Part Seven

My mother wears the necklace for a few days, and then it disappears, even from my memory. Her twenty-five years with Solly are happy ones—on this, even my sister and I agree. Of course there are sorrows. Ven nit di shein, volt kein shoten nit geven, my mother says. If not for the light, there would be no shadow.

My brother, who remained in the Navy, is killed at the age of twenty-seven, saving someone from a falling winch. I still have one of his postcards, a grainy photo of a sailor dancing with a hula girl. “Guess where your bro is now?” he writes on the back.

While my mother continues to grieve over her son’s untimely death, I’m consoled by the thought that Sheldon led the adventurous life he wanted. My sister disagrees. “You were too little to know what he went through. After Lenore’s abortion, he was never the same. Hartsvaytik, as Mama likes to say.” Heartsick. “The Navy was just his escape.”

I drop out of college to marry foolishly, a man like my father, charming and selfish. Four years later, after I abort our child, the marriage ends. I return to school to get my bachelor’s. I go to graduate school. My mother says it’s the happiest day of her life when I get my Ph.D. On that day, I feel very sorry for Sol.

My sister marries a successful executive who provides a huge house and swimming pool for them, only he isn’t around when she has her first miscarriage. She has three more, until finally she gives birth to twins. My mother learns not to say to me, “And you? When is your turn?”

By then I am already living with Jack Wisenfeld, a lawyer who specializes in copyright law for artists and musicians, none of whom has made him rich. From the very beginning our relationship is as comfy and enveloping as an old robe. We get married only because Jack wants to have children. Ironically, we spend years trying to conceive and a small fortune on in vitro procedures that fail to work. Long after we’re accustomed to being childless, the Fates reverse their course.

And when Isaac Abrams goes to Italy to study art, Ben follows, abandoning his law practice. He is nearly disbarred for unprofessional conduct. On his return, we learn that the investments he made for us have become largely worthless, except for some real estate and Treasury notes. The debts Jack and I have incurred trying to get me pregnant wipe us out, but he says he feels no animosity toward my cousin. Between uncle and nephew, however, is a wide rift. It takes years for my mother to reconcile them. “Which is more important,” she tells Sol, “the money or what Benny did to bring us together?”

During that quarter of a century, if my mother and Sol have endured any grief not caused by the death of loved ones, I cannot imagine it.

Today I stop at my mother’s apartment to bring her over to our place for dinner—a Friday ritual that begins after Sol dies of a stroke. My mother is eighty-six now and getting frail. I am on the cusp of forty, and seven months pregnant.

I find her in a cotton smock, rummaging through the famous chest that Sofie gave my sister. “You’re not dressed yet, Mama. What gives?” I ask.

“I just remembered, an old bankbook. Before we moved here.”

“That was a long time ago. Are you sure?”

She waves her bony arm at me. “From long ago I remember everything. Don’t ask what I did yesterday.” Suddenly she slaps her thighs. “In the bottom drawer. In the bedroom. You go look. I get dressed.”

The drawer is crammed with brassieres. I remove it from the bureau and overturn it on the bed. Out falls the passbook, from a bank probably no longer extant, yet it may be possible to trace its assets. I try to slide the drawer back into the bureau, but something is in the way.

Carefully I lower myself to the floor and bend over as far as my beach ball stomach will permit. There is a wad of waxed paper wedged in the groove. I remove it and am about to toss it when I hear a slight rattle. I unwad the paper and slip the necklace out, then I go find my mother in the bathroom, where she’s combing her fine white hair.

“Mama, I found the bankbook, and this.” I stick out my hand. “Isn’t this the necklace Peter the Wolf gave you?”

“Meshuggeneh, that’s from Sol.”

“Why is it in waxed paper?”

She shrugs. “To keep it clean.”

I laugh. “Why isn’t it in your jewelry box or one of the little velvet boxes?”

“What difference?” she says. “The money in the bankbook, for you to save—” She points to my bulging stomach. “Should I wear the green dress?”

“Really, Sol gave it to you?” I ask. We both know I mean the necklace.

“You, with the memory,” she says, “you don’t remember? Solly, who else?”

“But you never wore it.”

“Yes, a couple times—”

“You didn’t like it?”

“Something happened I wanted to forget. Each time I put this necklace around my throat, I’m thinking things—”

“What things?”

“Not today,” she says.

For our annual visit to the cemetery, my mother wears the heart Sol brought back from Asia a quarter-century ago, but she refuses to talk about it.

Before we ride out to Beth El, we gather at my sister’s condo in New Jersey. As usual, my sister is not ready on time. While we wait, my husband, Jack, plays billiards downstairs with Ben. In the massive living room, I tell my mother the story of Madame Bovary, which I am teaching this quarter. Then, hoping to get the story of her necklace, I ask, “What is love?”

“ ‘What is love?’ Zol ich azoy vissen fun tsores,” my mother says.

“Tsores, ‘troubles,’ ” I say.

“She’s learned a little something.” My mother looks toward the ceiling. “I think like this it goes: I should know as much about troubles as I know what you’re asking. Your brother, olov hasholem, he knew about loving.”

“How can you say you don’t know what love is? What you did for Sol—”

“Who wouldn’t? Solly, he was an angel. Olov hasholem.” May he rest in peace.

“Did you love Peter the Wolf?”

“Who?”

“C’mon, Ma. Harry from Magic Shoes.”

“What’s to remember about that one?” she says.

“This,” I say, indicating the faint scar on my cheek.

“I don’t know what you’re talking,” she says. “Go see if she’s ready.”

I go up the circular staircase. Near the top I hear my sister say, “I’m the guilty one, then. Lock me away. Feed me bread and water—”

Elihu says, “You don’t even know how irresponsible you are.”

I retreat down the stairs. My mother looks like a bolster in the middle of the S-shaped sofa, which is at least twenty feet long. “She’s almost ready? I’m afraid for you going up and down,” she says. “You’ll break the water.”

“They used to think that, Mama. Now they think exercise is good for pregnancy.”

“So far along?” she says dubiously. “Pssshhh. Anyhow, that Madame LePage—” She corrects herself. “Bovary. For her, real love was not enough.”

“Why don’t you come teach my class?” I banter.

“You make fun of me.”

“Maman, pas du tout.”

“What for, you ask what is love—” She rubs at a spot on the purse in her lap. “Don’t be too blind, you. You have Jake—a mentsh like my Solly. I told you how it was with him? In the beginning?”

“Not all of it.” I don’t mind if she repeats herself. Sometimes she adds details I haven’t heard, and anyway, I am fascinated with the retracing of her past—our past. Consumed by it, Jack says.

