The Pursuit of Happiness

Douglas Kennedy

The Pursuit of Happiness

'This is the kind of writing that isn't supposed to be written anymore - a stunning conflation of individual destiny with the broad sweeps of history... Let the hyperbole fall - this is the novel against which the rest of the year's output demands to be judged' Express on Sunday

'A triumph' Mail on Sunday

'This is a book that demands attention, gripping from the first pages to the closing chapters' Marie Claire

'Kennedy really can tell a story... the twists in the plot are perfectly timed to keep the pages turning' The Times

'Curl up and enjoy' Spectator

'A big ambitious book... the storytelling is accomplished and the characters of the women, particularly Sara's true and singular voice, stay in the mind well after the last page' Irish Times

'Kennedy chillingly evokes the atmosphere of disbelief, then visceral fear which tore media-America apart' Lisa Appignanesi, Independent

'An engrossing fable of moral choice' Sunday Telegraph

'This superb story of divided loyalties and personal tragedy will leave you pinned to your seat' Woman & Home

'Escapism at its very best' Sunday Business Post

'Postwar Manhattan simply leaps off the page' Independent on Sunday (Fifty Best)

'Outstanding' Good Housekeeping

About the author

Douglas Kennedy's novels - The Dead Heart, The Big Picture, The Job, The Pursuit of Happiness, A Special Relationship, State of the Union, Temptation and The Woman in the Fifth - have all been highly praised bestsellers. He is also the author of three acclaimed travel books: Beyond the Pyramids, In God's Country and Chasing Mammon. His work has been translated into sixteen languages. In 2006 he received the French decoration of Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Born in Manhattan in 1955, he lives in London with his wife and two children.

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

ISBN 9781407098401

Version 1.0

www.randomhouse.co.uk

Published in the United Kingdom by Arrow Books in 2002

Copyright (c) Douglas Kennedy 2001

The right of Douglas Kennedy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

First published in the United Kingdom by Hutchinson in 2001

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9781407098401

Version 1.0

Once again for Grace Carley

We do not what we ought;

What we ought not, we do;

And lean upon the thought

That chance will bring us through.

- Matthew Arnold

Part One

Kate

One

I FIRST SAW her standing near my mother's coffin. She was in her seventies - a tall, angular woman, with fine grey hair gathered in a compact bun at the back of her neck. She looked the way I hope to look if I ever make it to her birthday. She stood very erect, her spine refusing to hunch over with age. Her bone structure was flawless. Her skin had stayed smooth. Whatever wrinkles she had didn't cleave her face. Rather, they lent it character, gravitas. She was still handsome - in a subdued, patrician way. You could tell that, once upon a recent time, men probably found her beautiful.

But it was her eyes that really caught my attention. Blue-grey. Sharply focused, taking everything in. Critical, watchful eyes, with just the slightest hint of melancholy. But who isn't melancholic at a funeral? Who doesn't stare at a coffin and picture themselves laid out inside of it? They say funerals are for the living. Too damn true. Because we don't just weep for the departed. We also weep for ourselves. For the brutal brevity of life. For its ever-accumulating insignificance. For the way we stumble through it, like foreigners without a map, making mistakes at every curve of the road.

When I looked at the woman directly, she averted her gaze in embarrassment - as if I had caught her in the act of studying me. Granted, the bereaved child at a funeral is always the subject of everybody's attention. As the person closest to the departed, they want you to set the emotional tone for the occasion. If you're hysterical, they won't be frightened of letting rip. If you're sobbing, they'll just sob too. If you're emotionally buttoned up, they'll also remain controlled, disciplined, correct.

I was being very controlled, very correct - and so too were the twenty or so mourners who had accompanied my mother on 'her final journey' - to borrow the words of the funeral director who dropped that phrase into the conversation when he was telling me the price of transporting her from his 'chapel of rest' on 75th and Amsterdam to this, 'her eternal resting place'... right under the LaGuardia Airport flight path in Flushing Meadow, Queens.

After the woman turned away, I heard the reverse throttle of jet engines and glanced up into the cold blue winter sky. No doubt several members of the assembled graveside congregation thought that I was contemplating the heavens - and wondering about my mother's place in its celestial vastness. But actually all I was doing was checking out the livery of the descending jet. US Air. One of those old 727s they still use for short hauls. Probably the Boston shuttle. Or maybe the Washington run...

It is amazing the trivial junk that floats through your head at the most momentous moments of your life.

'Mommy, Mommy'.

My seven-year-old son, Ethan, was tugging at my coat. His voice cut across that of the Episcopalian minister, who was standing at the back of the coffin, solemnly intoning a passage from Revelations:

God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes;

And there shall be no more death, neither sorrow

Nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain;

For the former things are passed away.

I swallowed hard. No sorrow. No crying. No pain. That was not the story of my mother's life.

'Mommy, Mommy...'

Ethan was still tugging on my sleeve, demanding attention. I put a finger to my lips and simultaneously stroked his mop of dirty blond hair.

'Not now, darling', I whispered.

'I need to wee'.

I fought a smile.

'Daddy will take you', I said, looking up and catching the eye of my ex-husband, Matt. He was standing on the opposite side of the coffin, keeping to the back of the small crowd. I had been just a tad surprised when he showed up at the funeral chapel this morning. Since he left Ethan and me five years ago, our dealings with each other had been, at best, businesslike - whatever words spoken between us having been limited to our son, and the usual dreary financial matters that force even acrimoniously divorced couples to answer each other's phone calls. Even when he's attempted to be conciliatory, I've cut him off at the pass. For some strange reason, I've never really forgiven him for walking right out of our front door and into the arms of Her - Ms Talking Head News-Channel-4-New-York media babe. And Ethan was just twenty-five months old at the time.

Still, one must take these little setbacks on the chin, right? Especially as Matt so conformed to male cliche. But there is one thing I can say in my ex-husband's favor: he has turned out to be an attentive, loving father. And Ethan adores him - something that everyone at the graveside noticed, as he dashed in front of his grandmother's coffin and straight into his father's arms. Matt lifted him off the ground and I saw Ethan whisper his urination request. With a quick nod to me, Matt carried him off, draped across one shoulder, in search of the nearest toilet.

The minister now switched to that old funeral favorite, the 23rd Psalm.

Thou prepareth a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

I heard my brother Charlie choke back a sob. He was standing in the back of this sparse congregation of mourners. Without question, he had won the award for the Best Surprise Funeral Appearance - as he arrived at the chapel this morning off the red-eye from LA, looking ashen, spent, and deeply uncomfortable. It took me a moment to recognize him - because I hadn't seen him in over seven years, and because time had worked its nasty magic, rendering him middle-aged. Okay, I'm middle-aged too - just! - but Charlie (at fifty-five, nearly nine years my senior) really looked... well, I guess mature would be the right word, though world-weary might be a little more accurate. He'd lost most of his hair, and all of his physique. His face had become fleshy and loose. His waist bulged heavily at both sides - a spare tire that made his ill-fitting black suit appear even more of a sartorial misjudgment. His white shirt was open at the collar. His black tie was dappled with food stains. His entire countenance spoke of bad diet and a certain disappointment with life. I was certainly on cordial terms with the last of these concepts... but I was still stunned at just how badly he had aged, and that he had actually crossed the continent to say goodbye to a woman with whom he had only maintained nominal contact for the past thirty years.

'Kate', he said, approaching me in the lobby of the funeral chapel.

He saw my face register shock.

'Charlie?'

There was an awkward moment when he reached to hug me, then thought better of it and simply took my two hands in his. For a moment we didn't know what to say to each other. Finally I managed a sentence.

'This is a surprise...'

'I know, I know', he said, cutting me off.

'You got my messages?'

He nodded. 'Katie... I'm so sorry'.

I suddenly let go of his hands.

'Don't offer me condolences', I said, my voice curiously calm. 'She was your mother too. Remember?'

He blanched. Finally he managed to mumble, 'That's not fair'.

My voice remained very calm, very controlled.

'Every day for the last month - when she knew she was going - she kept asking me if you had called. Towards the end, I actually lied, and said you were phoning me daily to see how she was doing. So don't talk to me about fair'.

My brother stared down at the funeral home linoleum. Two of my mother's friends then approached me. As they made the requisite sympathetic noises, it gave Charlie the opportunity to back away. When the service began, he sat in the last row of the funeral chapel. I craned my neck to check out the assembled congregation - and briefly caught his eye. He turned away in acute discomfort. After the service, I looked around for him, as I wanted to offer him the chance to ride with me in the so-called 'family car' to the cemetery. But he was nowhere to be found. So I traveled out to Queens with Ethan and my Aunt Meg. She was my father's sister - a seventy-four-year-old professional spinster who has been devoted to the destruction of her liver for the past forty years. I was pleased to see that she had remained sober for the occasion of her sister-in-law's send-off. Because on those rare occasions when she was practising temperance, Meg was the best ally you could have. Especially as she had a tongue on her like a pissed-off wasp. Shortly after the limo pulled away from the funeral home, the subject turned to Charlie.

'So', Meg said, 'the prodigal schmuck returns'.

'And then promptly disappears', I added.

'He'll be at the cemetery', she said.

'How do you know that?'

'He told me. While you were pressing the flesh with everyone after the service, I caught him on the way out the door. "Hang on for a sec," I told him, "and we'll give you a ride out to Queens." But he went all mealy-mouthed, saying how he'd rather take the subway. I tell you, Charlie's still the same old sad asshole'.

'Meg', I said, nodding toward Ethan. He was sitting next to me in the limo, deeply engrossed in a Power Rangers book.

'He's not listening to the crap I'm talking, are you, Ethan?'

He looked up from his book. 'I know what asshole means', he said.

'Attaboy', Meg said, ruffling his hair.

'Read your book, darling', I said.

'He's one smart kid', Meg said. 'You've done a great job with him, Kate'.

'You mean, because he knows bad language?'

'I love a girl who thinks so highly of herself'.

'That's me: Ms Self-Esteem'.

'At least you've always done the right thing. Especially when it comes to family'.

'Yeah - and look where it's gotten me'.

'Your mother adored you'.

'On alternate Sundays'.

'I know she was difficult...'

'Try genteelly impossible'.

'Trust me, sweetie - you and this guy here were everything to her. And I mean everything'.

I bit my lip, and held back a sob. Meg took my hand.

'Take it from me: parents and children both end up feeling that they're the ones who landed the thankless job. Nobody comes out happy. But at least you won't suffer the guilt that your idiot brother is now feeling'.

'Do you know I left him three messages last week, telling him she only had days left, and he had to come back and see her'.

'He never called you back?'

'No - but his spokesperson did'.

'Princess?'

'The one and only'.

'Princess' was our nickname for Holly - the deeply resistible, deeply suburban woman who married Charlie in 1975, and gradually convinced him (for a long list of spurious, self-serving reasons) to detach himself from his family. Not that Charlie needed much encouragement. From the moment I had been aware of such things, I always knew that, for a mother and son, Mom and Charlie had a curiously cool relationship - and that the root cause of their antipathy was my dad.

'Twenty bucks says Charlie-boy breaks down at the graveside', Meg said.

'No way', I said.

'I mightn't have seen him in... when the hell did he last pay us a visit?'

'Seven years ago'.

'Right, it may have been seven years ago, but I know that kid of old. Believe me, he's always felt sorry for himself. The moment I laid eyes on him today I thought: poor old Charlie is still playing the self-pity card. Not only that, he's also got hot-and-cold running guilt. Can't bring himself to talk to his dying mom, but then tries to make up for it by putting in a last-minute appearance at her planting. What a sad act'.

'He still won't cry. He's too wound tight for that'.

Meg waved the bill in front of me.

'Then let's see the color of your cash'.

I fiddled around in my jacket pocket until I found two tens. I brandished them in front of Meg's eyes. 'I'm going to enjoy taking your twenty off you', I said.

'Not as much as I'm going to enjoy watching that pitiful shithead weep'.

I cast a glance at Ethan (still buried in his Power Rangers book), then threw my eyes heavenward.

'Sorry', Meg said, 'it just kind of slipped out'.

Without looking up from his book, Ethan said, 'I know what shithead means'.

Meg won the bet. After a final prayer over the coffin, the minister touched my shoulder and offered his condolences. Then, one by one, the other mourners approached me. As I went through this receiving-line ritual of handshakes and embraces, I caught sight of that woman, staring down at the headstone adjoining my mother's plot, studying the inscription with care. I knew it off by heart:

John Joseph Malone

August 22, 1922 - April 14, 1956

John Joseph Malone. Also known as Jack Malone. Also known as my dad. Who suddenly left this world just eighteen months into my life - yet whose presence has always shadowed me. That's the thing about parents: they may physically vanish from your life - you may not have even known them - but you're never free of them. That's their ultimate legacy to you - the fact that, like it or not, they're always there. And no matter how hard you try to shake them, they never let go.

As my upstairs neighbor, Christine, embraced me, I glanced over her shoulder. Charlie was now walking towards our father's grave. The woman was still standing there. But once she saw him coming (and evidently knowing who he was), she immediately backed away, giving him clear access to Dad's plain granite monument. Charlie's head was lowered, his gait shaky. When he reached the gravestone, he leaned against it for support - and suddenly began to sob. At first he tried to stifle his distress, but within a moment he lost that battle and was sobbing uncontrollably. I gently removed myself from Christine's embrace. Instinctively, I wanted to run right over to him - but I stopped myself from such an outward show of sibling sympathy (especially as I couldn't instantly forgive the pain that my mother silently suffered about his absence over all those years). Instead, I slowly walked towards him, and lightly touched his arm with my hand.

'You okay, Charlie?' I asked quietly.

He lifted up his head. His face was tomato red, his eyes awash in tears. Suddenly he lurched towards me, his head collapsing against my shoulder, his arms clutching me as if I was a life preserver in high seas. His sobbing was now fierce, uninhibited. For a moment I stood there, arms at my side, not knowing what to do. But his grief was so profound, so total, so loud that, eventually, I simply had to put my arms around him.

It took him a good minute before his cries subsided. I stared ahead into the distance, watching Ethan (having just returned from the toilet) being gently restrained by Matt from running towards me. I winked at my son, and he repaid me with one of those hundred-watt smiles that instantly compensates for all the exhausting, endless stress that is an essential component of parenthood. Then I looked to the left of Ethan, and saw that woman again. She was standing discreetly in an adjoining plot, watching me comfort Charlie. Before she turned away (again!), I momentarily saw the intensity of her gaze. An intensity which made me wonder: how the hell does she know us?

I turned back to look at Ethan. He pulled open his mouth with two fingers and stuck out his tongue - one of the repertoire of funny faces he pulls whenever he senses I am getting far too serious for his liking. I had to stifle a laugh. Then I glanced back to where the woman was standing. But she was no longer there - and was instead walking alone down the empty graveled path that led to the front gates of the cemetery.

Charlie gulped hard as he tried to control his sobbing. I decided it was time to end the embrace, so I gently disentangled myself from his grip.

'Are you okay now?' I asked.

He kept his head bowed.

'No', he whispered, then added: 'I should've, I should've...'

The crying started again. I should've. The most agonizing, self-punitive expression in the English language. And one we all utter constantly throughout this farce called life. But Charlie was right. He should've. Now there was nothing he could do about it.

'Come back to the city', I said. 'We're having some drinks and food at Mom's apartment. You remember where it is, don't you?'

I immediately regretted that comment, as Charlie began to sob again.

'That was dumb', I said quietly. 'I'm sorry'.

'Not as sorry as me', he said between sobs. 'Not as...'

He lost control again, his crying now ballistic. This time, I didn't offer him solace. Instead, I turned away and saw that Meg was now hovering nearby, looking dispassionate, yet waiting to be of assistance. When I turned towards her, she nodded in the direction of Charlie and arched her eyebrows, as if to ask, 'Want me to take over here?' You bet. She approached her nephew, and said, 'Come on, Charlie-boy', linking her arm through his, 'let's you and I take a little walk'.

Matt now relaxed his grip on Ethan, who ran towards me. I crouched down to scoop him up in my arms.

'You feeling better?' I asked.

'The toilet was yucky', he said.

I turned towards my mother's grave. The minister was still standing by the coffin. Behind him were the cemetery's grounds-keepers. They were keeping a discreet distance from the proceedings, but I could still tell they were waiting for us to leave so they could lower her into subterranean Queens, bring out the earth movers, plug the hole, then head off to lunch... or maybe the nearest bowling alley. Life really does go on - whether you're here or not.

The minister gave me a small telling nod, the subtext of which was: it's time to say goodbye. Okay, Rev., have it your way. Let's all join hands and sing.

Now it's time to say goodbye to all our company...

M-I-C... See you real soon...

K-E-Y... Why? Because we like you... M-O-U-S-E...

For a nanosecond, I was back in the old family apartment on 84th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam. Six years old, home from first grade at Brearley, watching Annette, Frankie and all the Mouseketeers on our crappy Zenith black-and-white set, with the round picture tube and rabbit-ears antenna, and the imitation mahogany cabinet, and my mom staggering towards me with two Welch's grape jelly glasses in her hand: Strawberry Kool-Aid for me, a Canadian Club highball for her.

'How's Mickey and his pals?' she asked, the words slurring.

'They're my friends', I said.

She sank down next to me on the couch.

'Are you my friend, Katie?'

I ignored the question. 'Where's Charlie?'

She suddenly looked hurt.

'Mr Barclay's', she said, mentioning a dancing school to which adolescent prep school boys like Charlie were dispatched, once a week, screaming.

'Charlie hates dancing', I said.

'You don't know that', Mom said, throwing back half of her drink.

'I heard him tell you', I said. 'I hate dancing school. I hate you'.

'He didn't say he hated me'.

'He did', I said, and turned my attention back to the Mouseketeers.

Mom threw back the rest of her drink.

'He didn't say that'.

I think it's a game.

'Oh yes he did'.

'You never heard him...'

I cut her off. 'Why is my daddy in heaven?'

She went ashen. Though we'd been down this road before, I hadn't asked about my dead father for nearly a year. But this afternoon, I had arrived home with an invitation to a Father/Daughter evening at my school.

'Why did he have to go to heaven?' I demanded.

'Darling, as I told you before, he didn't want to go to heaven. But he got sick...'

'When can I meet him?'

Her face now betrayed despair.

'Katie... you are my friend, aren't you?'

'You let me meet my daddy'.

I heard her stifle a sob. 'I wish I could...'

'I want him to come to school with me...'

'Tell me, Katie, that you're my friend'.

'You get my daddy back from heaven'.

Her voice was weak, tiny, diminished.

'I can't, Katie. I...'

Then she began to cry. Pulling me close to her. Burying her head in my small shoulder. Scaring the hell out of me. And making me run out of the room, terrified.

It was the only time I ever saw her drunk. It was the only time she ever cried in front of me. It was the last time I asked her to get my father back from the celestial beyond.

'Are you my friend, Katie?'

I never answered her question. Because, truth be told, I never really knew the answer.

'Mommy!'

Ethan was squeezing my hand. 'Mommy! I want to go home!'

I snapped back to Queens. And the sight of my mother's coffin. I said, 'Let's first say goodbye to Grandma'.

I led Ethan forward, sensing that all eyes were on us. We approached the shiny teak coffin. Ethan knocked on it with his small fist.

'Hello, Grandma. Goodbye, Grandma'.

I bit hard on my lip. My eyes filled up. I glanced at my father's grave. This is it. This is it. An orphan at last.

I felt a steadying hand on my shoulder. I turned around. It was Matt. I shrugged him off. And suddenly knew: it's me and Ethan, and no one else.

The minister gave me another of his telling glances. All right, all right, I'll move it along.

