THE KIMONO.

One evening not long ago, while I was walking down a set of stairs at the New York Public Library, it occurred to me, as it had on occasions in the past, that there are people in the world who believe in an afterlife, and people who don't; and that Heaven and Hell--or whatever vague and nebulous realms exist (or don't) beyond our consciousness of them or our ability to comprehend their natures--may be populated, as it were, with the souls of those who, during their time among the living, fell into the first category, the category of people who believe.

My mother, Louanne Antrim, trusted in her afterlife to come. I am not certain that I can make, on my own behalf, unambivalent claims in relation to the transmigration of souls. Life after death? I do admit that late one night after my mother's father died, in 1995, I had a strong feeling that he had stopped to pay me a visit. For a few moments, I thought of him in his car, parked beside the curb outside my building in Brooklyn. The car, as I pictured it, was running--headlights and tail-lights on. It was October, and exhaust clouded behind the back bumper. Was my grandfather waiting for me to climb out of bed and come downstairs to say goodbye? Was he offering me a ride? I felt him near me. But I did not see him (or his car), and I did not converse with his spirit. What does it mean to feel--or to imagine feeling--the silent presence of someone who has died?

From time to time, I speak to my mother. I am in the habit of occasionally filling her in on my news, explaining some problem or other that has me bothered, or maybe setting her straight, once and for all, on one of our long-standing, unresolved disputes--one of the many white-hot conflicts that were rendered moot by her death, from lung cancer, almost four years ago, at the age of sixty-five.

Anyway, that is what I was doing, that evening not long ago, as I walked down the stairs at the Public Library: I was speaking (in a suitably quiet voice) to my dead mother. And it occurred to me, as I descended the massive Vermont marble stairwell at the northern end of the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, that it was, after all, I who was speaking to my dead mother, and not she speaking to me. In fact, I never, these days, experience anything that I could call a direct communication from her. She does not summon me, as they say, from the beyond, or make her presence in the ether palpable. I do not feel her beside me in a room, or turn suddenly and, glancing over my shoulder, catch a glimpse of--her, not there.

What I am getting at is this: If, when it comes to life after death, I am not (exactly) a believer, why am I talking? To whom do I think I am talking?

When I am talking to my mother--while at home, or out on the street, or in public buildings--there invariably comes a moment when I feel that I can imagine her hovering in the near-distance, usually at a modest height above the ground, just as angels in classical paintings float in the vicinity of the upper corners of their frames. And in the instant in which I imagine her this way--less as an apparition than as a memory, in which she is sometimes a young and attractive version of herself, though more often she is older, and sick, and close to her death--I see not only her face, with her mouth curving mischievously upward at the sides, creating dimples, as it did whenever she was about to laugh or smile; and her eyes, which typically wear, as they wore in life, a look of slight bewilderment, as if everything in the world were too much for her to take in; and her weak, Appalachian chin, the chin that I, too, inherited from our Scottish and English ancestors; and her hair, which, late in her life, looked as if it had been speedily cut with dull shears. I see these things, and then I see the rest of the picture. I see what she is wearing. I see, for one dreadful moment, my mother's clothes.

In particular, I see a garment that she made during the early nineteen-nineties. She was living in Miami, Florida, at the time, operating a small storefront boutique that was intended as a showcase for her own increasingly eccentric fashion designs, but which was dedicated mainly to routine tailoring and alteration jobs. She never got much business. The shop was in a run-down strip mall in an underpopulated district crisscrossed with freeway overpasses, not far from the Miami River. Because the shop was not--nor would it ever be--profitable, my mother relied on her father, who lived in North Carolina, to cover the rent.