BOUT SIX YEARS AGO, I was invited to speak at the annual meeting of the Philpott Society, a group of people—a small group of people—devoted to improving the literary reputation of John R. Philpott, the author of Oysters and All About Them, a work that I have long regarded as a masterpiece of idiosyncratic organization and one that I eagerly acknowledge as one of the inflationary influences on my memoirs. 
    The honorarium from the Philpott Society paid our expenses and left us a little surplus, so Albertine and I spent a week in London.  Nearly every day we visited the discount ticket booth in Covent Garden and got theater tickets for the evening.
    One day, (I believe it was the day after we saw a performance of Jean Cocteau’s Les Parents Terribles), instead of waiting in the queue for twofers, we took a boat ride up the Thames to Kew and visited the Royal Botanic Gardens.  It was a gray, cold, drizzly day, not the best day for walking, but we do love a ramble, regardless of the weather, so we spent hours divagating through the drizzle, observing and chatting.  It was, until the time came for us to leave the gardens and return to London, one of the most pleasant days we have ever spent together, I think, a gem among gems.  Distant as we were from our usual life and its quotidian cares, we had nothing to do but enjoy each other’s company and see what there was to see.  The day did not require sunshine for its pleasure, nor could sunshine have improved the pleasure that it brought us.
    Inevitably, though, the time came when we had to cease our carefree strolling and find the shortest route back to the entrance.  We stopped where we were to consult a map of the gardens.  We were standing on a paved path in a parklike area, where we could see quite a long way across damp and verdant lawns.  Several other paths led here and there.  We began to study the map, but were immediately distracted from our purpose by the call of a bird—a mother’s urgent, anxious cry, if I may so anthropomorphize.  Beside us, no more than a few strides away, a long, sturdy branch stretched out from the trunk of an ancient tree, an old chestnut, I think.  In the nearly bare branches at its extremity there was a nest.  A mother bird, a tiny bird, some type of sparrow, I think, was nudging a tiny fledgling toward the edge of the nest, and as she urged it on she was—I can’t think of any way to put this but in human terms—shouting a few final instructions to it.  It her cries that had caught our attention.
    “Oh, my gosh,” said Albertine.  She turned toward me, we smiled at each other, and I put my arm around her shoulder and hugged her warmly.  We were thoroughly delighted with the little drama.  We shared the feeling that we were witnessing the defining moment in the fledgling’s life, a moment bursting with metaphor, a moment that I for one had previously known only as a metaphor, never having observed the moment when a fledgling left the nest and braved the hazards of the great world.  While we watched, the mother, still shouting advice, lowered her head and gave the fledgling a good shove.
    “She’s saying something like ‘Now, Charlie, remember what I taught you: carry a clean handkerchief and don’t talk to strangers,’” said Albertine.
    “To me it sounds more like ‘I’ve had enough of your lying around all day smoking and watching television, Charlie!  Get out and get a job, you bum!’” I said.
    The fledgling flopped over the edge of the nest and fell toward the ground.  I felt the hollowness—the cold, empty feeling of fear—that a parent feels when a child steps into the street.  The little bird seemed to have no idea at all about flying, no notion that it could fly.  The branch that held the nest was only about twenty feet above the ground, and the thought had just flitted through my mind that the little bird could probably survive such a fall into the longish grass when, suddenly, silently, swiftly, a crow, a very large crow, swept in from our right and snatched the bird in midair.
    “Oh, no,” said Albertine.  She gripped my hand.
    The crow made a sweeping turn and took the fledgling to another tree, not very far off, where there were other crows—not that we could see them, but we could hear them—cheering when the catcher in the sky brought dinner home.  Crowing, if you will, about their champion’s triumph.
    “Ain’t nature grand?” said Albertine.
    Incredibly—to us, who could see the fate that awaited any fledgling that left the safety of home—the mother bird began nudging the next little one toward the rim of the nest.
    “Oh, no,” I said.  We couldn’t turn away.  It was a fascinating sight.
    The bird pushed the second fledgling over the edge, and like the first it plunged toward the grass.  Again, the crow swept in, snatched the hapless creature, and carried it back to its own nest.
    We watched, dumbstruck, horrified, while the mother pushed two more fledglings out.  The crow got them both.
    “I can’t take this anymore,” said Albertine.  She put her arm through mine and we began making our way out of the gardens.  Our way took us toward the crows’ tree, and as we passed the crow flew right over our heads, on its way to snatch another falling fledgling.  When it had returned to its nest again, we could hear the fading cries of the mother bird, but it seemed to me that there was a different quality to the cry now, and I supposed that all her offspring must be gone.
    So did Albertine.  “I know what she’s saying now,” she said.  “She’s asking, ‘What fucking asshole decided that this is the way life ought to be?’”

FOUR DAYS AGO, while I was still working on the preceding chapter, before I had found a pantomime for my father to perform when he killed Patti’s idea, I quit work early to take Albertine to lunch.
    While she was trying to decide what to wear, she asked me to step out onto the balcony and bring her a firsthand report on the state of the weather.  I stepped onto the balcony, looked to the sky, estimated the temperature, and then looked down to the street to see how lightly or snugly people were dressed.  I saw that the area in front of our building was cordoned off by yellow police tape.  A small crowd of spectators had lined up along the tape, and a few cops were inside the cordoned area.  A body was sprawled face down on the sidewalk directly below me.  Some people were looking at the body.  Others were looking up in my direction.  Some of those looking up were pointing, and after a moment I realized that they were pointing to some floor above ours.  I went back inside.
    “What’s it like?” Albertine asked.
    “It’s chilly,” I said, “and there’s a body on the sidewalk below us.”
    “What?”
    “I think that at some time earlier in the day, while we were reading the paper, someone on a floor above ours must have fallen, jumped, or been pushed from a balcony or window.  He—at least I think it’s ‘he’—is lying on the pavement—”
    “Dead?”
    “It looks that way to me.”
    She went out onto the balcony and looked down.  After a while, she came back in, shaking her head.
    We dressed in silence, and we left the building and walked through the crowd in silence, but in the subway station, when we were standing on the platform, waiting for the train, Albertine said, “He must have fallen right past our balcony.”
    “While we were reading the paper,” I repeated.
    We looked at each other and burst out laughing.  We began making wisecracks about death, about suicide by lethal leap.  We were shaken, and we were frightened.  We were laughing at the edge of the abyss, trying to be brave, trying to pretend that death held no terrors for us, as if we did not expect to meet the fate that all fledglings eventually must.  Nothing we said was funny enough to be worth recording here.  When we came up out of the subway, we sobered up, and neither of us said a word about the dead man during our lunch (chicken for Albertine and swordfish paillard for me).  Then, after we had left the warmth of Café des Artistes, with her arm through mine, huddling against me in the cold January wind on Central Park West, Albertine asked, “Do you remember the fledglings in Kew Gardens?”
    “I’ve been thinking about them all afternoon,” I admitted.

THAT NIGHT, while we were lying in bed reading, at about midnight, when the man who lives directly above us began throwing his furniture around, as he seems to do every night at that time, Albertine gesticulated toward the ceiling and said, “Of course, he wouldn’t be the one to jump.”