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pencil from his jacket to note down whatever the writer had to tell him, but Nathan merely shook his head. “ The memories, ” said Zuckerman, “ come in their own time. ” “ Rabbi, ” said Henry, “ I’ll deliver the eulogy. ” Earlier he ’ d said that he didn ’ t think he ’ d have the emotional wherewithal to get through it. “ If you could, ” said the rabbi, “ despite your grief, that would be wonderful. ” “ And if I cry, ” replied Henry, “ that won ’ t hurt either. She was the best mother in the world. ”
    So: the historical record was to be set straight at last. Henry would cleanse from the minds of her Florida friends the libelous portrait in Carnovsky. Life and art are distinct, thought Zuckerman; what could be clearer? Yet the distinction is wholly elusive. That writing is an act of imagination seems to perplex and infuriate everyone.
    Carol arrived on an evening plane with their two oldest kids and Henry put them up with him at a hotel over on Collins Avenue. Zuckerman slept at his mother ’ s alone. He didn ’ t bother making the bed up anew but, between the sheets that had covered her only two nights before, planted his face in her pillow. “ Mama, where are you? ” He knew where she was, at the mortician ’ s wearing her gray crepe dress; nonetheless, he couldn ’ t stop asking. His little mother, five feet two, had disappeared into the enormity of death. Probably the biggest thing she ’ d ever entered before was L. Bamberger ’ s department store on Market Street in Newark.
    Till that night Zuckerman hadn ’ t known who the dead were or just how far away. She murmured into his dreams, but no matter how hard he strained to hear, he could not understand. An inch separated them, nothi ng separated them, they were in divisible—yet no message could make it through. He seemed to be dreaming that he was deaf. In the dream he thought, “ Not gone; beyond gone, ” and awoke in the dark, bubbling saliva, her pillow soaked with his spittle. “ Poor child, ” he said, feeling for her as though she were the child, his child, as t hough she ’ d died at ten instead of sixty-six. He felt a pain in his head the size of a lemon. It was her brain tumor.
    Coming out of sleep that morning , struggling to be freed from a final dream of a nearby object at a dreadful distance, he began readying himself to find her beside him. Mustn ’ t be frightened. The last thing she ’ d ever do would be to come back to frighten Nathan. But when he opened his eyes to the daylight and rolled over on his side there was no dead woman on the other half of the bed. There was no way to see her beside him again.
    He got up to brush his teeth, then came back into the bedroom and. still in his pajamas, stepped into the closet among her clothes. He put his hand in the pocket of a poplin raincoat that looked hardly ever to have been worn , and found a freshly opened packet of Kleenex. One of the tissues lay folded in the pocket ’ s seam. He touched it to his nose, but it smelled only of itself.
    From a square plastic case down in the pocket he extracted a transparent rain bonnet. It was no bigger than a Band-Aid, folded up to about a quarter-inch thickness, but that it was tucked away so neatly didn ’ t necessarily mean that she had never used it. The case was pale blue, stamped “ Compliments of Sylvia ’ s, Distinctive Fashions, Boca Raton . ” The “ S ” in Sylvia ’ s was entwined in a rose, something she would have appreciated. Little flowers always bordered her thank-you notes. Sometimes his wives had got the flowered thank-you notes for as little as a thoughtful long-distance call.
    In her other pocket, something soft and gauzy. Withdrawing the unseen thing gave him a bad moment, it wasn ’ t exactly like his mother to be carrying her underwear in her pocket like a drunk. Had the tumor impaired her thinking in pitiful little ways none of them had even known? But it wasn ’ t a bra or her