She fingers the golden chain around her neck. “Solly, the moment I see him, my heart turns to stone. With suffering I have enough already. Solly, he tells me later, he makes up his mind right away he wants me, but children his wife never gave him. ‘I don’t know if I can accept someone else’s,’ he tells me.” She squints. “You look so surprised.”

“That explains a lot.”

“What means this?”

“Everyone agrees Sol was a prince, but accepting him as a father was so hard. I always thought it was my fault.”

“What he didn’t do for you—more than any father. And you, you wouldn’t let him adopt you. ‘Why’s she so angry?’ Solly said over and over.”

“Mama, forgive me—”

“It was very hard on Solly.” My mother fumbles with her purse, and it falls to the floor. She ignores it, and returns to the story of their courtship. “What to do? For me, was already too late. The hot flashes come like crazy—”

“That I remember. But Mama, at the restaurant, you didn’t even know Ben was matchmaking—”

“Restaurant? That came later. First was at Ben’s—”

“No, the first time was at a restaurant,” I argue. “Let me ask Ben.” Before she can protest, I call down the stairs. “Ben, can I lure you away from The Shark a moment?”

“Yo! Any excuse will do,” Ben shouts, and runs up the stairs. Puffing a little, he says, “Jack is demolishing me. While you’re working on your definitive guide, I bet he sneaks off to pool halls. What’s up?” Bending down to pick up my mother’s bag, he almost knocks the glass top of the coffee table clear off its base. “Go ahead, laugh at the klutz!” he says, smoothing an abundant shock of white hair. He has aged beautifully. My mother’s biggest fear, next to my not giving her a grandchild, was that in the era of AIDS, Ben wouldn’t age at all.

“You were the matchmaker between Sol and my mother, right?” I say.

“Guilty as charged.”

“Their very first meeting, where was it?”

“Sofie’s funeral.”

“Ben!” I whine.

“Being pregnant has sucked out your memory cells,” Ben says. “Sol had to hold you when they lowered her casket into the ground, remember?”

“What are you talking about?” my sister says, trailed by Elihu as she descends the stairs, in a smart navy dress that hides twenty excess pounds.

We put the question to her as to where Sol and my mother first met. Elihu answers, “Even I know. I heard it so many times. A fancy restaurant.”

“Right!” I say.

“Right!” my sister says.

“Rashomon,” says Ben, who is a movie buff. “The point being, Truth is a matter of perspective.”

My mother shrugs. “What difference where? Remember what you like.”

In the car, my mother sits in front beside Jack. Apropos of nothing, she says, “Believe me, this meeting, is at Ben’s apartment,” and then she falls silent, watching the scenery whisk by, like so many memories.

At the cemetery we walk in pairs, Elihu and my sister, Ben and me, Jack and my mother trailing behind. Elihu leads us in prayer, and we place pebbles on the headstones of Sol, my brother, and my Uncle Isaac.

During the extended discussion of where to have lunch— mostly between Elihu and my sister—I stroll along a row of headstones, and go commune with my brother. “Aren’t you going to weigh in?” Elihu calls out.

“A hundred sixty and rising,” I joke. “Don’t worry, I’ll eat whatever.”

“Lucky you,” Elihu says to Jack, “being pregnant doesn’t make her high-strung.”

“She is already,” my mother says.

Jack blows me a kiss, a signal to let my mother’s remark pass without comment. He puts his arm around Elihu’s shoulder and gets him to step away from the group. When they return, Elihu announces we’re going to Three Corners. “Lots of salads,” he tells my sister. “Something for everyone.”

Ben rides with us to the restaurant. “You’re such a diplomat,” he tells Jack. “I personally wanted to knee Elihu in the groin—contrary to my usual proclivity. He is a hunk. I won’t say what I’d do to Mimi, but it starts with L.”

“Give her a fat lip?” my gentle husband says.

“That starts with F,” I point out. “Liposuction, am I right?”

“Actually, I was thinking lobotomy, but yours is delicious,” says Ben.

I glance at my mother, who by now is usually asking us to explain ourselves. She is turned to the window and humming faintly.

As soon as Jack pulls into the parking lot of the restaurant, I spot my colleague’s car. Elihu and my sister have parked and are already walking in the front door, so we cannot go elsewhere. All I can think about is how to avoid having my husband meet my ex-lover.

Inspired, I say, “Go on, you three, I’ve a kink in my leg.”

Jack lingers, but I become insistent. “Honey, I’ll uncramp in a moment. Go order me some apple juice. Please. I’m dying of thirst.”

“I’ll bring it out to you,” Jack says.

My show of impatience is born of fear. “Jack, for God’s sake, will you go inside and wait for me for three lousy minutes?”

Now Ben does the arm-around-the-shoulder routine with my husband.

Once inside the restaurant, I immediately locate my colleague who’s with a woman—no surprise! I walk over anyhow, enjoying the alarm on his face. Even if I allowed myself to feel something at the sight of his irregular features, the intense eyes, the beard grown a little wilder, I don’t know what it would be.

“Look who’s come to the boonies,” I say, a reference to our mutual love of the city. “My family’s making our annual visit to the cemetery. What’s your excuse?”

“Katya lives nearby,” he says. “This is our colleague Devorah.”

He doesn’t say in which department Katya teaches. Dressed in clothes made to be worn wrinkled, a print scarf knotted at the nape, silver and onyx earrings, she’s obviously a poet. I don’t ask. Perhaps with her olive skin, she is the archetype of the poem he used to recite to me in his office, “The Nutbrowne Maide.”

Confident he and Katya will not stop now at my family’s table, I bid them “Enjoy!” and waddle away, queasy from the sight of breaded clams heaped on their plates and the odor of cooking oil. Before I see my family, I can hear their animated discussion over what to order. I limp a little as I approach and by my smile signal to Jack that all is truly well.

“So what happened to that man?” my mother asks. We are in her bedroom where I am helping her sort out her accumulated papers.

“Who?”

“That man,” she says. “The one you—”

“He’s still at the college. I see him at faculty meetings.”

“That was him—at the Triangle?”

“Three Corners, Mama. You’re so amazing!”

She shrugs. “The leg business, you made it up?”

“Yes, Mama.”

She sighs. “How this ended?” Never before has she asked about him. She only knows he exists because in a weak moment, I sought her advice.

Waiting for me now to tell her how the relationship ended, my mother studies some photos. “Here’s when you took horse-riding lessons.”

“I never took riding lessons. I don’t remember ever being on a horse.”

