cream because my parents obviously wanted me to. They wanted to think I was happy, they wanted to be released from all guilt, freed of all anxiety. There was nothing new in that—but how could I be happy when they were leaving me? How was I supposed to feel good about what was happening? I didn’t have my mother’s ability to detach herself from sentiment. I didn’t have my father’s humility, which had allowed him to be grateful for even the smallest favor from God, such as being born after Beethoven.

Instead, I was angry. I felt they had played a dirty, rotten trick on me. They had let me think that my father had come back because he was lonely and missed my mother, but he had come back to take her away.

I felt a despair that was like amputation. I had thought I was helping her—talking with her, reading to her, looking after her wants and needs. But what she needed was to cut off life. She was gangrenous with the past—maybe that’s how we all become. To get well, she needed to be freed from it. I was the amputated appendage.

Nothing I had done had been enough to keep her from being lonely and missing my father.

They handed me their empty bowls and I ran water over the dishes in the sink. When I turned around again, my father was helping my mother out of her chair.

“You’re not going already!”

It came out like a scream, a sort of scream or controlled shriek. I was afraid I had waked up Tavy. We stopped and listened to the house, but she slept on.

“Remember,” my father said. “Violin lessons as soon as you get back to Wisconsin.”

I nodded. My eyes were filling.

“Don’t cry,” my mother said. “It disgusts me to see anyone cry. Besides, I’m happy to be with your father again.”

And how happy she looked! She was as radiant as a bride, she was a bride. The smoothly rolling balls on the great pool table of time had arranged themselves in a new, or old, configuration, and before my eyes, she had become again the vibrant young beauty who had liked to stroll along the Gulf shore and dance late into the salt-scented, breeze-blown nights. She was again the clear-eyed, firm-profiled young woman who, to my father’s amazement, shared his love of the Beethoven string quartets. Who would have thought that there could be a girl like this, or that she would be waiting for him? When he had finally accepted this as yet another miracle he had no choice but to believe in, he gathered up his courage and drove to Gulfport, in a Buick he’d bought for 75 bucks at a bankruptcy sale. It was, as I said, 1933.

But now my father had picked up my mother and carried her in his arms to the door to the back yard. “Open the door, Nina,” he said.

I dried my hands on my shirt—his shirt—and went to the door. Outside, the leaves of the oak tree were like hands, all playing the sky as if the sky were a musical instrument, the wind an invisible bow. I unlatched the latch, unbolted the bolts, unlocked the key-lock.

“Stand over there, Nina,” my father ordered, jerking his head in the direction of the little table he had made, the two chairs and the high stool.

I moved over to the table.

“Good-bye,” said my mother. “I know you’re determined to be a better mother than I was, but that may not be as easy as you think. In any case, you must not let Tavy keep you from your work. Make sure you get a decent price on the house. Vote Labor.”

“Good-bye,” said my father. “I’m sorry if you think I didn’t love you enough, but I always had my hands full with your mother. So you see,” he added, grasping her tightly, “nothing is any different from the way it’s always been. Do you understand?”

My mother had her arms wrapped around my father’s neck, and they were smiling into each other’s young face.

She laughed.

And then my father carried my mother over the threshold of this world into the next.