I put my hand on the coffin. It felt cold, like a refrigerator. I pulled my hand away. So much for grand final gestures. I bit my lip yet again, and forced myself to stay controlled. I reached for my son. I led him towards the waiting car.

Matt was waiting by the door. He spoke quietly.

'Katie, I just wanted to...'

'I don't want to know'.

'All I was going to say...'

'Do you speak English?'

'Would you please listen...'

I started grabbing the car door. 'No, I will not listen to you...'

Ethan tugged my sleeve. 'Daddy said he'd take me to the IMAX movie. Can I go, Mommy?'

It was then that I realized just how shipwrecked I was.

'We have a party...' I heard myself saying.

'Ethan will have a better time at the movies, don't you think?' Matt said.

Yeah, he would. I put my face in my hands. And felt more tired than I had ever felt in my life.

'Please can I go, Mommy?'

I looked up at Matt. 'What time will you have him home?'

'I was thinking he might like to spend the night with us'.

I could see that he instantly regretted the use of that last pronoun. Matt continued talking.

'I'll get him to school in the morning. And he can stay the next couple of nights if you need...'

'Fine', I said, cutting him off. Then I crouched down and hugged my son. And heard myself saying, 'Are you my friend, Ethan?'

He looked at me shyly, then gave me a fast kiss on the cheek. I wanted to take that as an affirmative answer, but knew I'd be brooding about his lack of a definite response for the rest of the day... and night. And simultaneously wondering why the hell I'd asked that dumb question in the first place.

Matt was about to touch my arm, but then thought better of it.

'Take care', he said, leading Ethan off.

Then I felt another hand on my shoulder. I brushed it off, as if it was a fly, saying to whoever was behind me, 'I really can't take any more sympathy'.

'Then don't take it'.

I covered my face with my hand. 'Sorry, Meg'.

'Say three Hail Marys, and get into the car'.

I did as ordered. Meg climbed in after me.

'Where's Ethan?' she asked.

'Spending the rest of the day with his dad'.

'Good', she said. 'I can smoke'.

While reaching into her pocket book for her Merits, she knocked on the glass partition with one hand. The driver hit a button and it slowly lowered.

'We're outta here, fella', Meg said, lighting up. She heaved a huge sigh of gratification as she inhaled.

'Must you?' I asked.

'Yeah, I must'.

'It'll kill you'.

'I never knew that'.

The limo pulled out on to the main cemetery drive. Meg took my hand, locking her thin, varicose fingers with mine.

'You hanging in there, sweetheart?' she asked.

'I have been better, Meg'.

'A couple more hours, this entire fucking business'll be over. And then...'

'I can fall apart'.

Meg shrugged. And held my hand tighter.

'Where's Charlie?' I asked.

'Taking the subway back into town'.

'Why the hell is he doing that?'

'It's his idea of penance'.

'Watching him break down like that, I actually felt sorry for him. If he'd just picked up the phone towards the end, he could have straightened out so much with Mom'.

'No', Meg said. 'He wouldn't have straightened anything out'.

As the limo approached the gates, I caught sight of that woman again. She was walking steadily towards the cemetery entrance, moving with fluent ease for someone her age. Meg saw her as well.

'Do you know her?' I asked.

Her answer was a couldn't-care-less shrug.

'She was at Mom's grave', I said. 'And hung around during most of the prayers'.

Another shrug from Meg.

I said, 'Probably some kook who gets her giggles loitering in cemeteries'.

She looked up as we drove by, then lowered her eyes quickly.

The limo pulled out into the main road, and turned left in the direction of Manhattan. I fell back into the seat, spent. For a moment there was silence. Then Meg poked me with her elbow.

'So', she said, 'where's my twenty bucks?'

Two

AFTER THE CEMETERY, fifteen of the twenty graveside mourners returned to my mother's place. It was quite a squeeze - as Mom had spent the last twenty-six years of her life in a small one-bedroom apartment on 84th Street and West End Avenue (and even on those truly rare occasions when she entertained, I can't remember more than four people in her home at any given time).

I had never liked the apartment. It was cramped. It was badly laid out. Its southwest position on the fourth floor meant that it overlooked a back alleyway, and was rarely in contact with the sun. The living room was eleven feet by eleven, there was a bedroom of equal size, there was a small en-suite bathroom, there was a ten-by-eight kitchen with elderly appliances and scuffed linoleum. Everything about the apartment seemed old, tired, in desperate need of updating. Three years ago, I'd managed to convince Mom to get the place repainted - but, like so many old West Side apartments, this new coat of emulsion and gloss simply added another cheap veneer to plaster work and moldings that were already an inch thick with decades-worth of bad paint. The carpets were getting threadbare. The furniture was in need of recovering. What few so-called luxury items she owned (a television, an air-conditioner, an all-in-one stereo unit of indeterminate Korean origin) were all technologically backward. Over the past few years, whenever I had a bit of spare cash (which, it has to be said, wasn't very often), I'd offer to update her TV or buy her a microwave. But she always refused.

'You have better things to be spending your money on', she'd always say.

'You're my mom', I'd retort.

'Spend it on Ethan, spend it on yourself. I'm fine with what I've got'.

'That air-conditioner is asthmatic. You're going to boil in July'.

'I have an electric fan'.

'Mom, I'm just trying to help'.

'I know that, dear. But I am just fine'. She'd give the last two words such pointed, tetchy emphasis that I knew it was useless to pursue the issue. This topic of conversation was closed.

She was always denying herself everything. She hated the idea of turning into a burden. And - being a genteel, yet fiercely self-respecting WASP - she loathed the notion of being a suitable case for charity. Because, to her, it implied personal failure; a collapse of character.

I turned around from where I was standing in the living room, and caught sight of a cluster of framed family photos on an end table next to the sofa. I walked over and picked up a snapshot I knew all too well. It was of my father in his Army uniform. It was taken by my mother at the base in England where they met in 1945. It had been her one overseas adventure - the only time in her life that she ever left America. Having volunteered for the Red Cross after college, she'd ended up as a typist, working at an outpost of Allied Command HQ in suburban London. That's where she encountered the dashing Jack Malone, cooling his Brooklyn heels after covering the Allied liberation of Germany for Stars and Stripes - the US Army newspaper. They had a fling - of which Charlie was the byproduct. And they suddenly found their destiny spliced together.

Charlie approached me. He looked down at the photograph I was holding.

'Do you want to bring this back with you?' I asked.

He shook his head. 'I've got a copy at home', he said. 'It's my favorite photo of Dad'.

'I think I'll take it then. I don't have too many pictures of him'.

We stood there for a moment, wondering what to say next. Charlie chewed nervously on his lower lip.

'You feeling better?' I asked.

'Fine, yeah', he said, averting his eyes as usual. 'You bearing up?'

'Me? Sure', I said, trying to sound unfazed by having just buried our mom.

'Your son's a great-looking kid. Was that your ex?'

'Yeah - that's the charmer. You've never met him before?'

Charlie shook his head.

'Oh yes, I forgot - you missed my wedding. And Matt was out of town during your last trip here. Nineteen ninety-four, wasn't it?'

Charlie ignored that question, and instead posed another:

'He's still something in television news, isn't he?'

'He's now something very big. Like his new wife'.

'Yeah, Mom did tell me about the divorce'.

'Really?' I said, sounding surprised. 'When did she tell you? During your annual phone call in nineteen ninety-five?'

'We spoke a little more than that'.

'Sorry, you're right. You also called her every Christmas. So, it was during one of your bi-annual phone calls that you discovered Matt had left me'.

'I was really sad to hear about that'.

'Hey, it's ancient history now. I'm over it'.

Another awkward silence.

'The place doesn't look very different', he said, glancing around the apartment.

'Mom was never going to make it into the pages of House and Garden', I said. 'Mind you, even if she'd wanted to do up the apartment - which she didn't - money was always rather tight. Thank God the place was rent-stabilized - otherwise she wouldn't have been able to stay on'.

'What's it now a month?'

'Eighteen hundred - which isn't bad for the neighborhood. But it was always a scramble for her to meet'.

'Didn't she inherit anything from Uncle Ray?'

Ray was Mom's well-heeled brother - a big-deal Boston-based lawyer who maintained a starchy distance from his sister. From what I could gather, Mom was never particularly close to him when they were growing up - and they grew even further apart after Ray and his wife, Edith, voiced their disapproval of the Brooklyn Mick she had married. But Ray did live according to the WASP code of Doing the Proper Thing. So after my dad's premature death, he came to the financial aid of his sister by offering to pay for the education of her two children. The fact that Ray and Edith had no kids of their own (and that Mom was Ray's only sibling) probably made it easier for them to foot this hefty bill over the years - even though, when we were younger, it was pretty clear to Charlie and me that our uncle didn't really want anything to do with us. We never saw him. Mom never saw him. We each received a twenty-dollar savings bond from him every Christmas. When Charlie was at Boston College, Ray never once invited him over to his Beacon Hill townhouse. I also got the cold shoulder while I was at Smith and dropping into Boston once a month. Mom explained his aloofness away by telling us, 'Families can be odd'. Still, fair credit to the guy: thanks to him, Charlie and I were able to attend private schools and private colleges. But as soon as I graduated from Smith in '76, Mom saw no more money from her brother - and she was always short of cash for the rest of her life. When Ray died in '98, I expected Mom to come into a little money (especially as Edith had pre-deceased her husband by three years). But she received nothing from his estate.

'You mean, Mom never told you that Ray left her zilch?' I asked.

'All she said was that he had died'.

'That was during your nineteen ninety-eight phone call, right?'

Charlie stared down at his shoes. 'Yes - that's right', he said quietly. 'But I didn't know she'd been cut out of his will like that'.

'Yeah - Ray left everything to the nurse who'd been looking after him ever since Edith went to that big Episcopalian church in the sky. Poor old Mom - she always got shortchanged on everything'.

'How did she manage to pay the bills?'

'She had a small pension from the school. There was social security... and that was it. I offered to help her out, but, of course, she refused me. Even though I could have afforded it'.

'You still with the same ad agency?'

'I'm afraid so'.

'But you're some senior executive now, aren't you?'

'A senior copywriter, that's all'.

'Sounds pretty okay to me'.

'The money's not bad. But there's a saying in my business: a happy copywriter is an oxymoron. Still, it passes the time and pays the bills. I just wish Mom had let me pay some of her bills. But she was adamant she wanted nothing from me. The way I figure it, she was either running an illegal canasta game, or she had a lucrative Girl Scout Cookie racket going on the side'.

'You planning to close up this place now?' Charlie asked.

'I'm certainly not going to maintain it as a museum'.

I looked at him squarely. 'You know you're out of the will'.

'I'm, uh, not surprised'.

'Not that there's much in her estate. Just before she went, she told me there was a bit of life insurance and some stock. Maybe fifty grand tops. Too bad you didn't make contact with her six months ago. Believe me, she didn't want to cut you out - and she kept hoping against hope that you'd make that one call. After they told her the cancer was terminal, she wrote you, didn't she?'

'She never mentioned in the letter that she was dying', he said.

'Oh, that would have changed things, would it?'

Another of his evasive over-my-shoulder glances. My voice remained level.

'You didn't answer her letter, and you didn't answer the messages I left for you when she was in her final days. Which, I have to say, was strategically dumb. Because had you shown your face in New York, you would now be splitting that fifty grand with me'.

'I would never have accepted my share...'

'Yeah, right. Princess would have insisted...'

'Don't call Holly that'.

'Why the hell not? She's the Lady Macbeth in this story'.

'Kate, I'm really trying to...'

'Do what? "Heal wounds"? Achieve "closure"?'

'Look, my argument was never with you'.

'I'm touched. Too bad Mom's not here to see this. She always had these far-fetched romantic notions about everyone making up, and maybe seeing her West Coast grandkids again'.

'I meant to call...'

'Meant isn't good enough. Meant means shit'.

My voice had jumped a decibel or two. I was suddenly aware that the living room had emptied. So too was Charlie, as he whispered, 'Please, Kate... I don't want to go back to the coast with such bad...'

'Charlie, what the hell did you expect today? Instant reconciliation? Field of Dreams? You reap what you sow, pal'.

I felt a steadying hand on my arm. Aunt Meg.

'Great sermon, Kate', she said. 'And I'm sure Charlie now completely understands your point of view'.

I took a deep steadying breath. And said, 'Yeah, I guess he does'.

'Charlie', Meg said, 'why don't you go find yourself something alcoholic in the kitchen'.

Charlie did as commanded. The squabbling children had been separated.

'You okay now?' Meg asked.

'No', I said. 'I am definitely not okay'.

She motioned me towards the sofa. Sitting down next to me, her voice became conspiratorially quiet:

'Back off the guy', she said. 'I had a little talk with him in the kitchen. It seems he's been juggling some very major problems'.

'What kind of problems?'

'He was downsized four months ago. Fitzgibbon was taken over by some Dutch multinational, and they immediately canned half their Californian sales force'.

Fitzgibbon was the pharmaceuticals giant which had employed Charlie for the last twenty years. Charlie had started out as a San Fernando Valley sales rep, then gradually worked his way up to being Regional Sales Director for Orange County. And now...

'Exactly how bad are his problems?' I asked.

'Put it this way - he had to borrow money from a friend to buy the plane ticket back here'.

Jesus.

'And with two kids in college, financially speaking, things are hitting critical mass. He's in really grim shape'.

I suddenly felt a pang of guilt. The poor idiot. Nothing ever seemed to work out Charlie's way. He always had this unerring talent for making the wrong call.

'From what I gather, the marital front is also pretty choppy. Because Princess isn't exactly being the most supportive of spouses...'

Meg suddenly stopped talking and gave me a fast nudge with her elbow. Charlie had re-entered the room, his raincoat over his arm. I stood up.

'What's with the coat?' I asked.

'I've got to get back to the airport', he said.

'But you just arrived a couple of hours ago', I said.

'I've got a big meeting first thing tomorrow', he said sheepishly. 'A job interview. I'm, uh, kind of between things at the moment'.

I caught Meg's glance - imploring me not to let on that I knew about Charlie's unemployed status. Isn't it amazing how family life is an ever-widening web of petty confidences and 'please don't tell your brother I told you...'

'I'm sorry to hear that, Charlie', I said. 'And I'm sorry I boxed your ears before. It's a bad day and...'

Charlie silenced me by leaning forward and giving me a fast buzz on the cheek.

'Let's keep in touch, eh?' he said.

'That's really up to you, Charlie'.

My brother didn't respond to that comment. He simply shrugged sadly and headed to the front door. When he got there, he turned back towards me. A look passed between us. It only lasted a nanosecond, but it said it all: please forgive me.

In that sad nanosecond, I felt a surge of pity for my brother. He appeared so bloated and battered by life; as trapped and cornered as a deer staring straight into the oncoming headlights. Life had not worked out for him - and he now radiated disappointment. I could certainly sympathize with his sense of letdown. Because, with the serendipitous exception of my son, I was not exactly a walking advertisement for personal fulfilment.

'Goodbye, Katie', Charlie said. He opened the front door. I turned away from my brother and disappeared into the bathroom. When I came out two minutes later, I was relieved to see that he'd left.

Just as I was also relieved that the rest of the assembled mourners began to make their goodbyes. There were a couple of people from the building, and some old friends of Mom - increasingly frail women in their seventies, trying to make pleasant chit-chat, and appear reasonably spirited, and not think too much about the fact that, one by one, their contemporaries were vanishing.

By three, everyone had gone - except for Meg and Rozella, the large, cheerful, middle-aged Dominican woman I had hired, two years ago, to clean Mom's apartment twice a week. She ended up being a full-time nurse after Mom checked herself out of Sloan-Kettering.

'I'm not dying in some beige room with fluorescent lighting', she told me the morning her oncologist informed her the cancer was terminal.

I heard myself saying, 'You're not dying, Mom'.

She reached out from the bed and took my hand.

'You can't fight City Hall, dear'.

'The doctor said it could be months...'

Her voice remained calm, strangely serene.

'At the very outset. From where I'm sitting, I would say three weeks maximum. Which, quite frankly, is better than I expected...'

'Must you always, always look on the bright side, Mom?' Oh Christ, what am I saying here? I grasped her hand tighter. 'I didn't mean that. It's just...'

She stared at me critically.

'You've never really figured me out, have you?' she said.

Before I had a chance to offer up some weak refutation, she reached out and hit the call button by her hospital bed.

'I'm going to ask the nurse to get me dressed and help me pack up my things. So if you wouldn't mind giving me fifteen minutes

'I'll get you dressed, Mom'.

'No need, dear'.

'But I want to'.

'Go get yourself a cup of coffee, dear. The nurse will take care of everything'.

'Why won't you let me... ?' I suddenly sounded like a whiny fourteen-year-old. My mom simply smiled, knowing she'd checkmated me.

'You run along now, dear. But don't be longer than fifteen minutes - because if I'm not gone by noon, they charge another full day for the room'.

'So what?' I felt like yelling. 'Blue Cross is picking up the tab'. But I knew what her response would be.

It's still not fair to take advantage of a good, dependable company like Blue Cross.

And I would then wonder (for around the zillionth time) why I could never win an argument with her.

You've never really figured me out, have you?

Damn her for knowing me too well. As usual, she was right on the money. I never understood her. Never understood how she could be so equanimous in the face of so many disappointments, so many adversities. From the few hints that she had dropped (and from what Charlie told me when we used to talk), I sensed that her marriage hadn't exactly been happy. Her husband had died young. He'd left her no money. Her only son had estranged himself from the family. And her only daughter was Ms Discontented who couldn't understand why her mom refused to scream and shout about life's many letdowns. Or why, now, at the end of her life, she was so damn accepting, and would think it bad manners to rage against the dying of the light. But that was always her fortitudinous style. She never showed her hand, never articulated the inherent sadness which so clearly lurked behind her stoical veneer.

But she was certainly right about the timetable of her illness. She didn't last months. She lasted less than two weeks. I hired Rozella on a twenty-four-hour care basis - and felt guilty about not being with Mom full time. But I was under insane pressure at work with a big new account, and I had Ethan to look after (being pigheaded, I also didn't want to ask Matt for any favors). So I could only squeeze in three hours a day with her.

The end was fast. Rozella woke me at four a.m. last Tuesday, and simply said, 'You must come now'.

Fortunately I had already worked out an emergency plan for this exact moment with a newfound friend named Christine - who lived two floors above me in my building, and was a fellow member of the Divorced Moms Club. Though Ethan loudly objected, I managed to get him out of bed and delivered him to Christine, who immediately put him back to bed on her sofa, relieved me of his school clothes, and promised to deliver him to Allan-Stevenson that morning.

Then I raced downstairs, got the doorman to find me a cab, and told the driver that I'd tip him five bucks if he could make it across town to 84th and West End in fifteen minutes.

He did it in ten. Which was a good thing - as Mom went just five minutes after I walked through the door.

I found Rozella standing at the foot of her bed, sobbing quietly. She put her arms around me, and whispered, 'She's here, but not here'.

That was a nice way of saying she had slipped into a coma. Which, honestly, was something of a relief to me - because I was secretly terrified of this deathbed scene. Of saying the right, final thing. Because there is no right or final thing to say. Anyway she couldn't hear me now - so any melodramatic 'I love you, Mom!' proclamations would have been for my benefit alone. At a momentous moment like this one, words are less-than-cheap. And they couldn't assuage the guilt I was feeling.

