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to be reckoned with, but Pauline found that his performances varied considerably. (She had found him notably lacking in James Ivory’s A Room with a View.) In My Left Foot, the Irish writer-director Jim Sheridan’s life story of Christy Brown, an Irishman born with cerebral palsy who learned to paint with his foot and became an enormously successful artist, writer, and rounder—Day-Lewis won her over. She opened her review with a detailed account of the scene in the picture in which Brown is devastated by the announcement of his beloved teacher (Fiona Shaw) that she is going to marry someone else, which she described as perhaps “the most emotionally wrenching scene I’ve ever experienced at the movies. The greatness of Day-Lewis’s performance is that he pulls you inside Christy Brown’s frustration and rage (and his bottomless thirst). There’s nothing soft or maudlin about this movie’s view of Christy.” She found Day-Lewis possessed of the sensual, imaginative daring that she loved in Laurence Olivier, and she compared his performance with Olivier’s as Richard III. Day-Lewis won the New York Film Critics Circle Best Actor prize for My Left Foot, and Pauline was seated next to him at the awards presentation, held at the Algonquin Hotel. He was terribly shy, but Pauline worked hard to bring him out, patting him on the hand and asking him questions until he was smiling and quite animated.

In August, Pauline attended a family reunion at her sister Anne’s house in Berkeley. She continued to have great affection for Anne, who had recently retired from Lowell High School after a long and distinguished teaching career there. The years had improved the relationship between her and Rose somewhat, but they were still anything but close.

While in Berkeley, Pauline connected with her old friend from the Cinema Guild days, Linda Allen. Pauline struck Allen as being a little heavier than she had remembered, with slightly hunched shoulders and noticeably less energy. But, as she wrote in an unpublished essay about Pauline, “The wide eyes still miss nothing.” It was Gina who had changed more, Allen thought: she looked “surprisingly unlike herself as a girl, especially with her spacious, curved, pure-looking forehead covered with bangs.... Very different from the fragile, quiet dancer and child artist; still an artist, though, and definitely shy.”

There was a reason that Pauline seemed less robust to Allen. For some time she had been feeling increasingly fatigued and had had a great deal of trouble keeping her balance, especially when she was walking against a strong wind. In New York she had fallen on the street a number of times, breaking her nose more than once. The tremor in her hands had intensified over the years, but whenever she consulted her doctors they had assured her it was nothing more than a benign tremor—no cause for alarm. Friends were slow to notice her symptoms, partly because she had always had a certain fluttery, birdlike quality, especially when she was having an intense reaction to something. By late 1989 she realized she could no longer maintain the illusion that there was nothing seriously wrong with her: Every instinct told her otherwise.

She consulted another doctor. This time, she mentioned that her tremor would sometimes surface in one hand, sometimes in the other. The doctor, concerned, sent her to a neurologist, whose tests confirmed what she had feared for some time: She had Parkinson’s disease. Her neurologist explained to her that unlike other degenerative conditions that attack the central nervous system, such as Lou Gehrig’s, Parkinson’s was often quite responsive to treatment—particularly in the case of elder onset—and that she might be able to manage a more or less normal life for a number of years. Still, the news was a terrible blow to her. Until she had reached her sixties, she had had few health concerns. To find herself suddenly forced to focus on her own fragile condition was an exceedingly difficult thing for a woman who had often shot through life feeling invincible.

In October 1989 Pauline