George Gershwin's Self-Portrait in the Mirror with My Mother

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.

The photograph is the only picture on the pale green walls in my mother's dressing room, and I go in there just to look at it, sometimes dragging over the little upholstered seat that tucks under her built-in dressing table, so I can climb up and stand eye to eye with the girl in the picture. It is like looking in a mirror.

Surely this cozy chamber, with its four mirrored closet doors, one of which conceals a built-in cabinet with many shallow, black velvet-lined drawers, like all the gracious features in our house, was fashioned for other, much fancier people. A joint gift from my mother's father and aunt, neither of whom trust my father to provide a home or much else for his family, it is a large house, with many rooms. Over time, some of these rooms will fill with piles of books and stacks of my father's movie scripts and collapsing heaps of papers and unopened mail, until the doors to those rooms will barely open. From the beginning, this grand brick Dutch Colonial house in the heart of Forest Hills Gardens is too much for my hapless and indifferent housekeeper of a mother.1 The elegant features in our house include a laundry chute hidden behind little spring-hinged doors on each floor. There are bell pushes in every room, though only a few of them still work, activating a feeble clanging in the basement laundry room, where only