So I simply sat on the bed, and took Mom's still-warm hand, and gripped it tightly, and tried to remember my first recollection of her, and suddenly saw her as an animated, pretty young woman holding my four-year-old hand as we walked to the playground in Riverside Park, and thought how this wasn't a significant or crucial memory, just something ordinary, and how back then she was fifteen years younger than I am now, and how we forget all those walks to the park, and the emergency trips to the pediatrician with tonsillitis, and getting picked up after school, and being schlepped around town for shoes or clothes or Girl Scout meetings, and all the other scheduling minutiae that comes with being a parent, and how my mom always tried so hard with me, and how I could never really see that, and how I hated my neediness towards her, and wished that I could have somehow made her happier, and how, back when I was four, she would always go on the slide with me, always sit in the adjoining swing, rocking back and forth, and how, suddenly, there we were, mother and daughter swinging higher into the sky, an autumn day in '59, the sun shining, my world cozy, secure, loving, my mother laughing, and...

She took three sharp intakes of breath. Then there was silence. I must have sat there for another fifteen minutes, still holding her hand, feeling a gradual chill drift into her fingers. Eventually, Rozella gently took me by the shoulders and stood me upright. There were tears in her eyes, but none in mine. Perhaps because I was just too paralyzed to cry.

Rozella leaned over and shut Mom's eyes. Then she crossed herself and said a Hail Mary. I engaged in a different sort of ritual: I went into the living room, poured myself a large Scotch, threw it back, then picked up the phone and dialed 911.

'What kind of emergency do you want to report?' asked the operator.

'It's not an emergency', I said. 'Just a death'.

'What sort of death?'

'Natural'. But I could have added: 'A very quiet death. Dignified. Stoic. Borne without complaint'

My mother died the way she lived.

I stood by the bed, listening to Rozella wash up the dishes from the wake. Just three days ago Mom lay here. Out of nowhere I suddenly remembered something that a guy named Dave Schroeder recently told me. He was a freelance magazine writer: smart as hell, well-traveled, but still trying to make a name for himself at forty. I'd gone out with him twice. He dropped me when I wouldn't sleep with him after the second date. Had he waited until the third date, he might have gotten lucky. But anyway... he did tell me one great story: about being in Berlin on the night the Wall was breached, then coming back a year later to find that that monstrous structure - the defining, bloodstained rampart of the Cold War - had simply vanished from view. Even the famous Customs Shed at Checkpoint Charlie had been dismantled, and the old Bulgarian Trade Mission on the eastern side of the Checkpoint had been replaced by an outlet of Benetton.

'It was like this terrible thing, this crucial cornerstone of twentieth-century history, never existed', Dave told me. 'And it got me thinking: the moment we end an argument is the moment we obliterate any history of that argument. It's a basic human trait: to sanitize the past, in order to move on'.

I looked down again at my mother's bed. And remembered the soiled sheets, the sodden pillows, the way she would almost claw the mattress before the morphine kicked in. Now it was neatly remade, with laundered sheets and a bedspread that had just come back from the dry cleaner's. The idea that she died right here already seemed surreal, impossible. A week from now - after Rozella and I packed up the apartment, and the Goodwill Industries people hauled off all the furniture I planned to give away - what tangible evidence would be left of my mom's time on the planet? A few material possessions (her engagement ring, a brooch or two), a few photographs, and...

Nothing else - except, of course, the space she would permanently occupy inside my head. A space she now shared with the dad I never knew.

And when Charlie and I both died... ping. That would be it for Dorothy and Jack Malone. Their impact on human life rubbed right out. Just as my lasting imprint will be Ethan. For as long as he's here...

I shuddered, and suddenly felt very cold, and in need of another Scotch. I walked into the kitchen. Rozella was at the sink, dealing with the final dishes. Meg was at the little formica kitchen table, a cigarette smouldering in a saucer (my mom had no ashtrays in the house), a bottle of Scotch next to a half-filled glass.

'Don't look so disapproving', Meg said. 'I did offer to help Rozella'.

'I was thinking more about the cigarette', I said.

'It doesn't bother me', Rozella said.

'My mom hated smoking', I said. Pulling back a chair, I sat down, then reached for Meg's packet of Merits, fished one out, and lit up. Meg looked stunned.

'Should I alert Reuters?' she said. 'Or maybe CNN?'

As I laughed, I exhaled a lung full of smoke.

'I treat myself to one or two a year. On special occasions. Like when Matt announced he was leaving. Or when Mom rang me up in April to say that she had to go into hospital for tests, but she was sure it was nothing...'

Meg poured me a large slug of whiskey, and pushed the glass towards me.

'Down the hatch, honey'.

I did as ordered.

'Why don't you go off with your aunt', Rozella said. 'I'll finish up here'.

'I'm staying', I said.

'That's dumb', Meg said. 'Anyway, my Social Security check just cleared yesterday, so I'm feeling flush, and in the mood for something high in cholesterol... like a steak. So how about I book us a table at Smith and Wollensky's? Have you ever seen the martinis they serve there? They're the size of a goldfish bowl'.

'Save your money. I'm staying here tonight'.

Meg and Rozella exchanged a worried look.

'What do you mean, tonight?' Meg asked.

'I mean - I'm planning to sleep here tonight'.

'You really shouldn't do that', Rozella said.

'Understatement of the goddamn year', Meg added.

'My mind's made up. I'm sleeping here'.

'Well, if you're staying, I'm staying', Meg said.

'No, you're not. I want to be here by myself'.

'Now, that's nuts', Meg said.

'Please listen to your aunt', Rozella said. 'Being by yourself here tonight... it is not a good idea'.

'I can handle it'.

'Don't be so sure about that', Meg said.

But I wasn't going to be talked out of this. After paying off Rozella (she didn't want to accept any additional money from me, but I shoved a hundred dollars into her hand and refused to take it back), I finally managed to dislodge Aunt Meg from the kitchen table around five. We were both just a little bit tipsy, as I had matched Meg Scotch for Scotch... and lost track somewhere after the fourth shot.

'You know, Katie', she said as I helped her into her coat, 'I really do think you are a glutton for punishment'.

'Thank you for such a frank assessment of my shortcomings'.

'You know what I'm talking about here. The last thing you should do tonight is be alone in your dead mother's apartment. But that's exactly what you're doing. And it baffles the hell out of me'.

'I just want some time by myself. Here. Before I clear the place out. Can't you understand that?'

'Sure I can. Just like I can understand self-flagellation'.

'You sound like Matt. He always said I had a real talent for unhappiness'.

'Well, fuck that social-climbing bozo. Especially as he has a proven talent for creating unhappiness'.

'Maybe he has a point. Sometimes I think...'

I trailed off, not really wanting to finish the sentence. But Meg said, 'Go on, spill it'.

'I don't know. Sometimes I think I get things really wrong'.

Meg threw her eyes heavenward.

'Welcome to the human race, sweetheart'.

'You know what I mean'.

'No - actually I don't. You're successful at what you do, you've got a great kid...'

'The best kid'.

Meg pursed her lips - and a momentary flicker of sadness crossed her face. Though she rarely spoke about it, I knew that her childlessness had always been a quiet source of regret for her. And I remembered what she said after I announced I was pregnant: 'Take it from me. I mightn't have tied the knot, but I've never been short of guys. And the vast majority of them are useless, weak-kneed assholes who run a mile when they work out you're an independent broad. In fact, the only good thing a guy can ever give you is a kid'.

'Then why didn't you get yourself knocked up?'

'Because back in the fifties and sixties - when I could have done it - the idea of a single-parent family was about as socially acceptable as supporting the Russian space program. An unmarried mom was immediately labeled an outcast - and I just didn't have the balls to handle the heat. I guess I'm a coward at heart'.

'I think the last thing I'd ever call you is a coward. I mean, when you get right down to it, I'm the coward in the family...'

'You got married. You're having a kid. From where I sit, that's brave'.

She immediately changed conversational tack. We never spoke about her childlessness again. In fact, the only time she let down her guard on the subject was at moments like this one - when mention of Ethan would be accompanied by a hint of ruefulness, which she would then banish in a New York second.

'Damn right, he's the best kid', she said. 'And, okay, the marriage tanked. But hey, look what you got out of it'.

'I know...'

'So why get so down about things?'

Because... oh God... I don't know how to begin explaining that most ambiguous, yet all-encompassing of emotions - a pervading frustration with yourself, and with the place you've landed yourself in life.

But I was too tired - and too blotto - to get into this issue. So I simply nodded in agreement, and said, 'I hear ya, Meg'.

'Too bad your mother didn't raise you a Catholic. You'd make one hell of a penitent'.

We headed downstairs in the elevator. As we crossed the lobby, Meg slid her arm through mine, and leaned on me for support. The doorman hailed a cab. He opened the door and I helped her inside.

'I hope the hell all that Scotch will knock you out cold', she said, "cause I really don't want you to be sitting up there, thinking, thinking, thinking...'

'There's nothing wrong with thinking'.

'It's dangerous to your health'. She clutched me. 'Call me tomorrow - when you've emerged from the Twilight Zone. Promise?'

'Yeah - I promise'.

She looked at me straight in the eye.

'You're my kid', she said.

I went back upstairs. I must have stood in front of the apartment door for at least a minute before my nerve returned. Then I let myself back in.

The silence inside was overwhelming. My initial thought was, flee. But I forced myself to go into the kitchen and put away the last of the dishes. I wiped down the formica table twice, then dealt with all the kitchen surfaces. I got out some Comet and gave the sink a good scrub. I found a can of Pledge and dusted every item of furniture in the apartment. I went into the bathroom. I tried to ignore the peeling wallpaper and the large damp patches on the ceiling. I picked up a toilet brush and went to work. Then I turned my attention to the bath, scouring it for a good fifteen minutes, but was unable to lift the deeply ingrained rust stains around the drain. The sink was even more rusted. I must have spent another quarter of an hour manically scrubbing it... oblivious to the fact that I was doing all these domestic chores while still dressed in a really good black suit (an absurdly expensive, absurdly chic Armani number with which Matt surprised me five Christmases ago - and which I later realized was a major guilt gift, as Matt hit me with Surprise Number Two on January second by announcing he was in love with a certain Blair Bentley, and had decided to terminate our marriage, effective immediately).

Eventually I could take no more of this washer-woman act, and slumped against the sink, my white blouse drenched, my face beaded with sweat. The heating in Mom's apartment was always turned up to sub-sauna levels, and I suddenly felt in desperate need of a shower. So I opened her medicine chest to see what soaps and shampoos I might purloin. I was suddenly confronted with around ten bottles of Valium, and a dozen vials of morphine, and packs of hypodermic needles, and boxes of enemas, and the long thin catheter which Rozella had to insert in Mom's urethra to draw out her urine. Then I noticed the packages of Depends Adult Diapers stacked in a corner under her vanity table, on top of a plastic bedpan. I found myself thinking: somebody, somewhere, manufactures and markets all this stuff. And, Jesus, their stock price must always be buoyant. Because if there's one great certainty to life, it's this: if you live long enough, you will end up in a Depends. Even if you get unlucky and, say, contract uterine cancer at forty, chances are that, towards the end of your terminal drama, you too will need a Depends. And...

I was suddenly doing what I swore I wouldn't do all day.

I can't remember just how long I cried - because I was inconsolable. The emotional brakes were finally off. I had surrendered to grief's unbridled rage. A relentless deluge of anguish and guilt. Anguish because I was now all by myself in the Big Bad World. And guilt because I had spent most of my adult life trying to dodge my mother's clutches. Now that I had permanently escaped her, I wondered: what the hell was the argument between us?

I gripped the sink tightly. I felt my stomach surge. Falling to my knees, I just managed to reach the toilet in time. Scotch. More Scotch. And a surfeit of bile.

I staggered to my feet, brownish drool dripping from my lips on to my good black suit. I returned to the sink, turned on the cold tap, shoved my mouth under it, and rinsed it free of vomit. I grabbed the king-sized bottle of Lavoris mouth wash on the vanity table - why is it that only little old ladies buy Lavoris? - unscrewed the big plastic cap, poured around half-a-pint of that astringent cinnamon-flavoured gargle into my mouth, swirled it around, spat the lot into the sink. Then I lurched to the bedroom, pulling my clothes off on the way.

By the time I reached Mom's bed, I was down to my bra and tights. I rifled through her chest of drawers, looking for a t-shirt... but then remembered that my mom wasn't exactly a member of the Gap generation. So I settled for an old cream-colored crew-necked sweater: very Going-with-Tad-to-the-Harvard/Yale-Game-Fall-'42 vintage. Pulling off my underwear, I pulled on the sweater, stretching it down to just above my knees. It reeked of moth balls, and the wool felt itchy against my skin. I didn't care. I threw off the bedspread and crawled in. Despite the Florida-like heat of the apartment, the sheets felt eerily cold. I grabbed a pillow and clutched it against me, clinging on to it as if it was the only thing on earth right now that could give me ballast.

I suddenly had an overwhelming need to hold my son. I suddenly started to cry. I suddenly felt like Little Girl Lost. I suddenly loathed myself for this burst of self-pity. I suddenly wondered why the room was beginning to tilt and keel like a boat in choppy waters. I suddenly fell asleep.

Then the phone started to ring.

It took me a moment or two to drift back into consciousness. The bedside light was still blazing. I squinted at the elderly digital clock by the bed - so 1970s that it had mechanically flipping numbers. 9.48 p.m. I had been asleep for around three hours. I lifted the phone. I managed to mumble...

'Hello?'

... but my voice was so thick with groggy sleep that I must have sounded semi-comatose. There was a long pause on the other end. Then I heard a woman's voice.

'Sorry, wrong number'.

The line went dead. I put the receiver down. I turned off the light. I pulled the covers over my head. And called an end to this fucking awful day.

Three

I WOKE AT six. For about ten seconds, I felt curiously elated. Because, for the first time in around five months, I had actually slept for eight unbroken hours. But then everything else flooded in. And I found myself wondering: what deranged, grief-stricken despondency made me want to stay in Mom's bed overnight?

I got to my feet, careened into the bathroom, took one look at myself in the bathroom mirror, and decided not to make that mistake again. I peed, baptized my face with cold water, and gargled with Lavoris: three basic ablutions that enabled me to leave the apartment without feeling like a total fire sale.

My suit stank of vomit. As I dressed, I tried to ignore the smell and paid no notice to its trashed condition. Then I made the bed, grabbed my coat, turned out all the lights, and slammed the door behind me. Meg was right: I really was a glutton for punishment. I decided: the next time I see this apartment again is the time I pack it up.

The early hour meant that I didn't run into any of Mom's neighbors in the elevator or the lobby. This was a relief, as I don't think I could have handled another heartfelt expression of condolence (I was also worried that people might think I was auditioning for a female remake of The Lost Weekend). The night doorman - slumped in an armchair by the lobby's fake electric fireplace - didn't even seem to notice me walking briskly by. There must have been two dozen empty cabs cruising West End Avenue. I hailed one, gave the driver my address, and collapsed across the back seat.

Even to a jaundiced native like myself, there is still something wondrous about Manhattan at dawn. Maybe it's the emptiness of the streets. Or the commingling of street-lamp light and the emerging sunrise. Everything's so tentative, so hushed. The city's manic rhythms are momentarily stilled. There's a sense of equivocation and expectation. At dawn, nothing seems certain... yet everything appears possible.

But then night drops away. Manhattan begins to shout at the top of its lungs. Reality truly bites. Because in the harsh light of day, possibilities vanish.

I live on 74th Street between Second and Third Avenues. It's an ugly, squat, white brick apartment building - of the sort favored by developers in the 1960s, and which now grimly define that bland Upper East Side cityscape between Third and the River. Being a West Side girl (born and bred!), I always considered this part of town to be the urban equivalent of vanilla ice cream: dull, insipid, devoid of edge. Before I got married, I lived for years on 106th Street and Broadway - which was anything but monotonous. I loved the exuberant grime of the neighborhood - the Haitian grocery stores, the Puerto Rican bodegas, the old Jewish delis, the good bookshops near Columbia University, the no cover/no minimum jazz at the West End Cafe. But my apartment - though insanely cheap - was tiny. And Matt had this rent-controlled two-bedroom place on East 74th Street, which had been in the family for years (he'd taken it over after his grandfather died). It was a steal at $1600 a month, not to mention a hell of a lot more spacious than my single cell up in Jungleland.

But we both hated the apartment. Especially Matt - who was seriously embarrassed about living at such an unhip address, and kept telling me we'd move to the Flatiron District or Gramercy Park as soon as he left lowly paid PBS and got his senior producer gig at NBC.

Well, he got the big NBC job. He also got the big Flatiron pad - with that cropped-blonde talking head, Blair Bentley. And I ended up with the much-hated rent-controlled apartment on 74th Street - which I now cannot leave, because it is such a bargain (I have friends with kids who can't even find a two-bed place in Astoria for $1600 a month).

Constantine, the morning doorman, was on duty when I got out of the cab. He was around sixty; a first-generation Greek immigrant, who still lived with his mom in Astoria, and who really didn't like the idea of divorced women with children... especially those vulgar harpies who actually have to go out and earn a living. He also had the proclivities of a village stoolie - always checking up on people, always asking the sort of leading questions which made you understand that he was keeping tabs on you. My stomach sank when he opened the door of the taxi. I could see that he was interested in my trashy state.

'Late night, Miss Malone?' he asked.

'No - early morning'.

'How's the little guy?'

'Fine'.

'Upstairs asleep?'

Yeah, that's right. He's been home alone all night, playing with my collection of hunting knives, while working his way through my extensive library of S&M videos.

'No - he's staying with his dad tonight'.

'Say hi to Matt for me, Miss Malone'.

Oh, thank you. And yeah, I did catch the way you stressed Miss.

There goes your Christmas tip, malacca (the only Greek profanity I know).

I took the elevator to the fourth floor. I unlocked the three deadbolts on my door. The apartment was appallingly silent. I went straight into Ethan's room. I sat on his bed. I stroked his Power Rangers pillow case (okay, I think the Power Rangers are totally dumb - but try having a discussion about aesthetics with a seven-year-old boy). I looked at all the guilt gifts Matt had recently bought him (an iMac computer, dozens of CD-Roms, top-of-the-line roller blades). I looked at all the guilt gifts I had recently bought him (a walking Godzilla, a complete set of Power Ranger action figures, two dozen jigsaw puzzles). I felt a stab of sadness. All this booty, all this crap - all given in an attempt to ease parental remorse. The same remorse I feel when - two or three times a week - I have to stay late at the office or go out to some business dinner, and am therefore forced to get Claire (the part-time Australian nanny who picks up Ethan from school and looks after him until I come home) to stay on. Though Ethan rarely chides me for these evening absences, I always feel lousy about them... a mega-guilt fear that, if Ethan turns out to be a sociopath (or develops a taste for crack at the age of sixteen), it will be due to all those nights I was out working late. Working, I might add, to pay the rent, to meet my half of his tuition, to meet the bills... and (I also might add) to give my own life some definition and purpose. I tell you, women like me can't win these days. You have all these post-feminist 'family values' creeps playing the 'kids need stay-at-home moms' card. Then you have the depressing example of certain members of my generation who have decided to do the Soccer Mom thing in the 'burbs, and are silently going ga-ga.

When you're a divorced working mom, you have stereophonic guilt... because not only are you not at home when your son comes back from school, but you also feel partially to blame for undermining your child's sense of security. I can still see Ethan's wide-eyed confusion, his terrified bewilderment, when, five years ago, I tried to explain to him that his daddy would now be living elsewhere.

I glanced at my watch. Six forty-eight. I was tempted to jump a cab downtown to Matt's place. But then I saw myself loitering like a deranged stalker outside of Matt's building, waiting for them to emerge. I also feared running into Her, and maybe losing my much-heralded cool (ha!). Anyway, Ethan might be rattled to see me outside his dad's building - and might think (as he has intimated recently on several occasions) that Mommy and Daddy were getting back together. Which is not going to happen. Ever.

