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me that my mother had died two weeks before, in hospital, of pneumonia. The details came later from Elizabeth: my mother had pulled her bed as far as it was possible to do into the closet, and gone to sleep with her head in what she hoped (I believe) would be a culture of mold. True or not, water had filled her lungs and killed her.
    The city authorities wrote to tell me she had been buried, decently, they said, in a public field in Belmont. Robert was appalled and wanted to send money to have her moved to his family’s plot. But somehow we never did it. There was not enough money at the time, and after a while it began to seem natural that she should rest, finally, as she had lived, among the anonymous of the city.
    Elizabeth wrote to assure me that she had rescued some of my mother’s furniture from the public sale. She had put it in the attic of her family’s house. I was grateful that the bentwood sofa, particularly, had not gone to strangers.
    It was accepted as reasonable that Virginia Maclaren, Robert’s mother, would not be present at the wedding. After all, she was abroad, the trip back would have been, to the Scots mind of her family, a needless expense, even a foolish one for so short a ceremony, so meager a celebration.
    We met for the first time in Frankfurt in the rooms Robert and his mother had occupied in the Praunheimer Strasse before our marriage. Robert had wired her that he was bringing a wife. As we leaned against the ship’s rail, or walked the deck of the City of Paris in the morning sun, he told me a little of her life dedicated so entirely to his welfare, of her constant worries for his health, her concern that he keep his feet dry and his hands soft.
    I listened, watching the sea for whales or any sign of life in what seemed to me, at almost eighteen, a vast, anonymous, and ancient burial ground for armadas of ships. I had never crossed an ocean before. I had known of the Atlantic only from the Boston wharves where its grandeur was reduced to a series of brackish inways between piers, swirls of shallow water, full of the spill of ships.
    I was frightened by the hugeness we were traveling over and, when it stormed, into , so frightened and sick that I was excessive in my relief and joy at landing and finally reaching Frankfurt alive. I remember, and still burn with shame when I do, that I threw myself into Virginia Maclaren’s arms when we met, without waiting for evidence from her that she wished to engage in so intimate and enthusiastic a greeting. We parted almost at once: I felt a gentle but insistent pressure on my shoulder and withdrew my impulsive self from her arms. “What a surprise, Rob,” she said.
    â€œWhy, Mama?” He accented the last syllable of that word in a way I had never heard in America. “I cabled. You knew I had married Caroline. The twelfth of November it was. You never answered the cable.”
    â€œYes. I had the cable. That was the surprise, Rob. How long have you known … Caroline?”
    â€œA few months. What difference does that make?”
    While they talked, through, around, and over me, I stood between them and looked at my mother-in-law. She was a small, very tight woman with a solid, bosomless body, like a cork. Her bodice and skirt seemed pasted to her tubular trunk; her dress was wrinkle-free and taut. At the very top of her head her red-brown hair, the color of Robert’s, was coiled like a spring, making her seem a little taller than she was. Still she did not come to Robert’s chin. She had a way of directing her words into the far corner of a room, never looking at those to whom she spoke, not even her beloved son. This curious distance gave her statements, as well as her questions, the force of edicts. It did not matter that she spoke in English to German shopkeepers (she felt it unpatriotic, she once said, to learn a foreign language); they responded with alacrity to what they took to be her