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were separated by half the country in mental institutions—Menninger’s, in Topeka, Kansas; Austen Riggs, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
    I huddled in the rear of the limousine, overcome by its dizzying warmth and sensuality. Pamela covered my lap with a fur lap robe and gave me a handkerchief, which I balled up and held very tight. I thought, I must not be melodramatic, my mother’s death is a historically tragic event, it affects many other people—but all that is inconsequential—what is essential at this particular moment, what is crucial, is to be absolutely selfish. Why, if one of my parents had to die, did it have to be my mother, when I needed her so? Why not my father? Only my mother had understood me; nobody else in the world ever had or ever would in the same way, and we had really only just begun. All of my fearful battles with her for survival and identity had been fought, and just as we had learned how to shrug off ancient rivalries, to conquer our primordial fears about each other, to throw down our weapons, cease being mother and daughter, unequal or different, now that we were two individual people who had survived together, having successfully held each other and the outside world at bay for miles and years, there was something truly senseless about life if this was the result. It was a revelation. I stared out at the dark city, feeling that we were passing under it rather than through it, and thought: You might as well think whatever you want, be as self-indulgent as you need to be. You have about ten minutes of privacy, and then the sorrow of other people to deal with, Bridget and Bill, Father. Yes, I thought, of course Father loves you, but if I, Brooke, were to die tonight, it would hardly change his life at all; he would mourn, maybe shed a few tears in passing. But ah! Mother would have known the death of someone who had actually once been a part of her; there would have been a dreadful sense of mutilation of self, blood gushing out in rivers, pain almost beyond endurance. How did she die? What was the last thing she thought about?
    Until now, the idea of death had been a hazy abstraction, although, as described in close detail with more or less poetry by great or even ordinary authors I’d read since childhood, or as presented in movies, it often made me cry; I had to be taken homeat the age of three, hysterical, when Bambi’s mother was shot. Now I tabulated the number of times an actual death had profoundly affected me; if our dog Stewart, a pointer who’d been run over in a ghastly accident, was not counted, the tally was a meager three. Working backward, there was Herman Mankiewicz when I was fifteen and Frances Fonda when I was twelve, both close friends of my parents, and both parents of children who were close friends of mine, almost part of my own family; then there was my grandfather Colonel William Hayward, who died of cancer when I was six. The Colonel, as he was always referred to, came out from New York and stayed with us in California for a while. He knew he was dying and the idea of being an invalid confined to a wheelchair annoyed him greatly. Always an active man, he took up needlepoint, and I remembered him seated in his wheelchair—impressively upright, shoulders back, with steel-rimmed glasses and the white, freshly starched collar he’d insisted on wearing every day of his life—stitching a wondrous alphabet, which eventually hung on our wall. He started it for Bridget and me, before Bill was born, so it must have taken several years to complete; in the end it measured about six by nine feet, all squares of animals represented alphabetically (A for Antelope, B for Buffalo) and rendered in the colors of a warm desert twilight.
    By the time we arrived at the Carlyle Hotel, where Father and Pamela then lived, I welcomed any distraction. Besides, I was curious about Father. How would he be affected by the death of someone to whom he’d been married for ten years and then