My mother shoves the photo at me. In it, I am nine or ten, and wearing a riding habit. “You told Sol you spend the time better reading books. I think you hurt his feelings. It wasn’t the first time. You didn’t appreciate—”

“I grew to appreciate him. To love him. Really, Mama. I was too extreme for him. You were, too, but he didn’t know it—”

My mother sticks her hand up. “So tell me,” she says, “how this ended.”

I tell her how one morning I am in a tiny, crowded cafe on campus. I hear one of the students mention my colleague’s name, and I learn that he is sleeping with their friend. Same place. Different hours. I learn that he also recites to her from “The Nutbrowne Maide” . . . For in my mynde of all mankynde I love but you alone. The irony of this line strikes me even as I knock over my café au lait on the messenger.

“You never see him again?”

She is rapt as I tell her how I had to fight the impulse to see him. “Like a junkie craving crack. Finally I call him. We meet—a restaurant in the East Village. Where did people in other centuries have their dramas? You know, Mama, before there were restaurants?”

She laughs. “That’s a good one,” she says. Her eyes narrow, as if thinking back. “To tell you the truth, I didn’t think you and Jake would make it through.”

“I don’t know how Jack put up with me that year. I despise what I did. Really. Jack deserves a better wife.” When my mother doesn’t rush to agree, I pat her hand appreciatively. “So how come you’re asking about him now?”

As usual, she takes a circuitous route. “Your sister, she’s very different from you.”

“All she wants is for Elihu to spend more time with her. Jack spends all the time with me I want. I don’t spend enough with him.”

“This I know,” she says.

“Nice that my mother and husband talk about me!”

“You’re kvetching or you’re angry?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. “Sometimes I wonder, why my own life is like this. Now I see: This craziness, from one generation to the next, nu? My own mameh—I told you this—all the time she’s laughing. Such a personality! Then one day, I’m seven years old maybe, whoosh, she stares blank. Now I know—your bubbeh, she was hartsvaytik. ”

“Heartsick,” I blurt out, because the word has stuck. “Ben says passionate love is always obsession. Funny for him to say, huh? After the way he threw over his law practice for that Isaac.”

“Isaac,” my mother says dreamily. “Now there was a man . . .”

There are many boxes to sort at my mother’s. Always I use the time to fill in more of the gaps from our past. I learn that my father wrote poetry—not something I could have imagined or can easily believe. I learn that years after he moves to North Carolina, Trudy Fleisch apologizes to my mother. And that my mother bought a car for Mr. Mangiameli.

“To make my own self feel better,” she says. “For a year I couldn’t sleep, thinking of how your papa broke his crutches. Later, when we move already here, I run into him on Riverside Drive. He’s sitting on a bench, making circles with the pencil around the advertisements. For a car. He says, ‘What I like I can’t afford, and what I can afford I don’t like.’

“This gave me such a laugh. ‘Mr. Mangiameli,’ I say, ‘I know the feeling.’ We get to talking. I get to asking how much is this car he likes. ‘Allow me,’ I say. ‘It would do my heart a lot of good after what happened.’ ”

“That’s so touching, Mama. I don’t know if I actually remember him or it’s that you talked about him. His face is thin, right? His eyes sunken in—”

“That’s him,” my mother says. “He looks a little like you-know-who.” Her expression is mischievous.

“My colleague?”

“ ‘My colleague,’ ” she mocks. “Mr. No-Name.”

It occurs to me that my mother doesn’t even realize she never calls us by our names, except Jack, and even then she changes it to Jake.

“Mr. No-Name, I forget how you meet him,” she says.

“In California, at a convention. I didn’t know we taught at the same school. He wasn’t wearing his badge—see, ‘Mr. No-Name’ is perfect for him. I was drinking with a group of professors from Berkeley, and they invited other people to join us. Where else, at a restaurant! Then he invited us back to his hotel room for a drink. He was very witty. He loved reciting poetry and he was good at it. Everyone else left after a while, and I was still there—”

“So back in New York,” my mother interrupts, “how you can meet him without Jake knowing?”

“Good question, Mama. It was on campus, in his office. You’ve seen my office. It’s like that, with even more books.”

She nods. “You didn’t feel cheap?”

I shake my head no. Excited, I recall. “Sometimes I wished we could go see an opera together, stroll in Central Park . . . Is that how it was for you, with Peter the Wolf ?”

“Why you keep calling him this?”

“I don’t know. It’s easier than calling him Harry. I knew it was supposed to be a secret, so I made it like a fairy tale—”

Her breast heaves. “What was I thinking, to see him at this time? I told him, ‘The little one, she understands too much.’ A shtik naches, you never made a breath at home.”

“Breathed a word,” I correct. “But I sure blabbed at the police station. They almost took me away from Aunt Ruchel.”

“Takeh? Sometime you tell me the story. Now I’m too tired. Tell me just one thing, you miss this guy?”

I know she doesn’t want to hear the truth, but I don’t want to lie to her. Not now, when we’re growing closer than we’ve been since I was little. “I miss the passion,” I say.

“Oy vey, I’m so tired.” She shoves a mound of papers back in a drawer. “Thank you—all what you help. You take me to your place for dinner now?”

I don’t say that Jack and I were planning to see a movie this evening. Perhaps she thinks it’s Friday, which is our regular night with her. “Sure, I’ll take you anyplace you want.”

“Alevai, to the hospital, if you deliver.”

“I’m not due for a month,” I remind her.

“I know. You asked. I answered.”

In the middle of the week my sister calls, although we call each other only on weekends. She is fifty now, menopausal. Her twins are in graduate school. After they were born, she never returned to teaching art. I made tenure before I even thought about having a child. It’s strange to think of my nephews almost grown when I’m about to become a mother for the first time.

When Mimi calls now, I guess it’s about Aunt Ruchel, who lives in a retirement home not far from her, but I’m wrong. “Mama doesn’t sound good,” she tells me. “She says she hurts all over.”

Miffed my mother has kept this from me, I say, “What do you want me to do?”

“I’m in Jersey,” she says. “It’s easier for you.”

“You don’t have a job. I’m teaching an extra class because I’m taking fall off. I’m not exactly able to run around with this protuberance.”

“Protuberance? Does that mean what I think it does? A lump, right? You call your baby a lump?”

“Swelling,” I say. The pause is long, and I know she’s contemplating an insult. “Mimi, take a joke. At least ‘Swelling’ is more colorful than ‘You.’ That’s the only name Mama’s ever called me.”

My sister ignores my whine. “Take her to the doctor. I have a feeling.”

My sister is uncanny with her feelings. “You scare me,” I say.

“I’m scared, too. I can’t help it.”

