! The Beloved Stranger

It was about seven years after her breakdown which she could not remember, and which I could not forget that one day as I was creaming and powdering her more intimately than I ever expected to as a man to his mother, she turned to me and said - inching her way with supreme heroic human effort out of the black and midnight subsoil maze of dementia - said carefully, enquiringly as if to establish a relevant fact, 'Are we related? ' And I knew not how to answer... Then after some few days I found a way to ease that pain: as I creamed and powdered the soreness under her still fine womanly breasts at a hundred and two years of age I said quietly to her uncomprehending memory, 'beloved stranger...' it wasn't a joke that she could share, but it helped a little.