Epilogue by Anne Roiphe Page B

camp days. V. goes on group hikes up

    the mountains of New Hampshire. He has a business appointment and has to cancel our afternoon at the museum. We stand outside the restaurant where we had lunch and a cold wind blows about my ears and my nose is turning red. He kisses me and holds me close. The hug seems to be a promise of future meetings. But perhaps it is a good-bye hug. Could I love this man? I could try, I decide.

    • • •

    On the other hand why should I try? Trying is not the way to loving I’m sure. Also I think that we are too different, come from such unlike worlds, that I would lose myself along the way. But if I am a real person with a memory and a history of my own I can’t get lost or can I?

    • • •

    Then there is K., who lives in my apartment building. For the last years I have seen him walking up and down the street carrying groceries, wearing shorts in the coldest of weather. He is a tall man with a wide chest, two sons each well over six foot five. He has a sad beat-up Irish face. He has always looked at me kindly, offered to carry my pack-ages, once he put an umbrella up over my head. He is never seen in a suit and a tie. He is a widower. His wife has been gone about five years. He wanders, still boyish, an old athlete, up and down. In the afternoon he goes to the park to jump rope to keep in condition. He stops me on the street. The building gossip has told him that H. has died. “How are you?” he asks. I shrug. His eyes fill with tears. “It’s the loneliness,” he says, “the loneliness.” “You could,” I say, “go to dinner with me one evening.” “I could,” he says. A

    few days later there is a message on my machine from him. “Go down, ” he says, “to the park and you will see on the left of the path the snowdrops my wife Linda planted there. She brought them back from my grandmother’s house and they are blooming. ” It’s March. I did not know that f lowers bloomed in the cold winds off the drive. The next morning I go and look. There they are, white petals, shining in the thin grass, their stems thrusting up from the cold, dark ground. “I saw the f lowers,” I say to his machine. “They are beautiful.” I thought he might call. He doesn’t.

    • • •

    Today there is a fog out my window. The Empire State Building has disappeared. The mist hangs over the rooftops and the water towers. I see the pipes reaching upwards, green and black on the tops of nearby brownstones. The terraces below hold summer chairs, a wilted plant or two, a rain-soaked barbeque. The traffic lights at the end of the block f loat and shimmer. The gargoyles on the building down the avenue are shrouded as an occasional wing or fang appears above the stone arches. Yesterday I went to Brooklyn to see my daughters and their children. I am fortunate to have their affection. I am fortunate to be welcome always in their homes. I am thankful for their company. I am also worried about this delicate matter of how much a presence I should be in their lives. How dependent on them could or should I become? In other cultures the old mother moves in with her daughter, helps with the care of the children, does the cooking. It is not unreasonable for the old to depend on the young, to be in their households as the young were once protected by their parents. And yet

    the idea appalls. Perhaps if I were in an Orthodox Jewish family, or an Old World Italian family, or a Navajo Indian family, I would have none of this unease but as it is I think I should be soon ready to pull away a little further, to call and be called less often, to hear fewer details of their days. I should be fading not entirely but somewhat from their view.
    We gather at one daughter’s house, a small rented carriage house behind a brownstone on a tree-lined street. You enter through a narrow gate and walk down a path between buildings barely wide enough for an adult to pass. The house has a small garden but now it is winter