“This is One, Pooky.”

The others didn’t bother to argue. They entered laboriously, most of them clinging to various surfaces for support. Noah and Delia came last. The door closed behind them, and they began rising. Meanwhile everyone beamed at Noah-even Pooky, who seemed unfazed that they were not, in fact, going down. At the second floor, a woman with a shopping bag got off. At the third floor, Noah said, “This is us,” and he and Delia stepped into a long corridor. Several women followed, with metallic clanking sounds and a whirring of wheels. Pooky, however, remained on board, gazing contentedly straight ahead as the elevator door slid shut.

“She rides up and down all day sometimes,” Noah told Delia.

Nothing here seemed any different from a standard apartment building, except for the handrails that ran along both walls. Blond flush doors appeared at intervals, each with a peephole at eye level. Noah stopped at the fourth door on the right. Nathaniel A. Moffat, Photographer, a business card read, with a Cambridge, Maryland, street address crossed out. When Noah pressed the doorbell, a single golden note sounded from within.

“Is that my favorite grandson?” a man shouted.

“Yes, it is,” Noah called back.

“It’s his only grandson,” he told Delia with a giggle.

The door opened, but instead of the old man Delia had expected, a short, chunky woman stood smiling at them. She could not have been out of her thirties. She had a round apricot of a face and pink-tinted curls, and she wore an orange sweater-dress with a keyhole neckline. Her shoes were orange too-tiny, open-toed pumps, as Delia found when she checked, reflexively, for nurse shoes to explain the woman’s presence. “Hi! I’m Binky,” she told Delia. “Hey there, Noah. Come on in.”

The living room they entered must have been as modern as the rest of the building, but Delia couldn’t see beyond the furniture, which was dark and tangled, ornate, ponderously antique. Also, there was far too much of it, set far too close together, as if it had once filled several larger rooms. For a moment Delia had trouble locating Noah’s grandfather. He was rising from the depths of a maroon velvet chair with viny arms. A four-pronged metal cane stood next to him, but he moved forward on his own to shake her hand. “You’re Delia,” he said. “I’m Nat.”

He was one of those men who look better old, probably, than they ever did young-clipped white beard, ruddy face, and a lean, energetic body. He wore a tweed sports coat and gray trousers. His handshake was muscular and brisk.

“Thank you for coming,” he told her. “I wanted to get a look at this person my grandson’s so taken with.”

“Well, thank you for inviting me.”

“Won’t you give Binky your coat?”

Delia was about to tell him she would keep her coat, she could only stay a second; but then she saw that the table in front of the couch was laid for tea. There were plates of cakes, four china cups and saucers, and a teapot already steeping in a swaddling of ivory linen. Thank goodness Noah had remembered she was invited.

She handed her coat to Binky and then sat where Nat indicated, at one end of the couch. Nat reclaimed his chair, and Noah took a seat in the little rocker next to him. Binky, when she returned from the coat closet, settled on the other end of the couch and bent forward to unwrap the teapot.

“Noah always likes mint instead of plain,” she told Delia. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all.”

Noah had this tea party every time he came here, then? Delia had imagined he was, oh, playing checkers or something. She looked over at his grandfather, who nodded gravely.

“Noah’s been taking tea with me since the days when he drank from a training mug,” he told her. “He’s the only boy in the family! We men have to stick together.”

Binky handed Delia her cup and said, “So how do you like keeping house for Noah’s father, Delia?”

“Oh, very much,” Delia said.

“Joel’s a good man,” Nat said placidly. “I make it a point not to choose sides in my daughters’ domestic disputes,” he told Delia. “Back when they were wee little girls, I swore an oath to myself I would approve of whoever they married.”

Enough of a pause hung after his words so that Delia felt pushed to ask, “And do you?”

“Oh, absolutely,” he said. His chuckle, filtered through his beard, had a wheezy sound. “I love my sons-in-law to death! And they think I’m just wonderful.”

“Well, you are wonderful,” Binky told him staunchly.

He bowed from the waist. “Thank you, madam.”

“Maybe not quite as wonderful as they imagine, mind you…”

He grimaced at her, and she gave Delia a mischievous wink.

Was this Binky a paid companion? Was she one of the daughters? But her merry face bore no resemblance to Nat’s. And she didn’t seem all that connected to his grandson. “Have some butter,” she was telling Noah, not noticing he had nothing to put it on.

“Have some low-cholesterol vegetable-oil spread,” Nat corrected her. “First I wolf down my I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter,” he told Delia, “and then I go wash my hair in Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific.”

Delia found this remark mystifying, but Noah tittered. His grandfather glanced over at him; his lips twitched as if he were trying not to smile. Then he turned back to Delia. “You’re from Baltimore, I hear.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Got family there?”

“Some.”

He raised his eyebrows, but she offered nothing further.

“Ninety percent of the people in this building come from Baltimore,” he said finally.

“They do?”

“Rich folks, retiring to the Eastern Shore. Roland Park and Guilford folks.”

Delia kept her face blank, giving no sign she had ever heard of Roland Park or Guilford.

“You surely don’t suppose all those chichi ladies are locals,” he said. “Lord, no. I wouldn’t be here myself if I hadn’t married a Murray. That’s Murray as in Murray Crab Spice. You think a two-bit, hole-in-the-wall photographer could afford these exorbitant prices?”

“They’re going to raise the rates again in July, I hear,” Binky told him.

Delia was looking around the room. The mention of photography had alerted her to the pictures hanging everywhere-large black-and-white photos, professionally framed. “Are these your work?” she asked him.

“These? If only.”

He stood, this time reaching for his cane. “These were taken by the masters,” he said, stumping over to a study of a voluptuous green pepper. “Edward Weston, Margaret Bourke-White…” He pivoted to inspect the picture at his left-factory chimneys, lined up like notes of music. “Me, I photographed brides,” he said. “Forty-two years of brides. Few golden-anniversary couples thrown in from time to time. Then I started getting my, what I call, flashbacks.” He gave a downward jab with his beard. Delia thought at first he was indicating the rug. “Old boyhood polio came bouncing back on me,” he said. “Thelma-that was my wife-she’d passed on by then, but she had put our names on the waiting list when they first drew up the plans for Senior City. Just why, I couldn’t tell you, since she refused to budge from our big old house long after the girls were grown and gone. She always said, what if they wanted to come back for any reason? And come back they did, you know they did: all four of them rushing home at every minor crisis, just because of the very fact they had a home to rush to, if you want my honest opinion. ‘Lord God, Thel,’ I told her, ‘we can’t be rearing those girls for all time! Look at how cats do,’ I told her. ‘Raise up their kittens, wean them, don’t know who the hell they are when they meet them in the alley a few months later. You think humans should be any different?’”

“Well, of course they should!” Binky protested, and she and Delia exchanged a smile.

But Nat hissed derisively behind his beard. “Hogwash,” he told Noah. Noah merely licked a dab of frosting from his thumb. “In any event,” Nat said, “I started getting these flashbacks. Times the one leg would clean give out on me, along about the end of day. Reached the point where I barely made it up the stairs some nights; I knew I couldn’t go on living where I was. So I phoned the people here and said, ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘didn’t my wife put our names on your waiting list once upon a time?’ And that’s how I happened to end up in Senior City. Senior City: God. Abominable name.”