So I went into my bedroom and stripped off my disgusting suit, and stood under a very hot shower for around ten minutes. Then I put on a bathrobe, wrapped my hair in a towel, and went out to the kitchen to make coffee. As I waited for the kettle to boil, I rewound the answer phone and listened to yesterday's accumulated messages.

There were nine altogether - five from assorted friends and people at work, offering solace and all finishing up with that standard what-do-you-say-to-a-bereaved-person line: if there's anything we can do. (Which, though formulaic, was still rather touching to hear). There was a message from Matt - at eight thirty last night, telling me that Ethan was just fine, that they'd had a great day out, and he was now tucked up in bed, and... 'if there's anything I can do'.

It's too late for that, chum. Far too late.

Naturally enough, there was a call from my aunt. It was classic Meg.

'Hi, it's just me, thinking you might have finally gotten some sense and come home. I thought wrong. Now I'm not going to bother you at your mom's place, because (a) you might chew my ear off, and (b) you probably want to be left the hell alone. But if you have decided that you've done enough penance for one evening, and have come home, give me a call... as long as it's a reasonable hour. Which, for me, means anytime before three a.m. Love ya, sweetheart. Kiss Ethan for me. And keep taking the medicine'.

Medicine being a Meg synonym for whiskey.

Finally, there were two messages where the caller failed to leave a message. The first came (according to the answering machine, which electronically tags the time of the call) at 6.08; the second at 9.44 p.m. Both were marked by an eerie moment or two of silence... when it was clear that the person on the line was deciding whether or not to say something. I hate it when people do that. Because it makes me feel vulnerable, spooked. And on my own.

The kettle began to whistle. I turned down the gas flame, grabbed the cafetiere and a vacuum jar of freshly ground, extra-strength French Roast, and shoveled enough coffee into the cafetiere for seven cups. I added the boiling water and pushed down the plunger. I poured out a large mug. I drank it down quickly. I poured out another cup. After one more charring gulp of coffee (I have an asbestos mouth), and a quick glance at my watch (7.12 a.m.), I decided I could face calling Matt's place.

'H... e... l... l... o...?'

The voice at the end of the line sounded half awake, and female. Her.

'Uh, hi...' I said, stumbling badly. 'Is, uh, Ethan there?'

'Ethan? Who's Ethan?'

'Who do you think Ethan is?'

That woke her up. 'Sorry, sorry, sorry. Ethan. Of course I know who...'

'Could I speak with him?'

'Is he still here?' she asked.

'Well, I don't really know the answer to that question', I said, 'because I'm not there'.

She now sounded totally flustered. 'I'll just see if... Is that you, Kate?'

'That's right'.

'Hey, I was going to write you... but now that you're here, like, I just wanted to say...'

Cut to the chase, dufus.

'Like... I was real, real sorry to hear about your mom'.

'Thank you'.

'And, well, uh, if there's anything I can do...'

'Just put Ethan on, please'.

'Uh... sure'.

I could hear Her whispering in the background. Then Matt picked up the phone.

'Hi there, Kate. I was just wondering how the rest of yesterday went'.

'Terrific. I haven't had such fun in years'.

'You know what I mean'.

I took another sip of coffee. 'I got through it. Can I speak with Ethan now, please?'

'Sure', he said. 'He's right here'.

I heard Matt pass the phone over to him.

'Sweetheart, you there?' I asked.

'Hi, Mom', Ethan said, sounding half awake. My heart immediately lifted. Ethan, for me, is instant Prozac.

'How are you doing, big guy?'

'The IMAX movie was cool. These people were climbing a mountain, and then it started to snow, and they got into trouble'.

'What was the name of the mountain they were climbing?'

'I forget'.

I laughed.

'And after the movie, we went to the toy shop'.

Figures.

'What did Daddy get you?'

'A Power Rangers CD-Rom'.

Great.

'And a Lego spaceship. Then we went to the television station -'

Wonderful. Just what I needed to hear.

'- and Blair was there. And she brought me and Dad into the room where they talk to the cameras. And we watched her on television'.

'Sounds like a terrific afternoon'.

'Blair was real cool. Then we all went out to a restaurant afterwards. The one in the World Trade Center. You could see all the city at night. And this helicopter came by. And a lot of people came to our table to ask Blair for her autograph...'

'You missing me, sweetheart... ?' I blurted out.

'Yeah, sure, Mom', he said, sounding deflated. I suddenly felt like a needy idiot.

'I love you, Ethan'.

'Bye, Mom', he said and hung up.

Jerk, jerk, jerk. You should never expect a child to make you feel wanted.

I stood by the phone for several minutes, willing myself not to break down again (I had done enough of that in the last twenty-four hours). When I felt myself under control again, I refilled my mug of coffee, walked out into the living room, and flopped down on the big cushy sofa - the last major domestic purchase that Matt and I made before his dramatic exit.

But he hasn't really vanished from my life. That's part of the problem. If we didn't have Ethan, the breakup would have been far easier. Because - after the initial period of shock, anger, grief, and mourning - I could have at least taken solace in the fact that I would never have to see the guy again.

But Ethan means that, like it or not, we must continue to interact, co-exist, acknowledge each other's presence (take your pick). As Matt said during that pre-divorce horse-trading process known as 'mediation': 'For everyone's sake, we really have to establish a little detente between us'. By and large, this detente has been achieved. Five years after the event, we've long since stopped screaming at each other. We deal with each other in (more or less) a correct manner. I have decided that the marriage was, from the outset, a huge mistake. But, despite my best efforts at so-called 'closure', the wound still remains curiously raw.

When I recently mentioned this to Meg during one of our weekly drunken dinners, she said, 'Sweetheart, you can tell yourself over and over again that he wasn't the guy for you, and that it was all one big blooper. But the fact remains that you're not going to totally get over it. It's just too big, too consequential. The pain will always be there. It's one of the many rotten things about life: the way it becomes an accumulation of griefs, both big and small. But survivors - and, sweetheart, you definitely fall into that category - figure out how to live with all that grief. Because, like it or not, grief is kind of interesting, and kind of essential. Because it gives things real import. And it's also the reason why God invented booze'.

Trust Meg to articulate a cheerful Irish-Catholic view of life.

'For everyone's sake, we really have to establish a little detente between us'.

Yeah, Matt - I do think that. But after all this time I still don't know how to pull it off. Whenever I sit in this living room, the thought strikes me: everything is so random, isn't it? Take the interior decor of this apartment. A large, cushy Pottery Barn sofa in stylish cream-colored upholstery (I think the name of the actual shade was Cappuccino). Two matching armchairs, a pair of smart Italian floor lamps, and a low-slung coffee table with a collection of magazines fanned across its beechwood top. We spent a significant amount of time deliberating about all this furniture. Just as we also debated the veneered beechwood floors that we eventually had installed in this room. And the high-tech grey-steel kitchen units we chose at IKEA in Jersey City (yes, we were so serious about this life we were building together that we actually made a trip to New Jersey to size up a kitchen). And the oatmeal-knit carpet which replaced that dreadful aquamarine shag which your grandfather lived with. And the Shaker-style four-poster bed which set us back $3200.

That's why the sight of the living room still astonishes me. Because it's a testament to a lot of rational discussion about that thing known as 'a joint future' even though the two people involved secretly didn't believe in that future. We just happened to meet up at a certain juncture in time when we both wanted to be attached. And we both quickly convinced ourselves that we were compatible, worthy of being spliced together.

It is extraordinary how you can talk yourself into situations which you know aren't durable. But neediness can make just about anything seem right.

The house phone rang, interrupting my reverie. I jumped up from the sofa, crossed over to the kitchen, and answered it.

'Hi there, Miss Malone'.

'Yes, Constantine?'

'I've got a letter here for you'.

'I thought the mail didn't arrive until eleven'.

'Not that kind of a letter... a hand-delivered letter'.

'What do you mean, hand-delivered?'

'What I mean is: a letter that was delivered by hand'.

Urgh!

'That part I get, Constantine. What I'm asking is: when was it delivered, and by whom?'

'When was it delivered? Five minutes ago, that's when'.

I looked at my watch. Seven thirty-six. Who sends a messenger around with a letter at this hour of the morning?

'And by whom, Constantine?'

'Dunno. A cab pulled up, a woman rolled down the window, asked if you lived here, I said yes, she handed me the letter'.

'So a woman delivered the letter?'

'That's right'.

'What kind of woman?'

'Dunno'.

'You didn't see her?'

'She was in the cab'.

'But the cab has a window'.

'There was a glare'.

'But surely you caught a glimpse...'

'Look it, Miss Malone - I saw what I saw, which was nothin', okay?'

'Fine, fine', I said, wanting to put an end to this Abbot and Costello routine. 'Send the letter up'.

I stalked off to the bedroom, pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, then ran a brush through my tangled hair. The doorbell rang, but when I opened it (keeping the chain on in true New York paranoid style), there was no one there. Just a small envelope at the foot of the door.

I picked it up and shut the door behind me. The envelope was postcard-sized and made of good-quality paper. A greyish-blue paper with a ridged surface that made it exceedingly tactile. My name and address were written on the front. The calligraphy was small, precise. The words By Hand were written in the upper right-hand corner of the envelope.

I opened the envelope with care. As I lifted up the flap, it revealed the top part of a card with an embossed address:

346 West 77th Street

Apt. 2B

New York, New York 10024

(212) 555.0745

My first thought was: that's close to home. Then I pulled out the card.

It was written in the same precise, controlled handwriting. It was dated yesterday. It read:

Dear Ms Malone,

I was deeply saddened to read of your mother's death in The New York Times.

Though we've not met face-to-face in years, I knew you as a little girl, just as I knew both your parents back then... but sadly fell out of touch with your family after your father died.

I simply wanted to express my condolences to you at what must be a most difficult juncture, and to say that I'm certain someone is watching over you now... as he has been for years.

Yours,

Sara Smythe

I read through the letter again. And again. Sara Smythe? Never heard of her. But what really threw me was the line 'someone is watching over you now... as he has been for years'.

'Let me ask you something', Meg said, an hour or so later when I woke her up at home to read her this letter. 'Did she write he with a capital H?'

'No', I said. 'It was a lower-case h'.

'Then we're not dealing with a religious nut here. A big H means the guy upstairs. Mr Almighty. The Alpha and the Omega. Laurel and Hardy'.

'But you're sure you never heard Mom or Dad mention a Sara Smythe?'

'Hey, it wasn't my marriage - so I wasn't exactly privy to everybody your parents met. I mean, I doubt if your mom or dad ever knew Karoli Kielsowski'.

'Who was Karoli... how do you say his name?'

'Kielsowski. He was a Polish jazz musician I picked up one November night in fifty-one at Birdland. A catastrophe in bed - but good company, and not a bad alto sax player'.

'I'm not following this...'

'My point is a simple one. Your dad and I liked each other, but we didn't live in each other's pockets. So, for all I know, this Sara Smythe was one of their best friends. Of course, as it was all around forty-five years ago...'

'Okay, point taken. But what I don't get is, why did she drop the letter off by hand at my apartment house? I mean, how did she know where I live?'

'Do you have an unlisted number?'

'Uh, no'.

'Well, that answers that question. As to why she dropped it off... I dunno. Maybe she saw the funeral announcement in yesterday's Times, realized she'd missed the planting, didn't want to appear overdue with the condolence note, and therefore decided to drop it off on her way to work'.

'Don't you think there's a lot of coincidence at work there?'

'Sweetheart, you want a hypothesis, I'm giving you a hypothesis'.

'You think I'm over-reacting?'

'I think you're understandably tired and emotional. And you're blowing this perfectly innocuous card out of all proportion. But hey, if you need to know more, call the dame up. I mean, her phone number's on the card, right?'

'I don't need to call her up'.

'Then don't call her up. While you're at it, promise me you won't spend another night alone at your mom's apartment'.

'I'm ahead of you on that one'.

'Glad to hear it. Because I was starting to worry that you might turn into some deranged Tennessee Williams character. Putting on Mommy's wedding dress. Drinking neat bourbon. Saying stuff like, 'His name was Beauregard, and he was the married boy who broke my heart...'

She cut herself off. 'Oh sweetheart', she said. 'I am one dumb big mouth'.

'Don't worry about it', I said.

'Sometimes I just don't know when to shut the hell up'.

'It's a Malone family trait'.

'I'm so damn sorry, Katie...'

'Enough. I've forgotten about it already'.

'I'm going to go say three acts of contrition'.

'Whatever makes you happy. I'll call you later, okay?'

I refilled my coffee cup, and returned to the big cushy sofa. I downed half the coffee, then parked the mug on the table and stretched out, putting the heels of my hands against my eyes, in an effort to black out everything.

His name was Beauregard, and he was the married boy who broke my heart...

Actually, his name was Peter. Peter Harrison. He was the guy I was with before meeting Matt. He also happened to be my boss. And he was married.

Let's get something straight here. I am not a natural romantic. I do not swoon easily. I do not fall head-over-heels at the drop of a dime. I spent most of my four years at Smith without a boyfriend (though I did have the occasional fling whenever I felt in need of some body heat). When I hit New York after college - and picked up a temporary job at an advertising agency (an alleged one-month gig which accidentally turned into a so-called career) - I was never short of male company. But several of the mistakes I'd slept with during my twenties accused me of First Degree Aloofness. It wasn't that I was a cool customer. It was just that I had not met anyone about whom I could feel truly, madly, deeply passionate.

Until I met Peter Harrison.

Oh, I was so stupid. Oh, it was all so damn predictable. I was edging towards my mid-thirties. I had just joined a new agency - Harding, Tyrell and Barney. Peter Harrison hired me. He was forty-two. Married. Two kids. Handsome (of course). Smart as hell. For the first month at the office, there was this curious unspoken thing going on between us; a sense that we were both aware of each other's presence. When we did meet - in the corridors, in the elevator, once at a departmental meeting - we were perfectly pleasant with each other. Yet there was an undercurrent of nervousness to our trivial chat. We became shy around each other. And neither of us was, by any means, the shy type.

Then he poked his head into my office late one afternoon. He asked me out for a drink. We repaired around the corner to a little bar. As soon as we started talking we couldn't stop. We talked for two hours - gabbing away like people destined to be gabbing to each other. We connected, spliced, fused. When he eventually threaded his fingers through mine, and said, Let's get out of here, I had no second thoughts on the matter. By that point, I wanted him so desperately I would have jumped him right there in the bar.

Only much later that night - lying next to him in bed, telling him just how much I'd fallen for him (and hearing him admit the same to me) - did I raise the one question which I hadn't wanted to ask earlier. He told me that there wasn't anything terribly wrong between his wife, Jane, and himself. They'd been together eleven years. They were reasonably compatible. They loved their girls. They had a nice life. But a nice life doesn't mean a passionate life. That part of the marriage had ebbed away years ago.

I asked him, 'Then why not accept its cozy limitations?'

'I had, sort of', he said. 'Until I met you'.

'And now?'

He pulled me closer. 'Now I'm not going to let you go'.

That's how it started. For the next year, he didn't let me go. On the contrary, he spent every possible hour he could with me. Which, from my standpoint, was never enough... but which also fueled the intensity of the affair. I actually loathe that word, 'affair' - because of its cheap, sordid connotations. This was love. Pure, undiluted love. Love that took place between six and eight p.m., twice a week, at my apartment. And frequently at lunchtime in a midtown hotel, three blocks away from our office. Of course I wanted to see more of him. When he wasn't with me - especially late at night - I actually pined for him. The longing was insane. Because I knew that I had found the one person on the planet destined for me. Yet I was determined to remained outwardly disciplined about my feelings for Peter. We both knew what a dangerous game we were playing - and how everything could fall apart if we became the hot subject of office gossip... or worst yet, if Jane found out.

And so, at the office, we remained rather formal with each other. He covered his tracks carefully on the home front - never arousing suspicion by staying out later than expected, keeping at my place the same toiletries he used at home, never letting me dig my nails into his back.

'That's the first thing I'm going to do on the first night we move in together', I said, gently caressing his bare shoulders. It was a December evening, just before Christmas. We were lying in bed, the sheets askew, our bodies still damp.

'I'll hold you to that', he said, kissing me deeply. 'Because I've decided to tell Jane'.

My adrenalin went into overdrive. 'You serious?'

'As serious as I've ever been'.

I took his face between my hands. 'Are you absolutely sure?'

Without hesitation he said, 'Yes, absolutely'.

We agreed that he wouldn't break the news to Jane until after Christmas - which was, after all, just four weeks off. We also agreed that I'd start apartment hunting for us straight away. After wearing out a lot of shoe leather, I actually found us a really cute two-bedroom place with a partial river view on Riverside and 112th. It was a few days before Christmas. I decided to give Peter a big surprise the next night (when, per usual, we were due to meet at my apartment around six) by bringing him to see our future home. He was over an hour late getting to my place. As soon as he walked in, I was scared. Because I could see that something was very wrong. He slumped down into my sofa. I immediately sat down next to him, and took his hand.

'Tell me, darling'.

He refused to meet my eye. 'It seems... I'm moving to LA'.

It took a moment or two to register. 'LA? You? I don't understand'.

'Yesterday afternoon, around five, I got a call at my office. A call from Bob Harding's secretary, asking if I could pay our company chairman a little visit. Like tout de suite. So up I went to the thirty-second floor, and into the great man's office. Dan Downey and Bill Maloney from Corporate Affairs were both there. Harding asked me to sit down, and cut straight to the chase. Creighton Anderson - the head of the LA office - just announced that he was off to London to run some big division of Saatchi & Saatchi. Which meant the job of LA boss was now open, and Harding had had his eye on me for some time, and...'

'They offered you the job?'

He nodded. I took his hand. 'But this is wonderful, darling. This is, in a way, what we wanted. A clean break. A way to establish our own life. And, of course, if there's a conflict about you hiring me to work in the LA office, no problem. It's a big market, LA, I'll find something. I can do LA...'

He interrupted this manic, scared rant. 'Katie, please...'

His voice was barely a whisper. He finally turned toward me. His face was drawn, his eyes red. I suddenly felt ill.

'You told her first, didn't you?' I said.

He turned away from me again. 'I had to. She is my wife'.

'I don't believe this'.

'Bob Harding said that I had to give him a decision by the end of today - and that he knew I'd need to talk things over with Jane first...'

'You were about to leave Jane, remember? So why didn't you talk first to the person with whom you were planning to start a new life? Me'.

He just shrugged sadly and said, 'You're right'.

'So what exactly did you tell her?'

'I told her about the offer, and how I felt this would be a great career move...'

'You said nothing about us?'

'I was about to... but she started to cry. Started saying how she didn't want to lose me, how she knew we'd been growing apart, but was terrified of even talking about it. Because...'

He broke off. Peter - my confident, secure, dauntless, always articulate man - was suddenly tongue-tied and sheepish.

'Because what?' I asked.

'Because -' he swallowed hard, ' - she thought there might be someone else in my life'.

'So what did you say?'

He turned away - as if he couldn't bear to look at me.

'Peter, you have to tell me what you said'.

He stood up and walked to the window, staring out into the black December night.

'I assured her... that there was no one else but her'.

It took a moment or two for this to register.

'You didn't say that', I said, my voice hushed. 'Tell me you didn't say that'.

He kept looking out the window, his back to me. 'I'm sorry, Katie. I'm so damn sorry'.

'Sorry's not good enough. Sorry is an empty word'.

'I am in love with you...'

That's when I stormed off into the bathroom, slammed the door, bolted it, then sank down to the floor, crying wildly. Peter pounded on the door, begging me to let him in. But my anger, my grief, were so volcanic that I blanked him out.

Eventually the banging stopped. Eventually I regained a modicum of control. I forced myself back on to my feet, unbolted the door, and staggered back to the sofa. Peter had gone. I sat on the edge of the sofa, feeling as if I had just been in a major car crash - that same weird, extra-worldly shock, during which you find yourself wondering: did that just happen?

