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of going through her papers.
    Mum had lost all interest in deskwork during the six or seven months of her invalidity. We found unpaid Gristede’s bills,
     Amex bills; undistributed cash for staff Christmas tips; uncashed checks; unopened letters, including, I saw to my disconcertment,
     a number from me. This was not carelessness on her part or any failure of affection, but rather fear, and realizing it made
     me wince in self-rebuke.
    Mum’s serial misbehavior over the years had driven me, despairing, to write her scolding—occasionally scalding—letters. Now
     I saw that she’d stopped opening most letters from me, against the possibility that they might contain another excoriation.
     I opened one of them and read:
    Dear Mum,
    That really was an appalling scene at dinner last night….
    I wish, now, that I could take back that letter, even though every word of it had been carefully weighed and justified. But
     looking back, I see it wasn’t fair. I’m a professional writer; she was not. So it wasn’t a level playing field, however outrageous
     the provocations that had driven me, hot-faced, flushing, furious, to the keyboard. And they never—ever!—did a bit of good,
     these pastoral letters of mine. Why, I wondered now, had I never accepted the futility of hurling myself against Fortress
     Mum? My only consolation was that I had, finally, stopped sending them after our last battle, the previous June. Just as I
     had exhausted myself in religious warfare with Pup, so had I given up lobbing feckless, well-worded catapult balls over Mum’s
     parapets. I had even refrained from saying anything to her after the last great provocation.
    A year earlier, my daughter, Caitlin (Mum’s only granddaughter, whom she had more or less lovingly ignored for nineteen years),
     had gone out to Stamford from New York for the night, bringing with her her best friend, Kate Kennedy. (I know; but there
     is simply no way to tell this story without using real names.) Cat and Kate look like Irish twin sisters and have been soul-mates
     since kindergarten. Kate is beautiful, vivacious, bright, witty, and
naughty
—a Kennedy through and through, nicknamed “Kick” after her great-aunt. The friendship between these two colleens is perhaps
     out of the ordinary given that their paternal grandfathers, Robert F. Kennedy and William F. Buckley Jr., were, shall we say,
     on somewhat opposite sides of the old political spectrum. At any rate, here were two enchanting young ladies at a grandparental
     country manse of a summer night. An occasion for joy, affection, delighted conversation. One might… sigh… think, anyway. I
     was not—praise the gods—in attendance. Mum and I were not speaking at the time, owing to a prior disgrace of hers, a real
     beaut even by her standards.
    The general mood at the dinner table that night was not leavened by the continued—indeed, persistent— presence of a British
     aristocrat lady friend of Mum’s who had arrived for a visit ten days before. Now, nearly a fortnight into her encampment at
     Wallack’s Point, she showed no signs of moving on. Pup’s graciousness as a host was legendary, but it had limits. The poor
     man was reduced to sullen japery.
So, A_______, you must be getting jolly homesick for Merry Olde England by now, surely, eh? Ho ho ho….
But Lady A______ showed no sign of homesickness for Old Blighty. Indeed, she had fastened on to our house with the tenacity
     of a monomaniacal abalone. Now, on day ten of Pup Held Hostage, his own mood had congealed from sullenness to simmering resentment.
     Meanwhile, Mum’s protracted, vinous afternoons of gin rummy with Her Ladyship had her, by dinnertime, in what might be called
     the spring-loaded position. In such moods, Mum was capable of wheeling on, say, Neil Armstrong to inform him that he knew
     nothing—
nothing whatsoever
—about astrophysics or lunar landing. No one in the history of hostessing has ever set a better dinner table than