Leaning against the doorjamb of my study, which is fast turning into a nursery, Jack asks if he can come with my mother and me to the doctor. On his corny T-shirt from the American Bar Association meeting, it says, ATTORNEYS SUCK, and below it, ALL THEY CAN. That’s just like Jack, to knock the profession that feeds him. “I love your irreverence,” I tell him.

“I don’t think it’s part of Mom’s definition of mentsh. ”

A good human being, my mother means—someone you can lean on and he won’t collapse, unlike my first husband.

“Why don’t you just take her?” I say. “Do we need redundancy?”

“Don’t you want to be there?”

“Be logical, Jack. She enjoys being with you more than me, and there’s nothing I can do for her, medically.” I shift my beach ball away from the computer keyboard and aim it toward the doorway, where he is still lingering. “You can come in,” I say. “The computer doesn’t bite.”

His arms move as if playing a theremin. “I detect electronic waves, an invisible barricade. Seriously, why wouldn’t you want to be with Mom?”

“To get the bad news? I can wait a few hours. Why?”

“I see the logic, Devorah, but it sounds—very inhuman.”

“Say it the way my mother says it, Jack: ‘Such a brain you got. Don’t you have a heart?’ ”

I imagine my mother leaning on Jack’s arm, walking from her apartment to the elevator, then out to his car, which is double-parked. “You took the time off from your customers?” she says to him.

“For days off, I charge them double,” Jack jokes back. He tells her, “Devorah had to teach. The University’s not thrilled she’s taking fall quarter off.”

“Jake, you don’t have to apologize for my daughter. Doctors make her nervous. That imagination of hers—she can make the littlest thing so big.”

The seminar on romantic motifs in nineteenth-century keep-sakes goes well. After the bell, my students huddle around me, trying to suck up more. I imagine their lips glued to my nipples, and behind them, a line of students awaiting their turn to be fed.

In the class that follows, I get tangled up in words. I misunderstand some questions, I get peeved at others. My back is killing me. Then Mr. No-Name peers through the window of the door. He holds his fist to his ear with thumb and pinkie extended. I nod. What does he want? I wonder. My stomach lurches, but it isn’t on account of the baby. All across my field of vision are zigzags of flashing lights.

I cancel the second class and take a taxi to the clinic. My mother is already with the doctor, but Jack is in the waiting room. I plop down beside him. “I don’t know if it’s guilt or concern,” I say.

“Whatever,” he says. “Mom will be glad to see you.”

An hour goes slowly by. The zigzags keep me from being able to read. When the flashing lights finally vanish, I try to keep my thoughts away from Mr. No-Name, but they gravitate to him like shavings to a magnet.

At last my mother emerges from the corridor. She seems a little thin, though not a whole lot different from last year. She shrugs and says nothing about her appointment. Jack and I trade eye-rolls. “I’ll be back,” he says quietly. I know he’s going to buttonhole the doctor.

“Jake told me something I never knew before,” my mother says.

“What?”

“Sitting here waiting, he makes the time to pass. He tells me about Brooklyn. The Indians. The Canarsees?”

History is Jack’s new hobby, not to mention giving my mother the attention he thinks she lacks from me.

“Yes,” I say. “They were in Brooklyn before white people.”

“Jake told me the name they called Coney Island,” she says.

“What?”

“ ‘Place without Shadows.’ Imagine.”

My mother is in the rest room when Jack returns with his report. He shakes his head. The doctor has his suspicions, and orders X rays and a bone scan. Inside me, my mother’s grandchild kicks furiously.

What the doctor calls hot spots are signs of bone cancer. For a long time my mother has ignored the pains in her pelvis, her hip, her shoulder. Now the cancer is well advanced. She refuses to undergo radiation. Jack and I think she decides wisely. My sister is not totally certain.

Two Sundays in a row when we are supposed to take her to the museum, my mother doesn’t feel well enough to go. I bring my laptop over to her place and sit by her bed, practically the whole day. Occasionally as we talk, I bristle, but I no longer argue. That’s one of the things about having a parent whose existence you stop taking for granted. You can no longer be yourself around them. You become a nicer person, but more like a stranger.

Another week goes by. Jack says we should move the chair with the pull-out bed into my study. It’s the bed Ben sleeps in when he comes over for dinner, has too much to drink, and winds up playing chess with Jack all night. We cram the computer into a corner of the living room. We bring my mother to stay with us.

On the phone, my sister has a fit. “We have lots more room here,” she argues. “And Mama likes the view of the Hudson.”

“What?” I say, incredulous. “She doesn’t, quote, ‘give a fig for the river.’ ”

“Devorah, she told me herself. She loves the view.”

“The skyline, I’ll bet. More to the point, you’re too far from her doctors, from the hospital. From civilization, actually,” I say. “I think you better get over here.”

“What are you telling me, Devorah?”

“The doctor said it could be two months, it could be a year.”

“So why do you have to think the worst?”

“I don’t mind being proven wrong,” I say. “When are you coming?”

“Are you going to call Papa?” she asks.

“Why?” I say.

Our father has been in Florida for fifteen years now. I call him on his birthday and on Father’s Day. Today, though it’s neither occasion, he isn’t surprised to hear from me. “Goldie and I just came back from the clinic,” he says. “I had an angioplasty. You know what that is?”

I think he should be talking to Elihu, whose business is medical supplies. They would have more in common than my father has with the rest of us.

“Papa, I’m calling to tell you about Mama.”

“Yeah? You’re still in New York? They couldn’t pay me to come back.”

I tell him about my mother. I give him the prognosis.

“The doctors, they’re always wrong,” he says. “Maybe she’ll live for a long time.”

“Let’s hope,” I say. “Anyhow, I thought I should tell you. The doctor says she’s dying.”

“What can I do from here?” he says. “Who knows what they can come up with? This angioplasty, it’s incredible—” I imagine he is still talking after I put the phone down.

I call my cousins, Sandy and Rhonda. We decide not to tell their mother. Aunt Ruchel is eighty-five now. She sold her home after Uncle Isaac had a series of heart attacks. They came to my sister’s fancy wedding, and a week later he was dead.

Sandy runs a chain of day-care centers now, and Rhonda still plays tennis, the amateur trophies accumulating on the shelves of her den, beside an oil painting of Millie that Uncle Isaac commissioned.

In it Millie wears a large-brimmed picture hat and a gauzy dress in soft turquoise. She’s younger looking than I remember, handsomer, with walnut-colored skin. Her sturdy arms rest along the arms of the rocking chair, which I don’t recall she ever sat in. What draws me to the painting again and again is her expression. I’m unknowable, it says. Somehow the painter, whoever he—or she—was, resisted the temptation to simplify.

A few years after Millie moved with her children to South Carolina, she and Aunt Ruchel lost touch.

