I don’t know why, I was never in one with her; their plenitude, their sober bustle, it seems to me, would have satisfied her. I think of her of course when I see somebody on the street who has Parkinson’s disease, and more and more often lately when I look in the mirror. Also in Union Station, Toronto, because the first time I was there I was with her, and my little sister. It was one summer during the War, we waited between trains; we were going home with her, with my mother, to her old home in the Ottawa Valley. A cousin she was planning to meet, for a between-trains visit, did not show up. “She probably couldn’t get away,” said my mother, sitting in a leather chair in the darkly panelled Ladies’ Lounge, which is now boarded up. “There was probably something to do that she couldn’t leave to anybody else.” This cousin was a legal secretary, and she worked for a senior partner in what my mother always called, in her categorical way, “the city’s leading law firm.”
