The hallway smelled of old food and wet paper. Illegible graffiti had been spray-painted big and black across the mailboxes. A yellow baby carriage without wheels was pushed against a wall. The elevator didn’t work.

“What floor does she live on?”

“Third, but she never goes out. Sometimes I wonder how many old people are prisoners in their apartments in this city. Too scared, or they can’t climb the stairs. There’s got to be a lot of them.”

We climbed in silence. I noticed here and there signs of the onetime beauty of the building. The banister was bird’s-eye maple, the ironwork beneath it intricate and pretty. The stairs were made of dark green stone with swirls of black inside, like a frozen cyclone.

There was lots of noise everywhere. Music, people talking, the general white noise from many television sets going full blast. It made me appreciate my own building, where the neighbors were unfriendly but quiet.

On reaching the third floor, we walked down a long hall to the end. Unlike the others, which looked like the police had periodically beaten them in, Frances Hatch’s oak door was immaculately preserved. There was a small brass plaque with her name engraved on it. It had recently been polished. Clayton rang the bell. We waited quite a while.

The door opened and I think both of us took a step back in surprise. A short bald man with a moon-round face and no chin, dressed in a dark suit, black tie, and white shirt stood there. His face said seventy or eighty, but he stood so straight that he could have been younger.

“Yes?”

“I’m Clayton Blanchard. Ms. Hatch is expecting me?”

“Come along.”

The man turned and walked stiffly back into the apartment, as if rehearsing for the march of the tin soldiers. I looked at Clayton. “I thought you said she only spoke to women?”

Before he had a chance to reply, the soldier called out, “Are you coming?” We scurried in.

I didn’t have a chance to look at anything, but my nose noticed how good it smelled in there. “What’s that smell?”

“Apples?”

“In here, please.”

The man’s voice was so commanding that I felt I was back in high school, being summoned to the principal’s office.

I saw the light before entering the living room. It was blinding and came through the door in a white flood. We walked in and I was in love before I knew it. Frances Hatch’s living room was full of Persian rugs, rare Bauhaus furniture, and the largest cat I had ever seen. The rugs were all varying shades of red—russet, cerise, ruby. Which mixed brilliantly with the stark chrome furniture. It softened the starkness but also made individual pieces stand out in their pure simplicity, almost as if they hovered over the varied redness below. High windows went all the way down the room, taking in as much light as the day had. On the walls were a large number of photographs and paintings. I didn’t have a chance to look at them before another imperious voice called out, “Over here, I’m here.”

As if it knew what she had said, the cat stood up, stretched languorously, and walked over to where Frances Hatch was sitting.

It stood looking up at her, tail swishing.

“How are you, Clayton? Come over here so I can see you.” He walked to her chair and took the large bony hand she held out.

“Cold. Your hands are always cold, Clayton.”

“It runs in my family.”

“Well, cold hands, warm heart. Who have you brought with you?”

He gestured for me to come over. “Frances, this is my friend Miranda Romanac.”

“Hello Miranda. You’ll have to come close because I can barely see. Are you pretty?”

“Hello. I’m passable.”

“I was always ugly, so there was never any question about that. Ugly people have to work harder to get the world’s attention. You have to prove you’re worth listening to. Did you meet Irvin?”

I looked at the man with the big voice.

“Irvin Edelstein, these are my friends Clayton and Miranda. Sit down. I can see you better now. Yes. You do have red hair! I thought so. Very nice. I love red. Have you noticed my rugs?”

“I did. I love the way you’ve done this room.”

“Thank you. It’s my magic carpet. When I’m in here I feel just a little bit above the earth. So you’re a friend of Clayton. That’s a good sign. What else do you do?”

“I’m a bookseller too.”

“Perfect! Because that’s what I want to talk about today. Irvin is here to advise me on what I should do. I have very valuable things, Miranda. Do you know why I’ve decided to sell them? Because all my life I’ve wanted to be rich. In one month I’ll be a hundred. I think it would be very nice to be rich at a hundred.”

“What will you do with the money?” It was a rude question to ask, especially after having just been introduced, but I liked Frances already and sensed she had a good sense of humor.

“What will I do? Buy a red Cadillac convertible and drive around, picking up men. God, how long has it been since I was with a man? You know, when you’re my age, you think about who you were all those years. If you’re lucky, you grow very fond of that person. The men I knew were silly most of the time, but they had nerve. Sometimes they even had the kind of guts you usually only dream of. Guts are what matters, Miranda. That’s what Kazantzakis told me. God gave us courage but it is dangerous music to listen to. That man had no fear. Do you know who his hero was? Blondin. The greatest tightrope walker who ever lived. He walked across a rope over Niagara Falls and halfway there stopped to cook and eat an omelette.”

“Clayton said you lived enough for three normal lives.”

“I did, but that was because I was ugly and had something to prove. I was a great lover and sometimes I had courage. I tried to tell the truth when it was important. Those are the things I’m proud of. Someone wanted me to write my autobiography, but it’s my life. I don’t want to share it with people who care less about it than I do. Anyway, by then I was too old to remember if I was telling the truth about everything, and that’s very important. But Irvin gave me this little gizmo and it’s a great comfort.” She reached into her lap and held up a small tape recorder. “I sit here and feel the magic carpets under my feet and the light through the window is warm and when an especially nice memory comes, all I have to do is press this button. I tell the machine something I haven’t remembered for a long time.

“Just this morning, right before you arrived, I was thinking about a picnic I had with the Hemingways at Auteuil. Lewis Gallantiere, Hemingway, and mad Harry Crosby. Why those two men ever got along was beyond me, but it was a lovely day. We ate Westphalian ham and Harry lost three thousand francs on the horses.”

Amazed, I looked at Clayton and silently mouthed, “Hemingway?”

“I think of Hemingway a lot. You know, people never stop talking about him and Giacometti, but they always describe them in such distorted, frenzied ways. People want to believe they were wild and dissolute because it fits a romantic image. But Gallantiere said something before he died that must be remembered: All the great artists put in a good day’s work every day of their lives when we were all living in Paris. People want to think those books and paintings arrived out of the ether, whole cloth. But what I remember most is how hard they worked. Giacometti? He would have murdered you if you came to his studio while he was working.”

Clayton gave me many wonderful things over the years, but the introduction to Frances Hatch was the most important. I will remember that first morning with her as long as I live. Afterwards we met frequently, both to settle the business of her collection and because I loved being in that room with her and her crowded memories. In college I’d read a poem by Whitman about an old man in a boat, fishing. He has lived a full life, but is tired now and waiting peacefully to die. Until then, he’s content to sit and fish and remember.