Operating on auto-pilot, I remembered putting on my coat, grabbing my keys, and leaving.

The next thing I knew, I was in a cab, heading southbound. I didn't remember much of the ride. But when we arrived at 42nd and First Avenue - pulling up in front of a large elderly apartment complex called Tudor City - it took me a moment or two to recall why I was here, and who I was planning to visit.

I got out of the cab, I walked into the lobby. When the elevator reached the seventh floor, I marched down the corridor and pressed the bell by a door marked 7E. Meg opened it, dressed in a faded light blue terrycloth robe, the usual cigarette plugged into the side of her mouth.

'So, to what do I owe this surprise... ?' she said.

But then she got a proper look at me, and turned white. I walked forward, and laid my head against her shoulder. She put her arms around me.

'Oh, sweetheart...' she said softly. 'Don't tell me he was married?'

I came inside. I burst into tears again. She fed me Scotch. I recounted the entire stupid saga. I spent the night on her sofa. The next morning I couldn't face the office, so I asked Meg to call up work and tell them I was out sick. She disappeared into her bedroom to use the phone.

When she emerged, she said, 'You'll probably call me a meddlesome old broad after I tell you this... but you'll be pleased to hear that you're not expected in the office again until the second of January'.

'What the hell did you do, Meg?'

'I spoke to your boss...'

'You called Peter?'

'Yeah, I did'.

'Oh Jesus Christ, Meg...'

'Hear me out. I called him and simply explained that you were a little under the weather today. Then he said that, "under the circumstances", you should not worry about coming in until January second. So there you go - eleven days off. Not bad, eh?'

'It's especially not bad for him - as it gives him a real easy out. He doesn't have to see me before he vanishes to LA'.

'Do you really want to see him?'

'No'.

'The defence rests'.

I hung my head.

'This is going to take time', Meg said. 'A lot of time. Longer than you think'.

I knew that. Just as I knew that I was heading into the longest Christmas of my life. The grief hit me in waves. Sometimes dumb, obvious things - like seeing a couple kiss on the street - would trigger it. Or I might be riding uptown on the subway (in reasonably cheerful form after happily squandering an afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art, or engaging in some retail therapy at Bloomingdale's) - and then, out of nowhere, I'd feel as if I was falling into this deep abyss. I stopped sleeping. I lost a lot of weight. Every time I castigated myself for over-reacting, I quickly fell apart again.

What disturbed me most was the fact that I swore, vowed, pledged never to lose myself to a man - and was always less than sympathetic (if not downright contemptuous) of friends and acquaintances who turned a breakup into an epic tragedy; a Manhattan Tristan and Isolde.

But now there were moments when I wondered how I would get through the day. And I felt like such a stupid cliche. Especially when - in the middle of a Sunday brunch at a local restaurant with my mother - I suddenly burst into tears. I retreated to the Ladies' until I got the Joan Crawford melodramatics under control. When I returned to the table, I noticed that Mom had ordered coffee for us.

'That was very worrying, Katherine', she said quietly.

'I've been having a bad week, that's all. Don't ship me off to Bellevue yet'.

'It's a man, isn't it?' she asked.

I sat up, blew on my coffee, and eventually nodded.

'It must have been serious if it's causing you this much upset'.

I shrugged.

'Do you want to tell me about it?' she asked.

'No'.

She bowed her head - and I could see how deeply I had just hurt her. Who was it who once said that mothers will break arms and legs to remain needed?

'I wish you could confide in me, Kate'.

'I wish I could too'.

'I don't understand why...'

'It's just how things between us have turned out'.

'You sadden me'.

'I'm sorry'.

She reached over and gave my hand a quick squeeze. There was so much I wanted to say just then - how I could never penetrate her protective coating of gentility; how I'd never been able to confide in her because I always felt that she sat in judgment on me; how I did love her... but there was just so much baggage between us. Yes, it was one of those moments (much beloved of Hollywood) when mother and daughter could have reached out to each other over the divide, and after shedding some mutual tears, reconciled. But life doesn't work that way, does it? We always seem to balk, hesitate, flinch at these big moments. Maybe because, in family life, we all build protective shields around ourselves. As the years evaporate, these defences solidify. They become hard for others to penetrate; even harder for us to tear down. Because they turn into the way in which we protect ourselves - and those closest to us - from assorted truths.

I spent the rest of my week-off in movie theaters and museums. On January second I returned to work. Everyone at the office was very solicitous about my 'terrible flu' - and did I hear about Peter Harrison's transfer to LA? I kept to myself, I did my work, I went home, I laid low. The outbursts of grief lessened; the sense of loss didn't.

In mid-February, one of my copywriting colleagues, Cindy, suggested lunch in a little Italian place near the office. We spent most of the meal talking through a campaign we were still fine-tuning. As coffee arrived, Cindy said, 'Well, I guess you heard the big gossip from the LA office'.

'What big gossip?'

'Peter Harrison just left his wife and kids for some account executive. Amanda Cole, I think her name was

The news detonated in front of me like a stun grenade. For several moments I really didn't know where I was. I must have looked shellshocked, because Cindy took my hand and said, 'Are you all right, Kate?'

I withdrew my hand angrily and said, 'Of course I'm okay. Why are you asking?'

'No reason', she said nervously. Turning away, she scanned the restaurant, made eye contact with the waiter, and motioned for the check. I stared down at my coffee.

'You knew, didn't you?' I asked.

She poured Sweet-and-Low into her coffee, then stirred it. Many times.

'Please answer the question', I said.

Her spoon stopped its manic agitation.

'Honey', she said, 'everybody knew'.

I wrote three letters to Peter - in which I called him assorted names, and accused him of upending my life. I sent none of them. I stopped myself (on several occasions) when the urge to ring him at four a.m. was overpowering. In the end I scribbled a postcard. It contained a three-word message:

Shame on you.

I tore up the postcard around two seconds before I mailed it... and then broke down - sobbing like an idiot on the southwest corner of 48th and Fifth, becoming an object of nervous, fleeting fascination for the passing lunchtime horde.

Matt knew that I was still in brittle shape when we started going out. It was eight months after Peter had moved to the coast. I'd switched agencies - moving to another big shop, Hickey, Ferguson and Shea. I met Matt when he invaded our offices one afternoon. He was accompanied by a PBS crew, filming part of a feature for the MacNeill-Lehrer News Hour on advertising agencies that were still hawking the demon weed, tobacco. I was one of the copywriters he interviewed - and we got schmoozing afterward. I was surprised when he asked me out - as there had been nothing flirtatious about our banter.

After we'd been seeing each other for around a month, I was even more surprised when he told me that he was in love with me. I was the wittiest woman he'd ever met. He adored my 'zero tolerance for bullshit'. He respected my 'strong sense of personal autonomy', my 'smarts', my 'canny self-assurance' (ha!). Game, set and match - he'd collided with the woman he'd always envisaged marrying.

Naturally, I didn't capitulate on the spot. On the contrary, I was deeply confused by this sudden confession of love. Yeah, I liked the guy. He was smart, ambitious, knowing. I was attracted to his metropolitan acumen... and to the fact that he seemed to get me - because, of course, we were both cut from the same urban cloth. A fellow native Manhattanite. A fellow preppy (Collegiate, then Wesleyan). A fellow wise-aleck - and, in true New York style, a possessor of a world-class entitlement complex.

They say that character is destiny. Perhaps - but timing plays one hell of a big role too. We were both thirty-six. He had just been evicted from a five-year relationship with an uber-ambitious CNN correspondent named Kate Brymer (she dumped him for some big network talking head) - so we both knew a thing or two about romantic car crashes. Like me, he hated that inane neurotic dance called dating. Like me, he dreaded the idea of flying solo into forty. He even wanted kids - which made his attractiveness increase one hundred fold, as I was beginning to hear predictably ominous ticking noises from my biological clock.

On paper, we must have looked great. An ideal meeting of worldly equals. The perfect New York professional couple.

There was just one problem: I wasn't in love with him. I knew that. But I convinced myself otherwise. Part of this self-deception was brought about by Matt's persistent entreaties to marry him. He was persuasive without being gauche - and I guess I eventually bought his flattery. Because, after the Peter business, I needed to be flattered, adulated, wanted. And because I was secretly scared of ending up alone and childless in middle age.

'A lovely young man', my mother said after first meeting Matt. 'I think he'd make you very happy'... which was her way of saying that she approved of his WASP credentials, his preppy sheen. Meg was a little less effusive.

'He's a very nice guy', she said.

'You don't exactly seem overwhelmed', I said.

'That's because you don't seem exactly overwhelmed'.

I paused, then said, 'I am very happy'.

'Yeah - and love is a wonderful thing. You are in love, aren't you?'

'Sure', I said tonelessly.

'You sound very convincing'.

Meg's sour comment returned to rattle around my head four months later. I was in a hotel room on the Caribbean island of Nevis. It was three in the morning. My husband of thirty-six hours was asleep beside me in bed. It was the night after our wedding. I found myself staring at the ceiling, thinking, what am I doing here?

Then my mind was flooded with thoughts of Peter. Tears started streaming down my face. And I castigated myself for being the most absurd idiot imaginable.

We usually mastermind our own predicament, don't we?

I tried to make it work. Matt seriously tried to make it work. We cohabited badly. Endless petty arguments about endless petty things. We instantly made up, then started squabbling again. Marriage, I discovered, doesn't coalesce unless the two parties involved figure out how to establish a domestic detente between themselves. The will needed is huge. We both lacked it.

Instead, we dodged the growing realization: we are a bad match. On the morning after fights, we bought each other expensive presents. Or flowers would arrive at my office, accompanied by a witty, conciliatory message:

They say the first ten years are the hardest.

I love you.

Matt

There were a couple of let's-rekindle-the-spark weekends away in the Berkshires, or Western Connecticut, or Montauk. During one of these, Matt drunkenly convinced me to dispense with my diaphragm for the night. I was seriously loaded too - so I agreed. And that is how Ethan came into our lives.

He was, without question, the best drunken accident imaginable. Love at first gasp. But after the initial post-natal euphoria, the usual domestic discontentment reappeared. Ethan didn't believe in the restorative virtues of sleep. For the first six months of his life, he refused to conk out for more than two hours at a time - which quickly rendered us both quasi-catatonic. Unless you have the disposition of Mary Poppins, exhaustion leads to excessive crankiness. Which - in the case of Matt and myself - turned into open warfare. As soon as Ethan was weaned, I wanted us to establish a rota for night feeds. Matt refused, saying that his high-pressure job demanded eight full hours of sleep. This was battle music to my ears - as I accused him of putting his own career above mine. Which, in turn, sparked further confrontations about parental responsibility, and acting like a grown-up, and why we always seemed to fight about everything.

Inevitably, when it comes to kids, it's the woman who ends up carrying the can - so when Matt arrived home one night and said that he'd just accepted a three-month transfer to PBS's Washington bureau, all I could say was:

'How convenient for you'.

He did promise to hire (and pay for) a full-time nanny - as I was now back at work. He did promise to come home every weekend. And he hoped that the time apart might do us some good - lessening the bellicose atmosphere between us.

So I was left holding the baby. Which actually pleased me hugely - not simply because I couldn't get enough of Ethan (especially as my time with him was limited to after-work late evenings), but also because I too was debilitated by all the constant bush-fighting with Matt.

Intriguingly enough, as soon as he moved to Washington, two things happened: (a) Ethan began to sleep through the night, and (b) Matt and I began to get along again. No - this wasn't an 'absence makes the heart grow fonder' situation; rather, a mutual lightening of tone. Freed from each other's constant presence, our ongoing antagonisms de-escalated. We actually started talking again - talking, as in: being able to have a conversation which did not eventually veer into angry exchanges. When he returned home at weekends, the fact that we only had forty-eight hours together kept us on good behavior. Gradually, a certain collegial rapport was reestablished - a sense that we could get along together; that we did enjoy each other's company; that there was a future for us.

Or, at least, that's what I thought. During the final month of Matt's Washington bureau stint, a breaking story (the early days of the Whitewater scandal) kept him in DC for three straight weeks. When he finally made it back to Manhattan, I sensed that something was seriously askew as soon as he walked through the door. Though he strived to act naturally in my presence, he became cagey and vague when I asked a couple of innocent questions about the long hours he was working in Washington. Then he nervously changed the subject. That's when I knew. Men always think they can mask these things - but, when it comes to infidelity, they're as transparent as Saran Wrap.

After we got Ethan to bed and collapsed in the living room with a bottle of wine, I decided to risk bluntness.

'What's her name?' I asked.

Matt turned the sort of chalky color I associate with Kaopektate.

'I'm not following you...' he said.

'Then I'll repeat the question slowly: What... is... her... name?'

'I really don't know what you're talking about'.

'Yes you do', I said, my tone still mild. 'I simply want to know the name of the woman you've been seeing'.

'Kate...'

'That's my name. I want to know her name. Please'.

He exhaled loudly.

'Blair Bentley'.

'Thank you', I said, sounding totally reasonable.

'Can I explain... ?'

'Explain what? That it was "just one of those things"? Or that you got drunk one night, and the next thing you knew, you tripped and found this woman on the end of your penis? Or maybe it's love...'

'It is love'.

That shut me up. It took me a moment or so to regain the power of speech. 'You're not serious?' I finally said.

'Completely serious', he said.

'You asshole'.

He left the apartment late that night. He never slept there again. And I became bitter. Maybe he wasn't the love of my life - but there was a child involved. He should have considered Ethan's stability. Just like he should have recognized that the separation had actually done us some good - that we had laid down our weapons of mass destruction and established an armistice with each other. An affectionate armistice - to the point where I had actually started to miss Matt. They always say the first year or two of marriage is hell. But, damn it, we'd turned the corner. We had started to become a common cause.

When I discovered that Ms Blair Bentley was twenty-six - and a leggy cropped blonde with perfect skin and a cliff of capped white teeth (not to mention a local news anchor on the leading NBC-affiliate station in DC, about to be transferred to big-time New York) - my bitterness quadrupled. Matt had found himself a trophy wife.

But, of course, the real bitterness I felt was toward myself. I had blown it. I had done everything I vowed never to do - from falling for a married man, to obeying the imperatives of my goddamn biological clock. We all talk about 'building a life' - finding the fulfilling career, the fulfilling relationship, the fulfilling balance between the professional and the personal. Glossy magazines are full of spurious strategies for constructing this perfectly synchronized, made-to-measure existence. But the fact is, when it comes to the big stuff (the man who breaks your heart, the man with whom you end up having children), you're just a hostage to fortune like the next jerk. Say I'd never joined Harding, Tyrell and Barney? Say I hadn't agreed to that after-work drink with Peter? Say I'd never changed agencies, and Matt had never walked into our office? A chance meeting here, a hasty decision there... then one morning you wake up in early middle age, a divorced single parent. And you find yourself wondering: how the hell did I ever end up in this life?

The phone began to ring, jolting me out of my extended reverie. I glanced at my watch. It was nearly nine a.m. How had I managed to lose so much track of time?

'Is that you, Kate?'

The voice surprised me. It was my brother. It was the first time he'd phoned my home in years.

'Charlie?'

'Yeah, it's me'.

'You're up early'.

'Couldn't sleep. Uh, I just wanted to, uh... it was good seeing you, Kate'.

'I see'.

'And I don't want another seven years to go by...'

'As I said yesterday, that's up to you, Charlie'.

'I know, I know'.

He fell silent.

'Well', I said, 'you know my number. So call me, if you like. And if you don't like, I'll live. You broke off communication. If you want to get it started again, it's over to you. Fair enough?'

'Uh, yeah, sure'.

'Good'.

Another of his damn nervous silences.

'Well then... I'd better be going, Charlie. See you...'

He interrupted my goodbye by blurting out, 'Can you lend me five thousand dollars?'

'What?'

His voice became shaky. 'I'm, uh, real sorry... I know you probably hate me for asking, but... you know that I mentioned I was up for a job... sales rep for Pacific Floral Service. Biggest flower delivery company on the West Coast. Only thing I could find out here where they'd even consider a guy in his mid-fifties... that's how bad things are in the job market these days, if you're well into middle age'.

'Don't remind me. Isn't the job interview today?'

'It was supposed to be. But when I got back home last night, there was a message from someone at Pacific Floral's Human Resources department. Telling me they'd decided to fill the post internally, so the interview was off'.

'I'm sorry'.

'Not as sorry as me. Not as goddamn sorry as me, because... because... it wasn't even a managerial job... it was a fucking sales rep... it was...'

He broke off.

'Are you all right, Charlie?'

I could hear him take a deep steadying breath. 'No. I am not all right. Because if I don't find five thousand dollars by Friday, the bank is threatening to take my house'.

'Will the five grand solve the problem?'

'Not really... because I actually owe the bank another seven'.

'Jesus, Charlie'.

'I know, I know - but you start building up those kind of debts when you're out of work for six months. And, believe me, I've tried borrowing money everywhere. But there are already two mortgages on the house to begin with...'

'What does Holly say?'

'She... she doesn't realize how bad things are'.

'You mean, you haven't told her?'

'No... it's just... I just don't want to worry her'.

'Well, she's going to be a little worried when you're evicted from the house'.

'Don't say that word, evicted'.

'What are you going to do?'

'I don't know. What little savings we had... and some stock... it's all spent'.

Five thousand dollars. I knew that I had eight grand in a savings account... and that Mom had a money market account with around eleven-five, which was part of the estate I'd inherit once the will was probated. Five thousand dollars. That was serious money to me. It didn't even cover a term's tuition for Ethan at Allan-Stevenson. Or it was nearly three months' rent. I could do a lot with five thousand dollars.

'I know what you're thinking', Charlie said. 'After all these years, his first proper phone call to me is to bum money'.

'Yes, Charlie - that is exactly what I'm thinking. Just as I'm also thinking how badly you hurt Mom'.

'I was wrong'.

'Yes, Charlie. You were very wrong'.

'I'm sorry'. His voice was barely a whisper. 'I don't know what to say except, I'm sorry'.

'I don't forgive you, Charlie. I can't. I mean, I know she could be overbearing and just a little interfering. But you still cut her off'.

I could hear his throat contract, as if he was stifling a sob. 'You're right', he said.

'I don't care whether or not I'm right - it's a little late to be arguing about that anyway. What I want to know, Charlie, is why'.

'We never got along'.

This was, indeed, true - as one of my abiding memories of childhood was the endless arguments between my mother and brother. They could not agree on anything, and Mom had this habit of being endlessly meddlesome. But whereas I figured out a way of deflecting (or even ignoring) her encroaching tendencies, Charlie was constantly threatened by her intrusions. Especially as they underscored the fact that Charlie so desperately missed (and needed) his father. He was almost ten when Dad died - and the way he always spoke to me about him let it be known that he idolized him, and somehow blamed Mom for his early death.

'She never liked him', he once told me when I was just thirteen. 'And she made his life so miserable that he was away most of every week'.

'But Mom said he was away every week working'.

'Yeah - he was always out of town. It meant that he didn't have to be with her'.

Because Dad died when I was just eighteen months old, I was denied any memories (let alone knowledge) of him. So whenever Charlie spoke about our father, I hung on to every syllable... especially as Mom constantly skirted the subject of the late Jack Malone, as if it was either far too painful to deal with, or she just didn't want to talk about him. In turn, this meant that I bought Charlie's view on our parents' fractious marriage - and silently attributed its unhappiness to Mom and her meddlesome ways.

