“Whatever you give your daughter you’ll end up taking back, times two. Often you won’t even know you’re doing it, but she will. As with everyone else in your life, you’ll ruin things that are fundamental to her well-being. You’ll ruin her dreams, sabotage her feelings of self-importance. You’ll suck her dry. When she’s your age, she’ll tell cynical, embittered stories about her mother the bitch. She’ll finish by saying she loves you of course, but the less she sees you, the better.

“As an adult, she’ll believe the articles in women’s magazines and think she’s missing everything. She’ll wear too much jewelry and her voice will get louder over the years as she realizes fewer and fewer people listen to what she says.

“Look around you. Watch how people function and interact with one another. You’ll see this is going on everywhere all the time. People devour each other in the name of love, or family or country. But that’s an excuse; they’re just hungry and want to be fed. Read their faces, the newspapers, read what it says on their T-shirts! ‘I think you’re mistaking me for someone who gives a shit.’ ‘My parents went to London but all they brought me back was this lousy T-shirt.’ ‘So many women, so little time.’ ‘Whoever dies with the most toys, wins.’ They’re supposed to be funny, witty, and postmodern, Miranda. But the truth is they’re only stating a fact: Me. I come first. Get out of my way.”

“So vampires are everywhere?”

“Everywhere. They just don’t have fangs or sleep in coffins.”

“What will happen if I give the baby my immortality? Will she live a happy life?”

“There’s no guarantee. She will be a vampire. But you’ll be giving her an enormous chance because, if nothing else, she would have all those lives. In a way, that’s happiness. Very few of our kind have been willing to make that sacrifice. Even when we find the love of our life, we refuse to give them our immortality.”

I told her about the cab ride from Crane’s View and seeing my life on screen at the drive-in theater.

“You’re doing that to yourself. It’s the immortal part of you with the unbelievable powers. The part that was able to free James Stillman. The part that was outside this building staring in the last time you were here. It knows you must decide now and it’s afraid you’ll make the wrong choice.”

“But why show me that scene? Hugh’s dead. I can’t do anything about that.”

“I don’t know. But those kinds of bizarre things will continue until you choose. Your magical side can be very persuasive, believe me.”

“Frances, that music is driving me crazy. Can you call down to the front desk and ask them to turn it off?”

She held up a finger for me to be quiet. The pastel-colored, ethereal music filled the room. Saint-Saens, Berlioz, Delius—it could have been composed by any of them. It perfectly complemented the brilliant mass and whirl of the flowers.

I watched her face. It remained expressionless most of the time, but now and then she flinched slightly or gave a faint smile.

“It reminds me of things I’ve forgotten and what I’m going to lose when I die. ‘Only in hell is memory exact.’ I suppose this is how my trip to hell begins. We forget so much over a lifetime. So many brilliant moments and stories. How could we forget, Miranda? Why do we let them go without a struggle? They make us, deepen us; they define who we are. But we live these moments and forget them. We mislay them like a set of keys. How is it possible to be so sloppy with our own life?

“Before you came in, for the first time in fifty years I remembered an October afternoon I spent in Vienna with Shumda. It was right after we’d arrived there, and he hadn’t started performing yet. We took a tram to the last stop in Grinzing, then walked up through the vineyards to the Wienerwald and Cobenzl. There’s a magnificent view from there down over the whole city.

“On the way home, we stopped at a Heurigen and had a lunch of fried chicken and new white wine. Shumda loved to talk. Almost nothing could stop him once he got going. But in the middle of our meal, right in the middle of taking a bite of chicken, he saw something behind me and absolutely froze. I’d never seen anything like it. I spun around to see what it was, but there was nothing there but two nondescript men sitting at a table drinking wine. Shumda wiped his hands carefully on a handkerchief, then reached into his backpack and took out the book he had been reading the whole summer. It was Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which had just been published.

“He asked how he looked. I said ‘Fine, what’s the matter with you?’ He bit his lip and it was plain he was extremely nervous about something. Shumda was never nervous. He was the most self-confident person I’ve ever known. He took the book, stood up, and walked across the courtyard to the two men. As he approached, a chow chow came out from under the table and stared at him. Obviously it was protecting the men, and for a moment I thought it was going to bite him. But it was on a leash, and one of them reined it in close.

Shumda looked at the dog and then the men. He held up the book, but instead of speaking, he made the dog talk for him. It said, ‘Dr. Freud, you have written a masterpiece. I’m in your debt.’ Freud, who wasn’t famous for his sense of humor, was bewildered. He kind of harrumphed a bit, said thank you, looked suspiciously at his dog, and finally asked Shumda if he was a performer. Shumda said yes very meekly and invited him to his show when it opened at the Ronacher Theater. Freud tried to smile and be gracious but he really didn’t know what to do.

“We left the Heurigen before they did. As we were walking out, Freud and I made eye contact. Passing their table I leaned over the great doktor, whom I didn’t know from the man in the moon, and said, ‘You really should come to his show. He’s a genius.’ I often wondered if he was there the night you fell.”

“You said you forgot things, Frances. Sounds like you remember very well.”

“I’m remembering everything now. The music has been doing that to me. It brings back Freud’s smell when I bent over to talk to him. The yellowness of the chestnuts on the ground in the courtyard of that Heurigen. They fell from the trees in spiky shells. You peeled, them open and inside was a shiny brown chestnut. People collected them and fed them to the animals at the Schonbrunn zoo.”

“Do you like remembering these things? You sound so sad.”

“Well, it is sad watching your house burn down. When there’s nothing you can do about it, you have to stand and watch. You remember the things inside you’re losing. It’s hard, but it reminds me of how rich my life was. God, I had a good one.”

“But I’m looking at your face, Frances. You’re not remembering only good things, are you?”

She wouldn’t answer.

Is it better to remember all we’ve lost? Especially when we know it’s gone forever? And what about the bad memories? The bad times, bad people, bad choices, bad plans—should we be reminded of them?

I didn’t think so, especially not in Frances’s case. In her retelling, even her good memories, the Freud stories and their like, trailed an aroma of melancholy and loss that stank. Even in a room filled with the most exotic flowers.

“I’ll go now. I’m going back to Crane’s View.”

She closed her eyes and nodded. She knew I had no other choice. “If you leave here tonight, you can’t come back until after you’ve decided. You won’t be protected.”

“I don’t want to be protected.” I bent over and kissed the old woman high on her forehead. She smelled of talcum powder. “Thank you for everything, Frances. Even after all that’s happened, I still love you very much.”

“And I love you. The one thing I always regretted was not having a child. A daughter. Now, having known you, I know what it would have been like and I regret it even more.”