Just when I wonder if my mother will last the week, she gets out of bed, puts on a nice dress, makes and pours coffee, which she brings to Jack while he shaves. “Today I don’t lay around,” she tells him.

I overhear him say, “Mom, you want to go to the museum?”

“Ja-ack,” I call plaintively.

“Devorah, come out, come out from your ivory tower. They have wheelchairs. You want to be wheeled around, Mom?”

The gleam in her eye is telling enough. Jack takes the day off and hires a car service. He doesn’t tell her he’ll have the car wait the whole time, in case she suddenly needs to leave the museum.

“We had a wonderful day,” my husband says tonight as we lie in bed. “The Egyptians, the Expressionists—”

“For a long time she liked the Impressionists. Mimi’s sappy influence.”

“Two hours’ worth, and then we went to the cafeteria. She hardly ate, but she swallowed a little apple juice. Loved the wheelchair.” Jack quotes her as saying, “ ‘Jakela, if you ride your baby around half as nice, the kid will be gebentsht.’ ” Blessed. To myself, I can’t help it, I say, Kineahora.

“Don’t be jealous.” He puts his hand on my stomach. “Whatever happened with the two of you, she loves you, Devorah. She doesn’t know how to express it.”

“I’ve been trying,” I say.

Jack takes my hand and kisses it. “I know, but I tell my clients, ‘Between the lines doesn’t count.’ ”

“Between the legs does,” I say, a come-on that results in some fine lovemaking, even if we have to forgo intercourse.

Afterwards I lie awake, musing on his words about my mother. Whatever happened with the two of you.

As I brush her hair I ask my mother if she would like to tour Brooklyn. We have an account now with the car service.

“Listen,” she says. “Don’t make it so much fun. It’s easier to let go when the world is ipish.” When it smells.

“C’mon, Mama. What’s your pleasure?”

She seems annoyed at having to answer. “All I want—I don’t know if I’m going to live long enough to see your little one. Alevai. You asked me.”

“If there was anything I could do to make this baby come sooner . . .” Although she knows she’s dying, we never talk about it directly.

“Your Aunt Ruchel,” she says suddenly. “So many times she saved my life. And yours too.”

“You want to see her? Say it, Mama.”

“I said it,” she claims.

I call the retirement home and ask them to give my aunt a message. She can’t hear well on the phone. They tell her to wait for us in the lobby, else she would be in one of her friends’ apartments, playing mah-jongg.

The driver of our hired car takes us along the Henry Hudson Parkway to the George Washington Bridge. The air-conditioning makes my mother shiver. Reluctantly the driver turns it off and rolls down the window.

“I bet you don’t remember. You stood on my lap the first time we crossed over,” my mother says, her white hair fluttering in the breeze.

“You’re right, but I remember what you told me—the river doesn’t compare with the ocean. Wouldn’t you like to see the ocean again?”

“This could be,” she says, and dozes off.

Aunt Ruchel is very happy to see us. In her white slacks, print blouse, and white cardigan, she is indistinguishable from dozens of white-haired ladies who sit in armchairs, in the spacious, air-conditioned lobby. After much back-and-forth over which place is best, we sit under an umbrella by the outdoor pool where no one swims. “The only drawback,” my aunt says, “is being around so many old people. Like flies they go. Every day they carry out someone—”

“Aunt Ruchel,” I interrupt, “they have good programs here at night?”

She shows us a calendar with the different activities— music, lectures, bingo. On the back are the daily menus. “They don’t cook like Millie,” she says wistfully. “You remember her?” she asks me.

“Even without seeing that portrait Rhonda’s got, I picture Millie clearly—”

“Tuesday I went with Jake to the museum,” my mother interrupts, perhaps afraid I’ll say something indiscreet.

“He’s working, no?” my aunt says.

“He took a day off for once,” my mother says. “Look at Benny, he’s supposed to be retired, but lawyers, they always work.”

“Not Jack,” I say. “He’s the only attorney I know who lacks ambition. He’s hoping to become a judge.”

My aunt gets the joke, but my mother says, “By my daughter this is a fault. Let me tell you something.” She points at me. “The way you work all the time, you’re lucky Jake comes home at night.”

“If he’s that unhappy, he’s never told me.”

“When would he tell you? Even when you’re home you’re at work.”

I’m stung, of course. Not by the charge, which is true, but by the confidence she and my husband share. I retreat for the balance of the visit.

When we get up to leave, my aunt kisses my mother on both cheeks, as usual. Usually my mother only clasps her sister’s forearms. This time my mother covers her sister’s face with kisses. Aunt Ruchel holds her, looks over my mother’s shoulder at me, searching for the explanation. I walk away. I imagine my face looks puckered, like one of those dolls made out of dried apples. I’m trying to hold back the tears. I fail.

For the next few days my mother gets out of bed only to go to the bathroom. Thanks to my brother-in-law, she has state-of-the-art pain management, where she can press a button on the pump and give herself morphine. She uses it sparingly. Unable to bear the thought of my mother in pain, my sister encourages her to use it more. Selfishly I keep out of it. I don’t want my mother to succumb just yet, to let go.

I am home with her all the time, now that the quarter at the University is over. “Mama,” I’ve taken to saying, “put your hands on my belly.” I want her to feel the baby kicking. Seven days to go. I know that waiting for the baby to be born is all that keeps her alive.

Tonight, though the air-conditioning is working overtime, it’s too hot to talk to anyone. I let the machine take phone messages while I suck orange Creamsicles, my latest craving. My mother has been asleep for hours. At the computer I research paradigms based on the myth of Herodias, the sensual mother of Salome. Unnamed in the Gospels, Salome lives in her mother’s shadow.

It’s late when Jack comes home. I hear him rummaging in the kitchen, then he’s on the phone, but I can’t hear what he’s saying. I decide he’s had a bad day. Still, when Jack comes into the living room without a word to me and turns on the T.V., I don’t give an inch. I say, “Honey, I’m working.”

“Honey, I’m relaxing,” he says, mimicking my tone. “Do you want me to go to a bar to watch the Mets?”

Certain he’ll back down, I say, “Do you want me to drive to campus?”

“First you took over the extra bedroom. Now you’ve taken over the living room,” he says. “Do I live here?”

Although Jack and I occasionally snipe at each other, scoring points by being witty, on a humid summer’s night wit goes by the wayside. Insults fly.

“You jellyfish,” I say. “You pretend you’re fine, and now the real truth comes out—but not from you. No, I have to hear it from Ben and my mother. You’re the one who turned things upside down to accommodate her.”

“ ‘High crimes and misdemeanors,’ ” he says. “So file for divorce.”