At the same time, however, I never understood why Charlie couldn't work out a strategy for dealing with her. God knows, I also fought with her constantly. I too found her maddening. But I would never have shut her out the way Charlie did. Then again, I did get the sense that Mom was a bit ambivalent about her only son. Of course she loved him. But I did wonder if she also silently resented him for being the reason why she ended up in an unhappy marriage with Jack Malone. Charlie, in turn, never got over Dad's death. Nor did he like being the only man in the house. As soon as he could, he fled - straight into the arms of a woman who was so controlling, so autocratic that Mom suddenly seemed libertarian by comparison.

'I know you never got along, Charlie', I said. 'And yeah - she had her pain-in-the-ass moments. But she didn't deserve the punishment you and Princess meted out'.

Long pause.

'No', he said. 'She didn't deserve it. What can I say, Kate? Except that I allowed myself to be wrongly influenced by...' He cut himself off, and lowered his voice. 'Put it this way: the argument was always presented in "It's either her or me" terms. And I was so weak, I bought it'.

Another silence. Then I said, 'Okay, I'll Fedex you a check for five thousand today'.

It took a moment to sink in. 'Are you serious?'

'It's what Mom would have wanted'.

'Oh God, Kate... I don't know what to...'

'Say nothing...'

'I'm overwhelmed...'

'Don't be. It's family business'.

'I promise, swear, I'll pay it all back as soon as...'

'Charlie... enough. You'll have the check tomorrow. And when you're in a position to pay me back, you pay me back. Now I need to ask you...'

'Anything. Any favor you need'.

'It's just a question I need answered, Charlie'.

'Sure, sure'.

'Did you ever know a Sara Smythe?'

'Never heard of her. Why?'

'I've received a condolence letter from her, saying she knew Mom and Dad before I was born'.

'Doesn't ring any bells with me. Then again, I don't remember most of Mom and Dad's friends from back then'.

'That's not surprising. I can't remember who I met last month. Thanks anyway'.

'No - thank you, Kate. You don't know what that five grand means to all of us...'

'I think I have an idea'.

'Bless you', he said quietly.

After I hung up, a thought struck me: I actually missed my brother.

I spent the balance of the morning tidying the apartment and dealing with domestic chores. When I returned from the laundry room in the basement of the building, I found a message on my answering machine:

'Hello, Kate...'

It was a voice I hadn't heard before; a deeply refined voice with a noticeable New England twang.

'It's Sara Smythe here. I do hope you received my letter and I do apologize for calling you at home. But it would be nice to meet up. As I said in my letter, I was close to your family when your father was alive, and would very much like to renew contact with you after all these years. I know how busy you are, so whenever you have a chance please give me a ring. My number is five-five-five oh-seven-four-five. I am in this afternoon, if you're around. Once again, my thoughts are with you at this difficult time. But I know you're tough and resilient - so you'll get through this. I so look forward to meeting you face-to-face'.

I listened to the message twice, my alarm (and outrage) growing by the second. I would very much like to renew contact with you after all these years... I know how busy you are... I know you're tough and resilient... Jesus Christ, this woman was sounding like she was an old dear family friend, or someone on whose knee I climbed when I was five. And didn't she have the decency to realize that, just having buried my mother yesterday, I wasn't exactly in the mood for socializing?

I picked up the letter she had hand-delivered earlier today. I walked into Ethan's room. I powered up his computer. I wrote:

Dear Ms Smythe,

I was enormously touched both by your letter and by your kind message.

As I'm certain you know, grief affects people in such curious, singular ways. And right now, I simply want to withdraw for a while and be alone with my son and my thoughts.

I appreciate your understanding. And, once again, my thanks for your sympathy at this sad juncture.

Yours,

Kate Malone

I read the letter twice through before hitting the button marked Print, then signing my name at the bottom. I folded it, placed it in an envelope, scribbled Smythe's name and address on the front, then sealed it. Returning to the kitchen, I picked up the phone, and called my secretary at the office. She arranged for our courier service to pick up the letter at my apartment and deliver it to Ms Smythe's place on West 77th Street. I knew I could have posted the letter, but feared that she might try to call me again tonight. I wanted to make certain I didn't hear from her again.

Half-an-hour later, the doorman rang me to say that the courier was downstairs. I grabbed my coat and left the apartment. On my way out the front door, I handed the letter to the helmeted motorcycle messenger. He assured me that he'd deliver it across town within the next thirty minutes. I thanked him, and headed up toward Lexington Avenue. I stopped by our local branch of Kinko's on 78th Street. I removed another envelope from my coat pocket and placed it inside a Federal Express folder. Then I filled out the dispatch form, requesting guaranteed next-day delivery to a certain Charles Malone in Van Nuys, California. I tossed it in the Fedex box. When he opened the letter tomorrow, he'd find a five-thousand-dollar cheque, and a very short note which read:

Hope this helps.

Good luck.

Kate

I left Kinko's and spent the next hour or so drifting around my neighborhood. I shopped for groceries at D'Agostino's, arranging to have the order delivered to my apartment later that afternoon. I walked around Gap Kids, and ended up buying Ethan a new denim jacket. I headed two blocks west and killed half-an-hour browsing in the Madison Avenue Bookshop. Then, realizing that I hadn't eaten a thing since yesterday afternoon, I stopped at Soup Burg on Madison and 73rd Street, and ordered a double bacon-cheeseburger with fries. I felt immense high-caloric guilt as I gobbled it down. But it was still wonderful. As I nursed a cup of coffee afterwards, my cellphone rang.

'Is that you, Kate?'

Oh God, no. That woman again.

'Who is this?' I asked, even though I knew the answer to that question.

'It's Sara Smythe'.

'How did you get this number, Miss Smythe?'

'I called the Bell Atlantic cellphone directory'.

'You needed to speak with me that urgently?'

'Well, I just received your letter, Kate. And...'

I cut her off. 'I'm surprised to hear you calling me by my first name, as I don't seem to remember ever meeting you, Ms Smythe...'

'Oh, but we did. Years ago, when you were just a little...'

'Maybe we did meet, but it didn't lodge in my memory'.

'Well, when we get together, I'll be able to...'

I cut her off again. 'Ms Smythe, you did read my letter, didn't you?'

'Yes, of course. That's why I'm calling you'.

'Didn't I make it clear that we are not going to be getting together?'

'Don't say that, Kate'.

'And will you please stop calling me Kate?'

'If I could just explain...'

'No. I want to hear no explanations. I just want you to stop bothering me'.

'All I'm asking is...'

'And I suppose that was you who made all those message-less phone calls to my apartment yesterday...'

'Please hear me out...'

'And what's this about being an old friend of my parents? My brother Charlie said he never knew you when he was young...'

'Charlie?' she said, sounding animated. 'You're finally talking to Charlie again?'

I was suddenly very nervous. 'How did you know I hadn't been speaking to him?'

'Everything will come clear if we could just meet...'

'No'.

'Please be reasonable, Kate...'

'That's it. This conversation's closed. And don't bother calling back. Because I won't speak with you'.

With that, I hit the disconnect button.

All right, I over-reacted. But... the intrusiveness of the woman. And how the hell did she know about the breach with Charlie?

I left the restaurant, still fuming. I decided to squander the rest of the afternoon in a movie. I walked east and wasted two hours at the Loew's 72nd Street watching some cheesy action film, in which intergalactic terrorists hijacked an American space shuttle, and killed all the crew - bar some beefcake astronaut who naturally foiled the baddies and single-handedly brought the damaged shuttle back to earth, landing it on top of Mount Rushmore. Ten minutes into this stupidity, I asked myself why on earth I ended up walking into this movie. I knew the answer to that question: because everything's out of synch today.

When I got back to the apartment, it was nearly six o'clock. Constantine the doorman was thankfully off. Teddy, the nice night guy, was on duty.

'Package for you, Miss Malone', he said, handing me a large bulky manila envelope.

'When did this arrive?' I asked.

'Around half-an-hour ago. It was delivered by hand'.

I silently groaned.

'A little old lady in a taxi?' I asked.

'How'd you guess?'

'You don't want to know'.

I thanked Teddy and went upstairs. I took off my coat. I sat down at the dining table. I opened the envelope. Reaching inside, I pulled out a card. The same greyish-blue stationery. Oh God, here we go again...

346 West 77th Street

Apt. 2B

New York, New York 10024

(212) 555.0745

Dear Kate,

I really think you should call me, don't you?

Sara

I reached back into the envelope. I withdrew a large rectangular book. On closer inspection, it turned out to be a photo album. I opened the cover and found myself staring at a set of black-and-white baby photos, carefully displayed behind transparent sheeting. The photos were pure fifties - as the newborn infant was shown asleep in one of those huge old-fashioned strollers that were popular back then. I turned the page. Here, the infant was being held in the arms of her dad - a real 1950s dad, with a herringbone suit, a rep tie, a crew cut, big white teeth. The sort of dad who, just eight years earlier, was probably dodging enemy fire in some German town.

Like my dad.

I stared back at the photos. I suddenly felt ill.

That was my dad.

And that was me in his arms.

I turned the page. There were pictures of me at the age of two, three, five. There were pictures of me at my first day of school. There were pictures of me as a Brownie. There were pictures of me as a Girl Scout. There were pictures of me with Charlie in front of Rockefeller Center, circa 1963. Wasn't that the afternoon when Meg and Mom brought us to the Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall?

I began to turn the pages with manic rapidity. Me in a school play at Brearley. Me at summer camp in Maine. Me at my first dance. Me on Todd's Point Beach in Connecticut, during summer vacation. Me with Meg at my high school graduation.

It was an entire photographic history of my life - including pictures of me in college, at my wedding, and with Ethan, right after he was born. The remaining pages of the album were taken up with newspaper clippings. Clippings of stories I wrote for the Smith College newspaper. Clippings from the same newspaper, showing me in a college play (Murder in the Cathedral). Clippings of my assorted print ad campaigns. There was the New York Times announcement of my wedding to Matt. And the New York Times announcement of Ethan's birth...

I continued flicking wildly through the album. By the time I reached the penultimate page, my head was reeling. I flipped over the final page. And there was...

No, this was unbelievable.

There was a clipping from the Allan-Stevenson newspaper, showing Ethan in gym clothes, running a relay race at the school gymkhana last spring.

I slammed the album shut. I shoved it under my arm. I grabbed my coat. I raced out the door, raced straight into an elevator, raced through the downstairs lobby, raced into the backseat of a cab. I told the driver, 'West Seventy-Seventh Street'.

Four

SHE LIVED IN a brownstone. I paid off the cab and went charging up the front steps, taking them two at a time. Her name was on the bottom bell. I held it down for a good ten seconds. Then her voice came over the intercom.

'Yes?' she said hesitantly.

'It's Kate Malone. Open up'.

There was a brief pause, then she buzzed me in.

Her apartment was on the first floor. She was standing in the doorway, awaiting me. She was dressed in grey flannel pants and a grey crew-neck sweater that accented her long, delicate neck. Her grey hair was perfectly coiffed in a tight bun. Up close, her skin appeared even more translucent and smooth - with only a few crow's feet hinting at her true age. Her posture was perfect, emphasizing her elegant stature, her total poise. As always, her eyes were sharply focused - and alive with pleasure at seeing me... something I found instantly unsettling.

'How dare you', I said, brandishing the photo album.

'Good afternoon, Kate', she said, her voice controlled and untroubled by my outburst. 'I'm glad you came'.

'Who the hell are you? And what the hell is this?' I said, again holding up the photo album as if it was the smoking gun in a murder trial.

'Why don't you come inside?'

'I don't want to come inside', I said, now sounding very loud. She remained calm.

'We really can't talk here', she said. 'Please...'

She motioned for me to cross the threshold. After a moment's nervous hesitation I said, 'Don't think I'm going to stay long...'

'Fine', she said.

I followed her inside. We entered a small foyer. On one wall was a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf, heaving with hardcover volumes. There was a closet next to the shelf. She opened it, asking, 'Can I take your coat?'

I handed it to her. As she hung it up, I turned around, and suddenly felt as if the wind had been knocked out of me. Because there - on the opposite side of the foyer - were a half-dozen framed photos of myself and of my father. There was that picture of my dad in his Army uniform. There was an enlargement of that photo of Dad cradling me when I was a newborn baby. There was a picture of me at college, and holding Ethan when he was just a year old. There were two black-and-white photos showing Dad in a variety of poses with a younger Sara Smythe. The first was an 'at home' shot: Dad with his arms around her, standing near a Christmas tree. The remaining shot was of the happy couple in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. From the age of the photos and the style of clothes they were wearing, I guessed they were taken in the early 1950s. I spun around and stared at Sara Smythe, wide-eyed.

'I don't understand...' I said.

'I'm not surprised'.

'You've got some explaining to do', I said, suddenly angry.

'Yes', she said quietly. 'I do'

She touched my elbow, leading me into the living room.

'Come sit down. Coffee? Tea? Something stronger?'

'Stronger', I said.

'Red wine? Bourbon? Harvey's Bristol Cream? That's about it, I'm afraid'.

'Bourbon'.

'On the rocks? With water?'

'Neat'.

She allowed herself a little smile. 'Just like your dad', she said.

She motioned for me to sit in an oversized armchair. It was upholstered in a dark tan linen fabric. The same fabric covered a large sofa. There was a Swedish modern coffee table, on top of which were neat stacks of art books and high-end periodicals (The New Yorker, Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, New York Review of Books). The living room was small, but immaculate. Bleached wood floors, white walls, more shelves filled with books, a substantial collection of classical CDs, a large window with southerly exposure, overlooking a small back patio. Directly off this room was an alcove which had been cleverly fitted out as a small home office, with a stripped pine table on which sat a computer, a fax machine and a pile of papers. Opposite this alcove was a bedroom with a queen-sized bed (bleached headboard, a quilted old Americana bedspread), and a Shaker-style dresser. Like everything else in the apartment, the bedroom exuded style and subdued good taste. You could tell immediately that Sara Smythe was refusing to embrace the muted dilapidation of senior citizenship - and live out the final part of her life in an apartment that was, stylistically speaking, two decades out of date, and reeking of shabby gentility. Her home hinted at a quiet, but ferocious sense of pride.

Sara emerged from the kitchen, carrying a tray. On it was a bottle of Hiram Walker bourbon, a bottle of Bristol Cream, a sherry glass, a whiskey glass. She set it down on the coffee table, then poured us each a drink.

'Hiram Walker was your father's favorite bourbon', she said. 'Personally I could never stand the stuff. Scotch was my drink - until I turned seventy, and my body decided otherwise. Now I have to make do with something dull-and-feminine like sherry. Cheers'.

She raised her sherry glass. I didn't respond to her toast. I simply threw back my whiskey in one gulp. It burned my throat, but eased some of the serious distress I was feeling. Another small smile crossed Sara Smythe's lips.

'Your dad used to drink that way - when he was feeling tense'.

'Like father, like daughter', I said, pointing to the bottle.

'Please help yourself', she said. I poured myself another slug of bourbon, but this time restricted myself to a small sip. Sara Smythe settled herself into the sofa, then touched the top of my hand.

'I do want to apologize for the extreme methods I used to get you over here. I know I must have seemed like an old nuisance, but...'

I quickly withdrew my hand.

'I just want to know one thing, Ms Smythe...'

'Sara, please'.

'No. No first names. We are not friends. We are not even acquaintances...'

'Kate, I've known you all your life'.

'How? How have you known me? And why the hell did you start bothering me after my mom died?'

I tossed the photo album on to the coffee table, and opened it to the back page.

'I'd also like to know how you got this?' I said, pointing to the clipping of Ethan in the Allan-Stevenson school newspaper.

'I have a subscription to the school's newspaper'.

'You what?'

'Just like I had a subscription to the Smith College paper when you were there'.

'You're insane...'

'Can I explain...'

'Why should we be of interest to you? I mean, if your photo album is anything to go by, this hasn't been a recent fixation. You've been tracking us for years. And what's with all the old pictures of my dad?'

She looked at me straight on. And said, 'Your father was the love of my life'.

Part Two

Sara

One

WHAT'S MY FIRST memory of him? A glance. A sudden over-the-shoulder glance across a packed, smoky room. He was leaning against a wall, a glass of something in one hand, a cigarette between his teeth. He later told me that he felt out of place in that room, and was looking across it in search of the fellow who had dragged him there. As his eyes scanned the guests, they suddenly happened upon me. I met his gaze. Only for a second. Or maybe two. He looked at me. I looked at him. He smiled. I smiled back. He turned away, still seeking out his friend. And that was it. Just a simple glance.

Fifty-five years on, I can still replay that moment - nanosecond by nanosecond. I can see his eyes - light blue, clear, a little weary. His sandy hair, buzz-cut down to short-back-and-sides. His narrow face with sharply etched cheekbones. The dark khaki Army uniform which seemed to hang so perfectly off his lanky frame. The way he looked so young (well, he was only in his early twenties at the time). So innocent. So quietly preoccupied. So handsome. So damn Irish.

A glance is such a momentary, fleeting thing, isn't it? As human gestures go, it means nothing. It's perishable. That's what still amazes me - the way your life can be fundamentally altered by something so ephemeral, so transitory. Every day, we lock eyes with people - on the subway or the bus, in the supermarket, crossing the street. It's such a simple impulse, looking at others. You notice someone walking towards you, your eyes meet for an instant, you pass each other by. End of story. So why... why?.. should that one glance have mattered? No reason. None at all. Except that it did. And it changed everything. Irrevocably. Though, of course, neither of us knew that at the time.

Because, after all, it was just a glance.

We were at a party. It was the night before Thanksgiving. The year was 1945. Roosevelt had died in April. The German High Command had surrendered in May. Truman dropped the bomb on Hiroshima in August. Eight days later, the Japanese capitulated. Quite a year. If you were young and American - and hadn't lost anybody you loved in the war - you couldn't help but feel the heady pleasures of victory.

So here we all were - twenty of us, in a cramped third-floor walk-up apartment on Sullivan Street - celebrating the first Thanksgiving of peace by drinking too much and dancing too raucously. The average age in the room was around twenty-eight... which made me the kid of the group at twenty-three (though the fellow in the Army uniform looked even younger). And the big talk in the room was of that romantic notion called the Limitless Future. Because winning the war also meant that we'd finally defeated that economic enemy called The Depression. The Peace Dividend was coming. Good times were ahead. We thought we had a divine right to good times. We were Americans, after all. This was our century.

Even my brother Eric believed in the realm of American possibility... and he was what our father called 'a Red'. I always told Father that he was judging his son far too harshly - because Eric was really more of an old fashioned Progressive. Being Eric, he was also a complete romantic - someone who idolized Eugene Debs, subscribed to The Nation when he was sixteen, and dreamed about being the next Clifford Odets. That's right - Eric was a playwright. After he graduated from Columbia in '37, he found work as an assistant stage manager with Orson Welles' Mercury Theater, and had a couple of plays produced by assorted Federal Theater Workshops around New York. This was the time when Roosevelt's New Deal actually subsidized non-profit drama in America - so there was plenty of employment opportunities for 'theater workers' (as Eric liked to call himself), not to mention lots of small theater companies willing to take a chance on young dramatists like my brother. None of the plays he had performed ever hit the big time. But he wasn't ever aiming for Broadway. He always said that his work was 'geared for the needs and the aspirations of the working man' (like I said, he really was a romantic). And I'll be honest with you - as much as I loved, adored, my older brother, his three-hour epic drama about a 1902 union dispute on the Erie-Lakawana Railroad wasn't exactly a toe-tapper.

