The great woman came to our house in the suburbs for supper. She was tiny and tart, like a kumquat.
She came with her friend, who was my mother’s friend. She sat at our dining room table, the one my mother stripped and refinished herself and which I gave away to a stranger after she died, though my mother had wanted me to keep it.
The great woman ate at our table because that evening she would hear my brother play in a student production of her husband’s masterpiece. She had sung the lead in Berlin, in New York.
She was trying to keep her husband’s legacy alive.
She sat opposite me, like a tiny queen, and ate my mother’s lasagna.
