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walked to her home on Ninety-sixth Street, and I took her to her bare apartment, where we shared another glass of wine, served in those infamous goblets. We talked, and I learned a good deal about her. Her maiden name was Mary Elizabeth White. Until she went to college, she had been a student at a convent school, the Academy of the Sacred Heart, after which she earned her M.A. From St. Mary’s in South Bend, Indiana. For eight years after that, she had worked at St. Mary’s as an instructor in pastel painting. There were some relationships with various men, but nothing serious until in one of those odd accidents of life, she met Sedge Hopper. He was a large, handsome man, a great athlete with a shock of blond hair. He was dominating and used to getting what he wanted, and he worked as an investment banker, a specialist in mergers and acquisitions. I asked her whether his full name was William Sedgwick Hopper, and while she was curious to know why I asked, I brushed it off with a passing word about seeing it in the papers. Evidently she knew little more about the case than I did. “Yes,” she said, “his name is William Sedgwick Hopper, but everyone called him Sedge. No one ever called him Bill or Billy.
    â€œHe thought I was beautiful—or said that he thought that. Perhaps I was pretty—prettier than I am now—but not beautiful. He said that he wanted someone unspoiled. He seemed to think that my being a student at Sacred Heart and then at St. Mary’s made me into some kind of a saint. I wasn’t in love with him, but my mother had begun to despair of my ever marrying, and I suppose the fact that he came from a good family, as she put it, and was a Catholic, meant a lot to her. The strange thing was that he married anyone, because he did not like women. Every woman was to him a cunt or a whore. He had been married before, but he had the marriage annulled. He boasted that it cost him ten thousand dollars. He wanted children, and I didn’t become pregnant. He never forgave me for that. The first time he hit me—”
    She began to cry, and I stopped her. “That’s enough for tonight, Elizabeth. We’ll talk about it another time—if you want to talk about it.”
    â€œI’m sorry. I mustn’t dump on you like this. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. I never told anyone else—”
    â€œMy mother used to say, ‘A sorrow shared is but half a trouble, though a joy that is shared is a joy made double.’ That’s kind of old-fashioned, and God help you if I ever make you listen to my woes.”
    â€œI don’t know why—”
    â€œNo,” I said firmly. “Don’t finish the thought. I’m glad you saw the two priests in Zabar’s. The ecumenism of food must never be underrated. My father, when we visited New York from Oneonta, upstate, used to take my mother to Dinty Moore’s, where their specialties were corned beef and gefilte fish. My mother was critical of the gefilte fish, and she gave them her own recipe, which they embraced and which brought them fame among the Jewish epicures. I will see you tomorrow. Do you remember my address?” I gave her my card, just to be sure.
    She was laughing. She was actually laughing. Her face changed, and suddenly she threw her arms around me and kissed me.
    I took a cab home, stuffed a pipe, and sat down in my armchair for a conversation with myself, something like: “My aged and foolish Ike—what in hell’s name are you getting yourself into? You are living here alone, perfectly content—well, if not content, reasonable and thereby with endurable misery—and you can sit here in the living room, where you were never permitted to smoke, and fill the air with noxious fumes and no one gives a damn; and if you want to stay in bed for half a day, you can do that, too; and you are entangling yourself with a broken, brutalized woman, and