“Your excessive kindness—it reminds me of Sol’s. I have to wonder what it’s covering up.”

He winces.

A gotcha! I think. “Damn it!” I say suddenly. It’s my bladder. I run to the bathroom, not quite in time. I clean myself off, avoid looking at my swollen body in the mirror.

Feeling unlovable does nothing to abate my temper. The argument resumes. In the midst of the shouting I suddenly detach. I hear my snide tone. I see Jack’s gentle eyes, sending out the equivalent of deadly laser rays. “Wait, wait,” I say. “Darling, stop! What is it?”

He fishes out his white handkerchief, waves it, accepting the truce, but not a hug from me. Reluctantly, the words come out: “Checked your phone messages?”

“No.” I feel myself flush. Jack doesn’t have to say any more.

“It was an accident,” Jack says now. I’m about to say, Yes, it was, I didn’t mean for my colleague to call, but Jack’s saying, “The light was flashing—the tape was full. You know how I goof up those goddamn—” His eyes bore into mine. “You didn’t tell me you’re presenting a paper.”

I process the information. I decide that Mr. No-Name is giving me a pretext to attend the spring conference that he’s chairing on the West Coast.

“Did you delete the message?” I ask Jack.

“No.”

“What?”

“I answered it.”

I imagine the end of my marriage. I imagine our child being passed back and forth between us. I imagine growing old alone and bitter. But I don’t ask. I take the advice that Jack has given as a lawyer: Never ask a witness on the stand a question to which you don’t know the answer. This is what saves me. For once I keep my mouth shut.

Elihu and my sister come to the city to have dinner with us. The plan is to eat out, if my mother’s up to it. “Nothing ethnic,” my sister says. She doesn’t mean Chinese.

The overpriced Mandarin restaurant affords us a more leisurely meal than the noisy hole-in-the-wall that Jack and I prefer. Lethargically my mother pushes noodles around on her plate. Jack and Elihu carry the conversation, arguing over whether Governor Cuomo could win if he ran for president. Elihu argues, “His drive isn’t strong enough.”

“So wanting makes it so?” my sister says.

“I wouldn’t underestimate force of will,” Elihu replies.

“Well,” my sister says, “I’ll just sit down and wish with all my heart I hadn’t found those letters—” Her la-di-da tone is new.

My mother perks up her ears. Elihu whispers something to Mimi, then stalks off to the men’s room. My mother says to her, “You went looking for trouble, or you find the letters by accident?”

“What difference!” my sister barks. “You think you know someone for twenty-five years, and one day you learn you don’t know a thing!”

Calmly, my mother says, “Not so long ago I found some letters.”

Chopsticks or forks suspended mid-air, we wait for her next words.

“From the Philippines,” she says.

I let out a breath, assuming it’s just letters Sol wrote to her from his many trips to Asia over the years, but then she says, “From a woman. A child by Sol she has. Imagine!”

Jack stares at me, obviously wanting me to say it isn’t so.

“Emes,” she says. “What for you all look at me? I still love him. He loved me. Things happen. Life is not so, how you say, uncomplicated.”

Now Elihu is back and my sister flies off to the bathroom. I waddle after her, needing time to recoup from these revelations.

I hear Mimi in the stall next to mine, sniffling. I flush the toilet, wash my hands, comb my flyaway hair, and wait. Finally my sister emerges, oddly more beautiful than I’ve ever seen her. No longer is her face a mask of creamy skin and perfectly made-up features. For once, she looks vulnerable.

“Is it a fling, or does he have serious intentions toward her?” I ask.

“I don’t care, I want a separation.” She reapplies her lipstick, sucks in her cheeks. Even with too much weight, she turns heads. And anyhow, I tell myself, it’s not the weight that made Elihu unfaithful.

“He only agreed to come tonight because I begged him,” she says. “I want Mama to think everything’s normal.”

“Mama’s way ahead of us, kid,” I say. “She’s done it all, knows it all.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The man in Magic Shoes.”

“What about him?” she says.

“You don’t know Mama as well as you think you do,” I say.

“What the hell does that mean?” my sister says. “Oh, I get it, you found things, going through her stuff. Or is it your overactive imagination, Devorah?”

I hesitate for a moment. I want to tell her I’ve made it my business to know. More than my business. My obsession. I want to know everything about my mother. But if I tell her this, Mimi will ask me why. For why, I don’t have an answer.

“Too much French literature,” I say with a Gallic shrug.

As if nothing has happened, we finish our plates, read our fortunes aloud to each other, promise not to let so much time go by before we get together again.

Jack drives us home and gets my mother to sit for a change in the back with me. “What he’s looking for,” she says, “he won’t find.”

“Who?” Jack asks.

“Who? Her husband, that’s who. ‘If you chase unhappiness, look out—before you catch it.’ Kholillah. You hear me, Devorah?”

“Mama! You used my name.”

“What?”

“You said, ‘Devorah.’ ”

She shrugs. “It’s your name, nu?”

“But you never call me that. You told me once when I was little—using names tempts the fates. Or maybe you said the Evil Eye.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking,” she says.

I lean forward and poke Jack in the shoulder. “Isn’t that true?”

In the rearview mirror he catches my eye and winks, but says nothing. That’s Jack, considerate to the nth degree. I feel shamed by his goodness.

There is a hearty kick in my stomach. “That’s right,” I tell the baby. “Don’t be reticent like your father. Feel free to express yourself.”

This time my mother places her own hand on my stomach. But when the baby kicks again, my mother is fast asleep.

My mother is dusting the blinds when I get home—a good sign, of course. I hand her the mail I’ve picked up from her building, my father’s squarish envelope on top, his right-slanted script easily recognizable.

“Papa,” she says. “You told him?”

“He asked how you were,” I lie.

Above a basket of daisies on the front of the card are the words TO CHEER YOU. She pronounces the verse inside “nice” and hands me the card, signed, “Ruben & Goldie.” A postscript says, “Regards to Mimi and Devora.”

“He spelled my name wrong,” I say.

“Spelling you get from my side, even if I don’t know many words.” She studies the postmark on the envelope. “Fort Lauderdale, is by the ocean?”

“You miss the ocean? We can visit Coney Island.”

“Enough with the ocean. To here,” she says, her hand under her chin. “For one thing only I would go, the Parachute Jump.”

“I remember when it closed down,” I tell her. “Too bad none of us ever got to ride on it, unless Sheldon did. Maybe he did—with Lenore.”

“I went,” she says. “One time.”

I try not to blurt out, Tell me. Ever since learning my mother is dying, I’m almost as eager for news of her past as I am for the birth of a new life.