Still, as a playwright, he did think big. Sadly, his kind of drama (that whole Waiting for Lefty sort of thing) was dead by the start of the forties. Orson Welles went to Hollywood. So too did Clifford Odets. The Federal Theater Project was accused of being Communist by a handful of dreadful small-minded congressmen, and was finally closed down in '39. Which meant that, in 1945, Eric was paying the rent as a radio writer. At first he scripted a couple of episodes of Boston Blackie. But the producer fired him off the show after he wrote an installment where the hero investigated the death of a labor organizer. He'd been murdered on the orders of some big-deal industrialist - who, as it turned out, bore more than a passing resemblance to the owner of the radio network on which Boston Blackie was broadcast. I tell you, Eric couldn't resist mischief... even if it did hurt his career. And he did have a terrific sense of humor. Which is how he was able to pick up his newest job: as one of the gag writers on Stop or Go: The Quiz Bang Show, hosted every Sunday night at eight thirty by Joe E. Brown. I'd wager anything that nobody under the age of seventy-five now remembers Joe E. Brown. And with good reason. He made Jerry Lewis appear subtle.

Anyway, the party was in Eric's place on Sullivan Street: a narrow one-bedroom railroad apartment which, like Eric himself, always struck me as the height of bohemian chic. The bathtub was in the kitchen. There were lamps made from Chianti bottles. Ratty old floor cushions were scattered around the living room. Hundreds of books were stacked everywhere. Remember: this was the forties... still way before the beatnik era in the Village. So Eric was something of a man ahead of his time - especially when it came to wearing black turtlenecks, and hanging out with Delmore Schwartz and the Partisan Review crowd, and smoking Gitanes, and dragging his kid sister to hear this new-fangled thing called Bebop at some club on 52nd Street. In fact, just a couple of weeks before his Thanksgiving party, we were actually present in some Broadway dive when a sax player named Charles Parker took the stage with four other musicians.

When they finished their first set, Eric turned to me and said, 'S, you're going to eventually brag about being at this gig. Because we have just witnessed ourselves a true revolution. After tonight, rhythm is never going to be the same again'.

S. That was his name for me. S for Sara or Sis. From the time Eric turned fourteen, he called me that - and though my parents both hated the nickname, I cherished it. Because my big brother had bestowed it on me. And because, in my eyes, my big brother was the most interesting and original man on the planet... not to mention my protector and defender, especially when it came to our deeply traditional parents.

We were born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut. As Eric was fond of pointing out, only two interesting people ever spent time in Hartford: Mark Twain (who lost a lot of money in a publishing house that went bust there), and Wallace Stevens, who coped with the tedium of being an insurance executive by writing some of the most experimental poetry imaginable.

'Outside of Twain and Stevens', Eric told me when I was twelve, 'nobody of note ever lived in this city. Until we came along'.

Oh, he was so wonderfully arrogant. He'd say anything outrageous if it upset our father, Robert Biddeford Smythe III. He fit his portentous name perfectly. He was a very proper, very Episcopalian insurance executive; a man who always wore worsted three-piece suits, believed in the virtues of thrift, and abhorred flamboyance or mischief-making of any kind. Our mother, Ida, was cut from the same stern material: the daughter of a Boston Presbyterian minister, ruthlessly practical, a triumph of domestic efficiency. They were a formidable team, our parents. Cut-and-dried, no-nonsense, reluctantly tactile. Public displays of affection were rare events in the Smythe household. Because, at heart, Father and Mother were true New England Puritans, still rooted in the nineteenth century. They always seemed old to us. Old and forbidding. The antithesis of fun.

Of course we still loved them. Because, after all, they were our parents - and unless your parents were savage to you, you had to love them. It was part of the social contract - or at least it was when I was growing up. Just as you had to accept their manifold limitations. I've often thought that the only time you truly become an adult is when you finally forgive your parents for being just as flawed as everyone else... and then acknowledge that, within their own boundaries, they did the best they could for you.

But loving your parents is far different from embracing their world-view. From the time Eric was in his teens he worked hard at infuriating Father (yes, he insisted we address him in that Victorian manner. Never Dad. Or Pop. Or anything hinting at easy conviviality. Always Father). Sometimes I think Eric's radical politics were less rooted in ideological conviction, and more to do with raising Father's blood pressure. The fights they used to have were legendary. Especially after Father discovered the copy of John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World under his son's bed. Or when Eric presented him with a Paul Robeson record on Father's Day.

My mother stayed out of all father/son arguments. To her, a woman had no business debating politics (one of the many reasons why she so hated Mrs Roosevelt, calling her 'a female Lenin'). She was always lecturing Eric about respecting Father. But, by the time he was ready to enter college, she realized that her stern words no longer carried any import; that she had lost him. Which saddened her greatly. And I sensed that she was always a bit baffled as to why her only son - whom she had raised so correctly - had turned into such a Jacobin. Especially as he was so astonishingly bright.

That was the only thing about Eric which pleased my parents - his exceptional intelligence. He devoured books. He was reading French by the age of fourteen, and had a working command of Italian by the time he entered Columbia. He could talk knowledgeably about such abstract, abtruse subjects as Cartesian philosophy or quantum mechanics. And he played a mean boogie-woogie piano. He was also one of those maddening whizkids who got straight As in school with minimal work. Harvard wanted him. Princeton wanted him. Brown wanted him. But he wanted Columbia. Because he wanted New York, and all its ancillary freedoms.

'I tell you, S, once I get to Manhattan, Hartford won't see me ever again'.

That wasn't exactly true - because, despite his rebelliousness, he still remained a reasonably dutiful son. He wrote home once a week, he made brief visits to Hartford at Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter, he never shoved Mother and Father out of his life. He simply reinvented himself completely in New York. To begin with, he changed his name - from Theobold Ericson Smythe to plain old Eric Smythe. He got rid of all those Ivy League Rogers Peet clothes that my parents bought him, and started shopping at the local Army/Navy store. His skinny frame got skinnier. His black hair grew thick, bushy. He bought himself a pair of narrow rimless spectacles. He looked like Trotsky - especially as he took to wearing an Army greatcoat and a battered tweed jacket. On the rare times my parents saw him, they were horrified by his transformed appearance. But, once again, his grades silenced them. Straight As. Elected to Phi Beta Kappa at the end of his junior year. High honors in English. Had he wanted to go to law school, or get a doctorate, he could have waltzed into any graduate program in the country. But instead, he moved downtown to Sullivan Street, swept floors for Orson Welles for $20 a week, and dreamed big dreams about writing plays that mattered.

By 1945, those dreams were dying. No one would even look at his plays anymore - because they belonged to another era. But Eric was still determined to break through as a playwright... even if it meant writing hack jokes for Joe E. Brown to keep a roof over his head. Once or twice, I dropped hints about maybe finding a teaching job in a college - which struck me as more worthy of Eric's talents than churning out one-liners for a game show. But Eric refused to entertain such notions, saying things like, 'The moment a writer starts teaching his trade, he's finished. And the moment he enters academia, he slams the door on the real world... the place about which he's supposed to be writing'.

'But The Quiz Bang Show isn't the real world', I countered.

'It's more rooted in reality than teaching English composition to a bunch of prim little women at Bryn Mawr'.

'Ouch!' I said, having graduated from Bryn Mawr two years earlier.

'You know what I'm saying here, S'.

'Yes - that I am a prim little woman who probably should be married to some dreary banker, and living in some prim little town on the Philadelphia Main Line...'

Certainly that was the life my parents envisaged for me. But I was having none of it. After I graduated from Bryn Mawr in '43, Mother and Father hoped that I would marry my steady back then - a Haverford graduate named Horace Cowett. He'd just been accepted into U. Penn law school, and had proposed to me. But though Horace wasn't as prim and humorless as his name (he actually was a rather bookish fellow who wrote some halfway decent poetry for the Haverford literary magazine), I still wasn't ready to impound myself in marriage at a premature age - especially to a man I liked, but about whom I felt no overwhelming passion. Anyway, I wasn't going to squander my twenties by sequestering myself in dull old Philadelphia, as I had my sights set on the city ninety miles north of there. And nobody was going to stop me from going to New York.

Predictably, my parents tried to block my move there. When I announced - around three weeks before my graduation - that I had been offered a trainee job at Life, they were horrified. I was home for the weekend in Hartford (a trip I made deliberately to break the job news to them, and also to inform them that I wouldn't be accepting Horace's marriage proposal). Ten minutes into the conversation, the emotional temperature within our household quickly hit boiling point.

'I am not having any daughter of mine living by herself in that venal, indecent city', my father pronounced.

'New York is hardly indecent - and Life isn't exactly Confidential', I said, mentioning a well-known scandal sheet of the time. 'Anyway I thought you'd be thrilled with my news. Life only accepts ten trainees a year. It's an incredibly prestigious offer'.

'Father's still right', my mother said. 'New York is no place for a young woman without family'.

'Eric's not family?'

'Your brother is not the most moral of men', my father said.

'And what does that mean?' I said angrily.

My father was suddenly flustered, but he covered up his embarrassment by saying, 'It doesn't matter what it means. What matters is the simple fact that I will not permit you to live in Manhattan'.

'I am twenty-two years old, Father'.

'That's not the issue'.

'You have no legal right to tell me what I can or cannot do'.

'Don't hector your father', my mother said. 'And I must tell you that you are making a dreadful mistake by not marrying Horace'.

'I knew you'd say that'.

'Horace is a splendid young man', my father said.

'Horace is a very nice young man - with a very nice, dull future ahead of him'.

'You are being arrogant', he said.

'No - just accurate. Because I will not be pushed into a life I don't want'.

'I am not pushing you into any life...' my father said.

'By forbidding me from going to New York, you are stopping me from taking control of my own destiny'.

'Your destiny!' my father said, with cruel irony. 'You actually think you have a destiny! What bad novels have you been reading at Bryn Mawr?'

I stormed out of the room. I ran upstairs and fell on the bed, sobbing. Neither of my parents came up to comfort me. Nor did I expect them to. That wasn't their style. They both had a very Old Testament view of parenthood. Father was our household's version of The Almighty - and once He had spoken, all argument was silenced. So, for the rest of the weekend, the subject wasn't raised again. Instead, we made strained conversation about the recent Japanese activity in the Pacific - and I stayed button-lipped when Father went into one of his jeremiads about FDR. On Sunday he drove me to the train station. When we arrived there he patted my arm.

'Sara, dear - I really don't like fighting with you. Though we are disappointed that you won't be marrying Horace, we do respect your decision. And if you really are that keen on journalism, I do have several contacts on the Hartford Courant. I don't think it would be too difficult to find you something there...'

'I am accepting the job offer at Life, Father'.

He actually turned white - something Father never did.

'If you do accept that job, I will have no choice but to cut you off'.

'That will be your loss'.

And I left the car.

I felt shaky all the way to New York - and more than a little scared. After all, I had directly defied my father - something I had never attempted before. Though I was trying to be dauntless and self-confident, I was suddenly terrified of the thought that I might just lose my parents. Just as I was also terrified by the thought that - if I heeded Father's wish - I would end up writing the 'Church Notes' column in the Hartford Courant, and ruing the fact that I had allowed my parents to force me into a small life.

And yes, I did believe I had a destiny. I know that probably sounds vainglorious and absurdly romantic... but at this early juncture in so-called adult life, I had reached one simple conclusion about the future: it had possibilities... but only if you allowed yourself the chance to explore those possibilities. However, most of my contemporaries were falling into line, doing what was expected of them. At least fifty per cent of my class at Bryn Mawr had weddings planned for the summer after they graduated. All those boys trickling home from the war were, by and large, just thinking about getting jobs, settling down. Here we were - the generation who was about to inherit all that postwar plenty, who (compared to our parents) had infinite opportunities. But instead of running with those opportunities, what did most of us do? We became good company men, good housewives, good consumers. We narrowed our horizons, and trapped ourselves into small lives.

Of course, I only realized all this years later (hindsight always gives you perfect vision, doesn't it?). Back in the spring of '45, however, all that concerned me was doing something interesting with my life - which essentially meant not marrying Horace Cowett, and definitely taking that job at Life. But by the time I reached Penn Station after that horrible weekend with my parents, I had lost my nerve. Despite four years away at college, Father still loomed large in my life. I still desperately sought his approval, even though I knew it was impossible to receive it. And I did think he really would carry out his threat to disinherit me if I went to New York. How could I live without my parents?

'Oh, please', Eric said when I related this fear to him. 'Father wouldn't dare cut you off. He dotes on you'.

'No, he doesn't...'

'Believe me, the old fool feels he must play the stern Victorian paterfamilias - but, at heart, he's a scared sixty-four-year-old who's about to be put out to pasture by his company next year, and is terrified of the horrors of retirement. So do you really think he's going to slam the door on his only beloved daughter?'

We were sitting in the cocktail lounge of the Hotel Pennsylvania, opposite Penn Station. Eric had arranged to meet me off the train from Hartford that Sunday afternoon (I had a two-hour wait for my connection back to Bryn Mawr, via Philadelphia). As soon as I saw him on the platform, I threw myself against his shoulder and started to weep, simultaneously hating myself for behaving so weakly. Eric held me until I calmed down, then said, 'So, did you have fun at home?'

I had to laugh. 'It was wonderful', I said.

'I can tell. The Pennsylvania's nearby. And the bartender there makes a mean Manhattan'.

That was the understatement of the decade. After two of those Manhattans, I felt like I was under anaesthetic - which, I must admit, isn't a bad thing to feel on occasion. Eric tried to get a third drink into me - but I dug in my heels and insisted on a ginger ale. I didn't want to say anything, but I was a little concerned when my brother downed his third Manhattan in four fast gulps, then called for another. Though we'd been in regular contact by letter (long-distance calls - even from New York to Pennsylvania - were expensive back then), I hadn't seen him since Christmas. And I was genuinely taken aback by his physical state. His lanky frame had thickened. His complexion was pasty. A small, but noticeable roll of fat hung beneath his chin. He was chain-smoking Chesterfields and coughing loudly. He was only twenty-eight, but he was beginning to have that puffy look of a man who had been prematurely aged by disappointment. Of course his conversation was as fizzy and funny as ever, but I could tell that he was worried about work. I knew from his letters that his new play (something about a migrant worker revolt in southwest Texas) had just been rejected by every possible theater company in New York, and he was paying the rent by reading unsolicited scripts for the Theater Guild ('It's pretty depressing work', he wrote me in March, 'because it's all about saying no to other writers. But it's $30 a week - which just about pays my bills'). And when he threw back his fourth Manhattan in five gulps, I decided to stop being silent about his chain-drinking.

'One more of those Manhattans, and you'll stand up on the table to sing "Yankee Doodle Dandy"'.

'Now you're being a puritan, S. After I see you off to beautiful Philadelphia, I shall take the subway back to my Sullivan Street atelier and write until sunrise. Believe me, five Manhattans is nothing more than creative lubrication'.

'Okay - but you should also think about switching to filtered cigarettes. They're much kinder to your throat'.

'Oh God! Listen to the Bryn Mawr ascetic! Ginger ale, filtered cigarettes. Next thing you'll tell me is that, if he gets the nomination, you're going to vote for Dewey against Roosevelt in the next election'.

'You know I would never do that'.

'I think I was making a joke, S. Though I must say Daddy would be boggled beyond belief were you to vote Republican'.

'He'd still insist that I return to Hartford like a good little girl'.

'You won't be returning to Hartford after graduation'.

'He's given me a pretty stark choice, Eric'

'No - what he's doing is playing the oldest poker ruse in the world. Putting all his chips into the pot, pretending that he holds a straight flush, and daring you to see his bet. So you're going to call his bluff by taking the job at Life. And though he will grump and groan about it - and probably do a little of his Teddy Roosevelt sabre-rattling - in the end he's going to accept your decision. Because he has to. Anyway, he knows that I'll look after you in the big bad city'.

'That's what's scaring him', I said, and immediately regretted that comment.

'Why?'

'Oh, you know...'

'No', Eric said, sounding unamused. 'I don't know'.

'He probably thinks you'll turn me into a raging Marxist'.

Eric lit up another cigarette. His eyes were sharply focused, and he looked at me warily. I could tell that he was suddenly sober again.

'That's not what he said, S'.

'Yes it was', I said, sounding unconvincing.

'Please tell me the truth'.

'I told you -'

'- that he didn't like the idea of me looking after you in New York. But surely he explained why he thought I might be a bad influence'.

'I really don't remember'.

'Now you're lying to me. And we don't lie to each other, S'.

My brother took my hand, and quietly said, 'You have to tell me'.

I looked up and met his stare. 'He said he didn't think you were the most moral of men'.

Eric said nothing. He just took a long, deep drag on his cigarette, coughing slightly as he inhaled.

'Of course, I don't think that', I said.

'Don't you?'

'You know I don't'.

He stabbed the cigarette into the ashtray, and threw back the remainder of his drink.

'But if it was true... if I wasn't "the most moral of men"... would that bother you?'

Now it was his turn to meet my gaze. I knew what we were both thinking: this was an issue that we've always dodged... even though it has always been lurking in the background. Like my parents, I too had had my suspicions about my brother's sexuality (especially since there had never been a girlfriend in his life). But, back then, such suspicions were never discussed. Everything was closeted. Literally. And figuratively. To openly admit your homosexuality in forties America would have been an act of suicide. Even to the kid sister who adored you. So we spoke in code.

'I think you're about the most moral person I know', I said.

'But Father is using the word "moral" in a different way. Do you understand that, S?'

I covered his hand with mine.

'Yes. I do'.

'And does that trouble you?'

'You're my brother. That's all that matters'.

'Are you sure?'

My hand squeezed his.

'I'm sure'.

'Thanks'.

'Shut up', I said with a smile.

He squeezed my hand back.

'I'll always be in your corner, S. Know that. And don't worry about Father. He won't win this one'.

A week later, a letter arrived for me at Bryn Mawr.

Dear S,

After seeing you last Sunday, I decided that a fast day trip to Hartford was long overdue. So I jumped the train the next morning. Needless to say, Mother and Father were just a tad surprised to see me on their doorstep. Though he refused to listen at first, eventually Father had no choice but to hear me out on your behalf. For the first hour of our 'negotiations' (the only word for it), he stuck to his 'She's coming back to Hartford, and that's the end of it' line. So I started playing the 'It would be a pity if you lost both your children' card with great finesse - making it less of a threat, more of a tragic potentiality. When he dug in his heels and said that his mind was made up, I said, 'Then you're going to end up a lonely old man'. With that, I left, and took the next train back to New York.

The next morning the phone rang at the ungodly hour of eight a.m. It was Father Dearest. His tone was still gruff and inflexible, but his tune had definitely changed.

'Here's what I will accept. Sara can take the job at Life, but only if she agrees to reside at the Barbizon Hotel for Women on East 63rd Street. It comes highly recommended by one of my associates at Standard Life, and operates according to strict rules, with nightly curfews and no visitors after dark. As Mother and I will know she is being carefully looked after at the Barbizon, we will therefore accede to her demands about living in Manhattan. As you seem to have cast yourself in the role of go-between, I will leave it to you to put this proposition to Sara. Please inform her that, though she has our love and support, we will not negotiate on this issue'.

Naturally I said nothing - except that I would pass on his offer to you. But, as far as I'm concerned, this is a near-capitulation on his part. So drink five Manhattans in celebration and kiss Pennsylvania goodbye. You're going to New York... with parental blessing to boot. And don't worry about the Barbizon. We'll check you in there for the first month or two, then quietly transfer you to your own apartment. And then we'll figure out a way of breaking the news to Father and Mother without reactivating hostilities.

Peace in our time.

Your 'moral' brother,

Eric

I nearly screamed with delight when I finished reading this letter. Racing back to my dorm room, I grabbed a piece of stationery and a pen, and wrote:

Dear E,

I'm writing FDR tonight and nominating you to run the League of Nations (if it's reconstituted after the war). You're a diplomatic genius! And the best brother imaginable. Tell all the gang on 42nd Street that I will soon be there...

Love, S

I also scribbled a fast note to Father, informing him that I accepted his terms, and assuring him that I would do the family proud in New York (a coded way of letting him know I would remain 'a nice girl', even though I was living in that Sodom and Gomorrah called Manhattan).

