FOR OVER A DECADE NOW, MY MOTHER HAS LIVED IN New York City, on the ground floor of a brownstone between Riverside Drive and West End Avenue. About twice a month, I take the train from D.C.’s Union Station to see her. I navigate the bowels of Penn Station with precision born of practice, my pace calibrated with the rolling crowd as we maneuver the main fairway with its newsstands and grab-n-go lattes, salads, pizza, and gyros. Rounding one corner and then the next, I climb a short flight of stairs holding my breath against the urine-soaked landing. At last, I arrive on the subway platform, where the Uptown 1 Express will whisk me to 96th Street.
Emerging on the Upper West Side, I stop at Barzini’s market for flowers—in springtime, I always hope for lilacs or peonies, my mother’s favorites. The store clerk wraps them for me in a cone of thick white paper. Bouquet under my arm, I cut over from Broadway to West End. At my mother’s door, digging in my bag, I fish out my set of jangling keys. Four keys to be exact: two for the outer street door, one for the vestibule door, and one that unlocks the deadbolt to my mother’s apartment.
I often get there before she does. Yet my visits give her an excuse to leave earlier than usual from her windowed office high above Times Square, where she manages five floors of lawyers. Not long after I arrive, I will hear the heavy outer door pushing open, the click of her heels and the rat-a-tat-tat as she knocks, knowing I am waiting for her.
Alone in the cool of her darkened, hushed apartment, I am at home in my mother’s scent—a mix of Chanel No. 5 and books. The apartment has one of those long, narrow layouts, nearly windowless except for the large sliding glass door to the garden at the back. Floor-to-ceiling, built-in mahogany shelves are overstuffed with mostly art, travel, and history titles. Treasures from her trips—jade miniatures from China; a hand-carved gazelle, lion, and zebra from Kenya; even signed and numbered Picasso and Rembrandt lithographs—perch there, mingling with the books.
The shelves line the length of the apartment’s main room, which my mother has cleverly divided via furniture to signal “study,” “dining room,” “formal living room,” and what she calls “the garden room.” In winter, we spend most of our time sitting on opposite ends of the garden room’s lush velvet sofa, a deep purple. But in the warmer months, we lounge in the garden or eat there—as we will tonight. Through the window, I can see the thick-trunked flowering magnolia at the center of the garden, and the red and yellow tulips my mother has planted around the edges. She doesn’t really need my flower offering. Yet, it would feel graceless to come empty-handed. Once I finally became whole enough to think of her and not always of myself, giving them became a habit.
Searching the cherry wood breakfront, I find the tall crystal vase she likes. As I arrange the lilac blooms, a silent question leaves me breathless, as if a heavy boot stood on my chest: When she’s gone, what will I do with all her treasures? Who will remember what she went through to get here? Who will remember her triumph?
Tonight, by the time I hear my mother’s footfalls, I’ve got dinner almost ready. She hugs me, then can’t resist turning to breathe in her lilacs, closing her eyes as she does. We carry our plates from the narrow galley kitchen into the garden to a wrought iron and glass table circled by cushioned chairs. As we continue talking, long after the sun goes down, the leavings of our dinner—steak au poivre, asparagus drizzled with Dijon mustard sauce, buttered baguette, and a slice of chocolate ganache cake to share—fade into the darkness. Fireflies begin to blink around us. We can hear neighbors on either side, but they remain unseen behind a high fence.
No doubt people up above in the neighboring buildings can look down into her garden, like something out of Rear Window, but the magnolia boughs shield us from view. A block away, the choir at the Greek Orthodox church on the corner is practicing. Hallelujah! Glory, Glory, they sing. We pause to listen. In the navy suede of the night, sitting beneath pink-bloomed branches, fallen petals all around us, no one would know we were here.
Lately, my mother has been puzzling over what she will do when she retires. Having been employed steadily since she was fourteen, she’s nervous about not working. But she recently sent me an e-mail outlining the plan she will start implementing in two years: Learn Italian and take senior ballet classes now that she’s quit smoking. Live in France again and in Italy for a few months. She’s planning trips to India, Vietnam, Australia, and Scandinavia. But first Kenya, where we will go together this coming fall—the first trip we’ve taken, just the two of us, in many years. My mother is giddy at the prospect. It will be her fourth safari and my first.
As the choir continues, I sing along with the refrain: Since I laid my burden down. Even though I can’t see my mother’s face, I sense her smiling in the dark. I know I’m right when she hums glory, glory and I hear her soft laughter rising up into the night.