She stands at the window overlooking Riverside Drive and the Hudson, her back to me. “First I’m swimming to the ocean—” She tells me again about the lifeguard, but the next part is new. “The police, they want me in Bellevue, but the boy—I see his freckled face—he makes a lie to save me. An accident I swim so far, he tells them. He don’t say I begged him, ‘Let me drown.’ ”

She turns around to face me. “What?” she says, as I give a start.

“Nothing,” I say. But I think it’s a contraction. A week early. Superstitious, I don’t dare to hope. “Go on, Mama.”

“Es tut mir vai.” It hurts me. Refusing the pump, she sits at my desk, in the swivel chair. I sit on the bed, which she has already made up.

“Later I wake on the beach,” she recounts, “sand on my tongue. My bathing suit, is dry. Veys mir, I’m burning from the sun. The strength, oy, is out of me. I stumble like a shikker. Later on the Boardwalk, a sailor, he comes by. Not a young one in a middy blouse, but more my age, with a stiff cap.”

“An officer,” I say.

“ ‘Game for the Parachute Jump?’ he asks me. These funny words. Maybe he’s kidding. ‘Sure. Okay, why not?’ I tell him. I was even thinking maybe I could fall off, mirtsishem.” God willing.

“What a ride! The sailor, all he wants is to take advantage, his arm around me, under my armpit, like so, so his fingers can feel my bust. But I forget everything as we go up. Up and up. The view, is open all around, like an elevator—no walls. From there, the Boardwalk so small, and my tsores like grains of sand on the beach. Nothing in the way, I’m going right to the sky over Brooklyn. Ek velt. Out of this world.

“The top of the parachute hits. Bom!” She gestures with her hands. “It bursts open, the biggest umbrella, the light so soft coming through. Whoosh! We drop. Right through the air we push. How can I explain? The air, is thicker than regular, with all the salt. I can feel it going against us.”

My mother leans over to pat my large belly. “Soon you’re pushing too.”

The phone rings. I know it makes her nervous if I don’t answer, so reluctantly I go. “C’est toi,” I say to my colleague, careful not to betray a flutter.

“Actually I called to wish you luck, Devorah. On the birth. I mean it. I want to give you this amulet I picked up abroad—a crowned figure sitting on a sea horse. She’s a Siren, but indisputably Diana, moon goddess, protectress of women in childbirth. She’s also used to protect against the Evil Eye.” He’s heard a lot from me about my mother.

“I’ll be glad if my mother doesn’t stuff the bag I’ve packed for the hospital with garlic,” I tell him.

“I wish she would,” he teases, before urging me to attend the conference.

When I return to my mother, she is humming. “What is this song?” she asks. “I remember it from the Boardwalk.” She hums it again.

“ ‘No, no, they can’t take that away from me,’ ” I sing.

She sings, “ ‘The way you wear your hat, the way you danced till three—’ ”

We look at each other for prompts. I sing, “ ‘The memory of all that—’ ”

Together, we sing, “ ‘No, no, they can’t take that away from me.’ ”

When my mother wakes, I bring two tablespoons of pistachio ice cream, in a large bowl so the portion will look even smaller. More than that makes her full just to look at, she says. My contractions are more frequent now but not all that intense, and nowhere near ten minutes apart. I’m trying to remember where Jack went. I can’t decide whether to tell my mother yet. I’m afraid of overexciting her. I pretend to go for a glass of water. I get my watch and look at Jack’s calendar. Something is scrawled on it, something I can’t read.

“Devorah!”

I hear my mother’s cry, a feeble cry. I run as best I can. Her eyes are wild. Her mouth is open.

Please, please, I think. Not yet. Not now.

“I have to go,” she says. “Hurry.”

She means to the bathroom. I breathe out. I help her up. She leans on me heavily. We stagger more than we walk. In the bathroom I help pull her dress up and her panties down. She leans on me the whole time, then I help lower her to the toilet seat. “Pshhh,” she says, echoing the stream. After she wipes herself, I help her up. Again she leans on me as we pull up her panties and pull her dress down over them.

“You’re so good with pish,” she says. “How did you learn to be so good with pish?”

“I’m kvelling with the compliment, Mama.” Bursting. I realize that because of her fear of the Evil Eye, I’ve been starved my whole life for compliments. There in the bathroom, I suddenly have to ask. “Mama, are you sorry you had me?”

My mother doesn’t answer directly. “Move me back,” she says.

This time she lies down. I arrange the pillows for her and wait for her answer. I’m sick with disappointment. She is sorry she had me, I decide, and she doesn’t have the courage to tell me. I jerk as another contraction comes.

“The baby?” she says. Her eyes light up.

“I think so. But it’ll be a while.”

“You have a nice picture of me to show your little one?” she asks.

“Yes, Mama. Lots of nice pictures.”

“Don’t cry. I want to tell you something. I never told nobody. Not Solly. Not my sister. Not even your Jake.” I try to lean forward. “The week I was gone, I slept under the Boardwalk,” she says. “You want to hear this now?”

“Yes, Mama. Everything.”

“Nu, the Boardwalk. Where else could I go? No money, nothing. The whole week I’m there. How I got so cold. The bums, they’re living there all the time. We sleep one next to the other to keep warm. Twice I got raped—”

“My God, Mama, you went through such hell—”

She shakes her head. “You want to know what hell is? I tell you. The guilt for not loving Solly enough. My aveyreh.” My sin. “What happened under the Boardwalk, I deserved it. Emes.” True.

“Mama, how could you even think that?” I try to embrace her, but she stiffens.

“Now is different. An affair at that time—with heaven comes hell.”

“Mama, I’m so sorry—”

She shrugs. “Why should you be sorry? All I want to know is, Why are you so angry at me?”

Just as I’m about to tell her, she nods off.

The contractions are erratic, and infrequent. I don’t mention them to Jack when he comes home for dinner, Thai takeout, and says he’s going to a meeting. Selfishly, I want my mother to myself. I boil potatoes for her and put them in the Cuisinart with milk and butter. Casually I ask Jack where his meeting is. The funny look he gives me says I don’t trust him. I pat my stomach. “Just in case,” I tell him, and he looks relieved.

My mother goes to bed right after what she calls dinner, a teaspoon of mashed potatoes, a few sips of Ensure. “Wake me up if anything.”

I sit by her bed as she sleeps. I don’t work on my laptop. I turn my mother’s words over and over in my mind. Under the Boardwalk. Raped. I try to imagine that terrible week. I try to imagine her over the years, silently suffering from her aveyreh. My imagination fails.