I never received a reply from Father to my letter. Nor did I expect to. It simply wasn't his way. But he did attend my graduation with Mother. Eric took the train down for the day. After the ceremony, we all went out for lunch at a local hotel. It was an awkward meal. I could see Father glancing between the two of us, and pursing his lips. Though Eric had put on a tie and jacket for the occasion, it was the only jacket he owned (a battered Harris tweed he'd found in a thrift shop). His shirt was Army-surplus khaki. He looked like a union organizer - and chain-smoked throughout the lunch (at least he kept his liquor intake down to two Manhattans). I was dressed in a sensible suit, but Father still regarded me with unease. Having dared to stand up to him, I was no longer his little girl. And I could tell that he was finding it difficult to be relaxed around me (though, if truth be told, my father was never relaxed in the company of his children). Mother, meanwhile, did what Mother always did: she smiled nervously, and followed my father's lead on anything he said.

Eventually - after much strained talk about the prettiness of the Bryn Mawr campus, and the bad standard of service on the train from Hartford, and which neighbor's boy was serving in which corner of Europe or the Pacific - Father suddenly said, 'I just want you to know, Sara, that Mother and I are most pleased with your cum laude degree. It is quite an achievement'.

'But it's not summa cum laude, like me', Eric said, his eyebrows arching mischievously.

'Thanks a lot', I said.

'Anytime, S'.

'You have both done us proud', Mother said.

'Academically speaking', Father added.

'Yes', Mother said quickly, 'academically speaking, we couldn't be prouder parents'.

That was the last time we were ever together as a family. Six weeks later - returning home to the Barbizon Hotel for Women after a long day at Life - I was stunned to see Eric standing in the lobby. His face was chalky, drawn. He looked at me with trepidation - and I knew immediately that he had something terrible to tell me.

'Hi, S', he said quietly, taking my hands in his.

'What's happened?'

'Father died this morning'.

I heard my heart pound against my ribcage. For a moment or two I really didn't know where I was. Then I felt my brother's steadying hands on my arms. He led me to a sofa, and helped me down into it, sitting next to me.

'How?' I finally said.

'A heart attack - at his office. His secretary found him slumped over his desk. It must have been pretty instantaneous... which is a blessing, I guess'.

'Who told Mother?'

'The police. And then the Daniels called me. They said Mom's pretty distraught'.

'Of course she's distraught', I heard myself saying. 'He was her life'.

I felt a sob rise up in my throat. But I stifled it. Because I suddenly heard Father's voice in my head: ' Crying is never an answer', he once told me when I burst into tears after getting a C+ in Latin. 'Crying is self-pity. And self-pity solves nothing'.

Anyway, I didn't know what to feel at this moment - except the jumbled anguish of loss. I loved Father. I feared Father. I craved his affection. I never truly felt his affection. Yet I also knew that Eric and I meant everything to him. He just didn't know how to articulate such things. Now he never would. That was the realization which hit me hardest - the fact that, now, there would never be a chance for us to breach the gulf that was always between us; that my memory of Father would always be colored by the knowledge that we never really talked. I think that is the hardest thing about bereavement - coming to terms with what might have been, if only you'd been able to get it right.

I let Eric take charge of everything. He helped me pack a bag. He got us both into a cab to Penn Station, and on the 8.13 to Hartford. We sat in the bar car, and drank steadily as the train headed north through Fairfield County. Never once did he seem stricken by grief - because, I sensed, he wanted to remain strong for me. What was so curious about our conversation was how little we talked about Father, or Mother. Instead we chatted idly - about my work at Life, and Eric's Theater Guild job, and rumors emanating from Eastern Europe about Nazi-run death camps, and whether Roosevelt would keep Henry Wallace as his Vice-President during next year's Presidential campaign, and why Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine was (in Eric's unrestrained opinion) a truly terrible play. It was as if we couldn't yet bring ourselves to deal with the profundity of losing a parent - especially one about which we both had such complex, ambivalent feelings. Only once during that journey was the matter of family mentioned... when Eric said, 'Well, I guess you can move out of the Barbizon now'.

'Won't Mother object?' I asked.

'Believe me, S - Mother will have other things on her mind'.

How dreadfully accurate Eric turned out to be. Mother wasn't simply grief-stricken by Father's death; she was inconsolable. During the three days before the funeral, she was so despondent that the family doctor kept her under sedation. She got through the actual service at the local Episcopal church, but came completely unstuck at the graveside. So unstuck that the doctor recommended admitting her to a rest home for observation.

She never left that rest home again. Within a week of her admission, a form of premature senile dementia had set in - and we lost her completely. A variety of specialists examined her - and they all came to the same conclusion: in the wake of Father's death, her grief had been so intense, so overwhelming, that she suffered a stroke which gradually attacked her speech, her memory, her motor control. For the first few months of her illness, Eric and I traveled back together every weekend to Hartford, to sit by her bed and hope for some sign of cognitive life. After six months, the doctors told us that it was unlikely that she would ever emerge from her dementia. That weekend we made some difficult, but necessary decisions. We put the family home on the market. We arranged for all of our parents' possessions to be sold, or given away to charity. Neither of us took much from the family home. Eric laid claim to a small writing table which Father kept in his bedroom. I held on to a photo, taken in 1913, of my parents on their honeymoon in the Berkshires. Mother was seated in a stiff-backed chair, wearing a long-sleeved white linen dress, her hair gathered up into a tightly constricted bun. Father was standing by her. He was in a dark cutaway suit, with a vest and a stiff high-collar. His left hand was behind his back, his right hand on Mother's shoulder. There was no glimmer of affection between them; no sense of ardour, or romantic animation, or even the simple pleasure of being in each other's company. They looked so stiff, so formal, so unsuited to the century in which they found themselves.

On the night Eric and I were sorting through their possessions - and we came upon this photograph in the attic - my brother burst into tears. It was the only time I ever saw him cry since Father had died and Mother took ill (whereas I had been regularly locking myself in the Ladies' room at Life, and blubbering like a fool). I knew exactly why Eric had suddenly broken down. Because that photograph was the perfect portrait of the formal, constrained face that our parents presented to the world... and, more tellingly, to their children. We always thought that their austerity extended to each other - because there were never any public displays of affection between them. But now we realized that there was this hidden passion between them - a love and a dependency so profound that it killed Mother to be without Father. What astonished us both was that we never saw this passion, never detected it for a moment.

'You never really know anybody', Eric said to me that night. 'You think you do - but they always end up baffling you. Especially when it comes to love. The heart is the most secretive - and confounding - part of the anatomy'.

My one antidote at this time was my job. I loved working at Life. Especially since, within four months, I had graduated from trainee status to the post of junior staff writer. I was researching and writing at least two short articles for the magazine every week. I was assigned the stories by a senior editor - a chain-smoking old-school journalist named Leland McGuire, who used to be the City editor on the New York Daily Mirror, but had moved to Life for the money and the gentler hours, and really missed the rough-and-tumble of a big raucous daily newspaper. He took a shine to me - and, shortly after I joined his department, took me out to lunch at the Oyster Bar in the basement of Grand Central Station.

'You want a piece of professional advice?' he asked me after we worked our way through two cups of chowder and a dozen cherrystones.

'Absolutely, Mr McGuire'.

'Leland, please. Okay - here it is. If you really want to become a properly seasoned journalist, get the hell out of the Time and Life building and find a reporter's job at some big-deal daily. I'm sure I could help you there. Find you something at the Mirror or the News'.

'You're not happy with my work so far?'

'On the contrary - I think you're terrific. But face facts: Life is, first and foremost, a picture magazine. Our senior writers are all men - and they're the ones who get sent out to cover the big stuff: the London blitz, Guadalcanal, FDR's next campaign. All I can give you is the arts-and-craft stuff: little five-hundred-word pieces on this month's big new movie, or a new fashion craze, or cookery tips. Whereas if you went to the City desk of the Mirror, you'd probably find yourself out on the beat with the cops, covering the courts, maybe even getting a real juicy assignment like an execution at Sing-Sing'.

'I don't think executions are really my sort of thing, Mr McGuire'.

'Leland! You really were raised far too well, Sara. Another Manhattan?'

'One's my limit at lunch, I'm afraid'.

'Then you really shouldn't go to the Mirror. Or maybe you should because after a month there, you'll know how to drink three Manhattans at lunchtime, and still function'.

'I really am very happy at Life. And I am learning a lot'.

'So you don't want to be some hard-as-nails Barbara Stanwyck lady reporter?'

'I want to write fiction, Mr McGuire... sorry, Leland'.

'Oh, brother...'

'Have I said something wrong?'

'Nah. Fiction's fine. Fiction's great. If you can cut it'.

'I am certainly going to try'.

'And then, I suppose, it's a hubby and kids and a nice house in Tarrytown'.

'That's not really high on my list of priorities'.

He drained his martini. 'I've heard that one before'.

'I'm certain you have. But, in my case, it's the truth'.

'Sure it is. Until you meet some guy and decide you're tired of the daily nine-to-five grind, and want to settle down and have someone else pay the bills, and figure this nice Ivy League type is a suitable candidate for entrapment, and...'

I suddenly heard myself sounding rather cross. 'Thank you for reducing me to the level of female cliche'.

He was taken aback by my tone. 'Hell, I was just talking out of the side of my mouth'.

'Of course you were'.

'I didn't mean to offend you'.

'No offence taken, Mr McGuire'.

'Sounds like you're pretty damn angry to me'.

'Not angry. I just don't like to be pigeonholed as some predatory female'.

'But you are one tough cookie'.

'Aren't cookies meant to be tough?' I said lightly, shooting him a sarcastically sweet smile.

'Your brand certainly comes that way. Remind me never to ask you out for a night on the town'.

'I don't date married men'.

'You don't take any prisoners either. Your boyfriend must have a fireproof brain'.

'I don't have a boyfriend'.

'Surprise, surprise'.

The reason I didn't have a boyfriend was a simple one: at that juncture in my life, I was simply too busy. I had my job. I had my first apartment: a small studio, on a beautiful leafy corner of Greenwich Village called Bedford Street. Most of all, I had New York - and that was the best romance imaginable. Though I'd visited it regularly over the years, living there was another matter altogether - and there were times when I literally thought I had landed in a playground for adults. To someone raised within the sedate, conservative, meddlesome confines of Hartford, Connecticut, Manhattan was a heady revelation. To begin with, it was so amazingly anonymous. You could become quite invisible, and never feel as if anyone was looking over your shoulder in disapproving judgment (a favorite Hartford pastime). You could stay out all night. Or spend half a Saturday losing yourself in the eight miles' worth of books at the Strand Bookshop. Or hear Ezio Pinza sing the title role of Don Giovanni at the Met for fifty cents (if you were willing to stand). Or grab dinner at Lindy's at three a.m. Or get up at dawn on a Sunday, stroll over to the Lower East Side, buy fresh pickles from the barrel on Delancey Street, then fall into Katz's deli for the sort of pastramion-rye that bordered on a religious experience.

Or you could just walk - which I did endlessly, obsessively. Huge walks - from my apartment on Bedford Street all the way north to Columbia University. Or across the Manhattan Bridge and up Flatbush Avenue to Park Slope. What I discovered during these walks was that New York was like a massive Victorian novel which forced you to work your way through its broad canvas and complicated sub-plots. Being an impatient sort of reader I found myself compulsively caught up in its narrative, wondering where it would bring me next.

The sense of freedom was extraordinary. I was no longer under parental supervision. I was paying my own way in life. I answered to nobody. And thanks to my brother Eric I had a direct entree into Manhattan's more esoteric underside. He seemed to know every arcane resident of the city. Czech translators of medieval poetry. All-night jazz disc jockeys. Emigre German sculptors. Would-be composers who were writing atonal operas about Gawain... in short, the sort of people you would never meet in Hartford, Connecticut. There were also a lot of political types... most of whom were either teaching at assorted colleges around town, or writing for small left-wing journals, or running little charities that supplied clothes and food to 'our fraternal Soviet comrades, valiantly fighting the forces of fascism'... or words to that effect.

Naturally, Eric tried to get me interested in his brand of left-wing politics. But I simply wasn't interested. Do understand - I did respect Eric's passion for his cause. Just as I also respected (and agreed with) his hatred of social injustice, and economic inequality. But what I didn't agree with was the way his political friends treated their beliefs as a sort of lay religion - of which they were the high priests. Thank God he left the Party in '41. I'd met a few of his 'comrades' when I'd visited him in Manhattan during college - and, my God, talk about dogmatic people! They really thought that theirs was the true way, the only way... and they would not broach any dissenting views. Which is one of the many reasons why Eric got fed up with them and left.

At least none of his political friends ever asked me out... which was something of a relief. Because, by and large, they were such a grim, glum bunch.

'Don't you know any funny Communists?' I asked him one Sunday over a late lunch at Katz's deli.

'A "funny Communist" is an oxymoron', he said,

'You're a funny Communist'.

'Keep your voice down', he whispered.

'I really don't think J. Edgar Hoover has agents stationed in Katz's'.

'You never know. Anyway, I am an ex-Communist'.

'But you're still pretty hard left'.

'Left of center. A Henry Wallace Democrat'.

'Well, I promise you this: I'd never go out with a Communist'.

'On patriotic grounds?'

'No - on the grounds that he wouldn't be able to make me laugh'.

'Did Horace Cowett make you laugh?'

'Sometimes, yes'.

'How could anyone with the name of Horace Cowett make anybody laugh?'

Eric had a point - though, at least, Horace didn't look as preposterous as his name. He was tall and gangly, with thick black hair and horn-rimmed glasses. He favored tweed jackets and knit ties. At twenty he already resembled a tenured professor. He was quiet, bordering on shy, but intensely bright, and a terrific talker once he was comfortable with you. We met at a Haverford/Bryn Mawr mixer, and went out for all my senior year. My parents really thought he was a splendid catch - I had my doubts, although Horace had his virtues, especially when it came to talking about novels by Henry James or portraits by John Singer Sargent (his favorite writer, his favorite painter). Though he didn't exactly exude joie de vivre, I did like him... though not enough to let him take me to bed. Then again, Horace never tried very hard on that front. We'd both been brought up far too well.

But he still proposed marriage a month before graduation. When I broke it off with him a week later, he said,

'I hope you're not ending it because you simply don't want to commit to marriage now. Maybe, in a year or so, you'll change your mind'.

'I do know how I will feel about this matter a year from now. The same way I am feeling now. Because, quite simply, I don't want to marry you'.

He pursed his lips, and tried not to look wounded. He didn't succeed.

'I'm sorry', I finally said.

'No need'.

'I didn't want to be so blunt'.

'You weren't'.

'Yes, I was'.

'No, really - you were just being... informative'.

'Informative? Direct is more like it'.

'I'd say... instructive'.

'Candid. Explicit. Frank. It doesn't really matter, does it?'

'Well, semantically speaking...'

Before this exchange, I'd had a few nervous little qualms about rejecting Horace's marriage proposal. After this exchange, all lingering doubts had been killed off. To my parents - and to many of my friends at Bryn Mawr - I had bucked convention by rejecting his offer. After all, he was such a safe bet. But I was certain I could meet someone with a little more sparkle and passion. And, at the age of twenty-two, I didn't want to buy myself a one-way ticket to wifehood without stopping to think about other options along the way.

And so, when I reached New York, the idea of finding a boyfriend was low on my list of priorities. Especially as I had so much to grapple with during that first year.

The family house was sold by Christmas - but almost all the proceeds went on Mother's medical bills and residential care. Eric and I greeted 1944 in a grubby hotel in Hartford, having rushed back on New Year's Eve afternoon when the nursing home called, saying that Mother had contracted a chest infection which had suddenly mutated into pneumonia. It was touch and go whether or not she'd pull through. By the time we'd reached Hartford, the doctors had stabilized her. We spent an hour at her bedside. She was deeply comatose, and stared up at her two children blankly. We both kissed her goodbye. As we'd missed the last train back to Manhattan, we checked into this slum of a hotel near the railway station. We spent the rest of the evening in the hotel bar, drinking bad Manhattans. At midnight, we sang 'Auld Lang Syne' with the bartender and a few forlorn traveling salesmen.

It was a grim start to the year. It got grimmer - as the next morning, just when we were checking out, a call came from the nursing home. I took it. It was from a staff doctor, on call that morning.

'Miss Smythe, I regret to inform you that your mother passed away half-an-hour ago'.

Oddly enough, I didn't feel an overwhelming rush of grief (that came a few days later). More a sense of numbness, as the thought sank in: my family now is Eric.

He was also caught off guard by the news. We took a cab to the nursing home. En route, he started to sob. I put my arms around him.

'She always hated New Year's Day', he finally said.

The funeral was the next morning. Two neighbors and our father's secretary showed up at the church. After the cemetery, we took a taxi back to the railway station. On the train back to New York, Eric said, 'I'm certain that's the last time I'll ever set foot in Hartford'.

There wasn't much of an estate - just two insurance policies. We ended up with around five thousand dollars each - quite a bit of money in those days. Eric instantly quit his Theater Guild job, and took off for a year to Mexico and South America. His portable Remington came with him - as he was planning to spend twelve months writing a major new play and maybe gathering material for a journal de voyage about travels in Latin America. He said he wanted me to come along - but I certainly wasn't going to quit my job at Life after just seven months.

'But if you come with me, you'll be able to concentrate on writing fiction for a year', he said.

'I'm learning a great deal at Life'.

'Learning what? How to write five-hundred-word articles about the Broadway premiere of Bloomer Girl or why chokers are this year's fashion accessory'.

'I was rather proud of those two pieces', I said, 'even if they didn't give me a byline'.

'My point exactly. As that editor guy told you, you'll never be assigned the big stories - because they all go to the senior male writers on the staff. You want to write fiction. So, what's stopping you? You have the money and the freedom. We could rent a hacienda in Mexico with the money we have between us... and both write all day, unencumbered'.

'It's a lovely dream', I said, 'but I'm not going to leave New York having just arrived here. I'm not ready to be a full-time writer yet. I need to find my way first. And the job at Life will also give me some necessary seasoning'.

'God, you're far too sensible. And I suppose you're planning to do something ultra-practical with your five thousand dollars'.

'Government bonds'.

'S, really. You've turned into Little Miss Prudent'.

'Guilty as charged'.

So Eric disappeared south of the border, and I stayed on in Manhattan, working at Life by day and trying to write short stories by night. But the pressures of the day job - and the vicarious pleasures of Manhattan - kept me away from the Remington typewriter in my studio apartment. Every time I sat down at home to work, I found myself thinking: I really don't have much to say, do I? Or that same doubting voice in the back of my head would whisper: There's a great double-feature at the RKO 58th Street: Five Graves to Cairo and Air Force. Or a girlfriend would ring up, suggesting Saturday lunch at Schrafft's. Or I'd have to finish a story for Life. Or the bathroom needed cleaning. Or... I'd find one of the million excuses that would-be writers always find to dodge the tyranny of the desk.

Eventually I decided to stop fooling myself. So I moved my Remington off the dining table and into the closet. Then I wrote Eric a long letter, explaining why I was putting my writing ambitions on hold:

I've never traveled. I've never seen anywhere south of Washington, DC... let alone the world. I've never been in mortal danger. I've never known anyone who's gone to prison, or has been indicted by a federal grand jury. I've never worked in the slums, or in a soup kitchen. I've never hiked the Appalachian Trail, or climbed Mt Kathadin, or paddled across Saranac Lake in a canoe. I could have volunteered for the Red Cross and gone to war. I could have joined the WPA and taught school in the Dust Bowl. I could have done around a thousand more interesting things than I'm doing now - and, in the process, found something to write about.