What I remember is her faraway look. How often she seemed distant, cold even. Times when I would search for what I had said or done to upset her. Times I tried to dig further into the past for an answer that was always out of reach. I massage my belly, as if to reassure my baby that things are okay.

My mother opens her eyes. “So, tell me. What this anger is,” she says. “First make my pillow.” She presses on the pump.

I adjust her pillow. I help her sit up a bit. She is actually half reclining. She takes my hand and holds it, something I remember her doing only when I was a child.

“Compared to what you went through,” I begin, “it isn’t important—” If it were some other time, if my mother weren’t dying . . .

“Tell me,” she says. “The moments are dripping through.”

I stare at the hollows in her cheeks where there used to be fat and flesh. “Don’t you think I missed you?” I begin. “I was barely four years old. I spent virtually every minute with you, up until you dumped me on Millie. And when you came back it wasn’t the same. I never trusted you after that. Or anyone, as Wally could tell you. As Jack can tell you.”

I jerk and involuntarily take my hand out of hers. I place it on my belly.

“More pains now?”

“Some. Nothing like yours. Then when you married Solly, I was shut out. He turned you into someone different. I missed you, the real you.” My fingers try to locate the scar on my cheek.

“What me?” she says.

It shames me to say that at this moment I imagine throttling her, my hands around the loose flesh of her neck. I don’t believe the cancer has caused her to forget.

“You became so bland. Like mashed potatoes. You used to be eccentric, full of verve and temper. ‘Like a dragon,’ Ben once said, ‘breathing fire.’ Then you became Mrs. Sol Farber. You didn’t yell, you didn’t scream anymore. Yes, Sol. No, Sol. Let’s make everything so pretty, Solly.”

“For this you’re blaming me?”

“You vanished on me. I never stopped loving you, but when you married Sol, it was worse than your disappearing into Brooklyn. Ever since, I’ve been trying to find you, or at least a shadow of you.”

I see her searching her memory. I look at my watch. I make a mental note to process her reactions later. Now it’s too much. The contractions are twelve minutes apart. Such a morbid subject we’re on, I think. I should drop it. I fear it’ll somehow contaminate the delivery. But I can’t help it. The moments are dripping through.

“Mama, I love you. I wanted to know you loved me back.”

“That’s why you’re angry with me? You think I didn’t love you?”

“Love has to make itself known,” I say. “Even when you were here, you were nowhere around.”

“Look at me, bubbeleh. Tell me, does your mameh love you?”

I hesitate.

“When I got the pneumonia,” she says. “The social worker, she figured it out. The one thing I had to live for.”

“What?”

“What?” she says, incredulous. My mother raises both her hands in the air as if addressing the gods. “My daughter asks me, ‘What?’ ”

I crumple up with the next contraction. “Mama, you better be here when I get back from the hospital. I’m going into labor.”

I’m in the hospital several hours when Jack shows up, looking grim. He says Ben is with my mother. He is torn between wanting to tell me she’s holding her own and what he thinks is the truth. He makes the right decision. He says, “I think it won’t be much longer.”

Later, when we tell the story, again and again, we disagree over who had the idea first. Probably we think of it simultaneously: to induce the baby. The doctor isn’t moved by my appeal to do this for my mother’s sake. “It’s not medically indicated,” he says.

I recall my sister’s friend Suzanne, who is an obstetrician on the East Side and used to catering to rich women. Jack calls Mimi to get Suzanne’s home number. Mimi heads for Manhattan. Jack calls Suzanne and explains the situation. Suzanne advises him. Jack tracks down my doctor in the cafeteria and talks to him in a calm, knowing way about hypertonic labor. Jack suggests bringing in a consulting physician. The doctor explains all the risks and finally agrees to induce.

My husband, who faints at the sight of a pinprick, waits outside as I go into active labor. He misses the miraculous moment, but not by much. The little wrinkled creature and I stare each other down. She wins with only one eye open. Then she opens the other to hypnotize Jack. Suddenly I am ravenous.

After our daughter is cleaned up, we wait till she has rooted awhile at my nipple, then Jack wraps her in a pillowcase. No one sees him leave. When the baby is discovered missing, I try to reassure the nurse. I imagine she thinks I killed my daughter and put her body in the medical waste bin. It’s so ludicrous I laugh, and of course the more I laugh, the more agitated she becomes. Soon there is a whole cadre of official-looking people around my bed. They even call in a shrink. “Two hours,” I tell him. “If she’s not back, summon the police.” Finally I get through. I can see it on the face of a nurse. It goes all dreamy. “That is the sweetest thing . . .” she says.

According to Jack, my mother holds our daughter for a few minutes. According to Ben, it is much longer. Both agree that she says, “I can’t tell who she looks like.” Ben says, “She does major kvelling. A look I haven’t seen on her in thirty years.”

Mimi asks her what she thinks of the newborn, maybe fishing for comparisons with her twins.

Ptooh, ptooh. My mother spits, but there’s so little saliva it disperses into the air. Then she says she’s tired and hands the baby to my sister. My sister returns the baby to Jack and drives them back to the hospital. They’re greeted by the police, but after Jack explains, the hospital decides not to press charges. On campus I become the talk of my department.

For the next twenty-four hours my baby sleeps most of the time, and so does my mother, who is being watched by Mimi during the day. She calls me once when my mother’s awake and puts her on the phone.

“Mama,” I say. “I love you.”

“I know,” she says.

“And Mama, Sol never felt for a moment you didn’t love him.”

“You think so?” she says, her feeble voice rising hopefully.

In the middle of my second night at the hospital, I bundle up my baby, sign us out, and we take a taxi home. Jack doesn’t hear us come in. He’s asleep on the sofa, in jeans and a T-shirt. I’m sure he’s worn out, caring for my mother. He wakes briefly, gently taps our daughter’s nose, then mine, puts his head down and begins to snore.

The baby and I sit in the room where my mother sleeps, where my daughter will grow into a little girl who hears stories about her grandmother. In the dark, I listen for my mother’s breathing. From time to time I nurse my baby. Such a good baby. She doesn’t cry. I think she knows we need to be quiet. Perhaps I doze off. The room lightens, I open the blinds slightly. The sky is gray, then golden over the Hudson. Behind me I hear nothing. I know before I turn around to look. I don’t see my mother’s chest rise and fall.

With my baby in my arms, I go to the bed. I lay my daughter down beside my mother’s still body. I kiss my mother’s cold hand. I kiss her cold forehead. I smooth her hair. We will name the baby for her, I imagine telling Jack. Perhaps he will suggest it first. I pick up our daughter, cradle her in my lap. We wait beside my mother, until Jack comes to get us.

I imagine my mother finally at peace. Alevai.