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prisoner until Mr. Hugo arrived. His mustache barely bristled. He seemed disappointed in Howell.
    â€œYou can’t marry my little girl,” he said. “Not because you’re the super’s boy. I’ve always liked you, but I don’t fancy you as my son-in-law.” Howell was fifteen at the time. “You’ll never have an artistic career, and Naomi would die without culture.”
    Howell packed whatever little he had, got on a Greyhound, and had been wandering ever since. He’d had a hundred different jobs until he discovered his own particular way with women. He’d never been rich, but it didn’t really matter. He wanted no permanent attachments.
    Now he was back where he started, and his Yankee Stadium sat like a feeble, gutted ghost beside the new stadium. But what irked him wasn’t a green graveyard at the bottom of the hill. It was that other ghost out of his childhood.
    â€œNando, what is Miss Naomi doing in 6A?”
    â€œShe never left. She’s been sittin’ up there since the day she was born.”
    â€œEven when the crackheads ruled this part of the Bronx?”
    Nando sneered at him. “We never had crack at the Lorelei. Mr. Hugo still owns the building. He and Miss Naomi gotta eat.”
    â€œDid the Little Miss ever marry?”
    She had many suitors, Nando said. “She was a real ball breaker.” She had invitations to Italy, cruises along the Nile. The finest Manhattan chefs were chauffeured uptown to give her private cooking classes. But she had no one to test her new palette on except her own papa. And so she prepared candlelight suppers near the Lorelei’s wrap-around windows that looked out onto the ravaged heartland of the Bronx. And after all her tutors, and all the little tasks, she ended up in Mr. Hugo’s office, as some sort of executive secretary.
    She was ravishing in her tailored jackets and argyle socks. But a hardness appeared at the edge of her mouth. She looked at you with eyes that were like tin telescopes. Her voice turned shrill. She began to lose her hair. She herself managed several of her father’s apartment houses. She would show up in a hard hat, like some truculent crusader. Soon she was limping, and then she couldn’t walk at all. Specialists from Mount Sinai examined her for six months. She was confined to a wheelchair when she was forty. And she had sat and sat on that aluminum throne ever since.
    Mr. Hugo was ninety, but he still hopped around on the balls of his feet, like that fencer out of Harvard. He still went to work, still made deals, when he wasn’t gallivanting with Naomi in her wheelchair.

    H owell picked up whatever furniture he needed at a Bronx fire sale. No sheriff in Louisiana or spurned widow could ever have tracked him to the Lorelei. He lived directly below the Waldmans, in a kind of squirrel’s retreat. All his life he’d lived like a squirrel, moving from one retreat to the next.
    He found a note on his kitchen table. It was a dinner invitation for that very night, in a childish scrawl.
    Dearest Carl, Welcome Home
    Dinner at Seven
    (We Eat Early in the Bronx)
    Apartment 6A
    It wasn’t even signed, or perhaps “6A” was enough of a signature. He searched for a flower shop and a local winery and found none. He had to invade Manhattan in his Town Car for a white rose and a decent bottle of wine. He wore his best suit, with a paisley tie and a black-on-black shirt.
    Mr. Hugo met him at the door. He was also wearing a black shirt.
    â€œMy protégé,” he said.
    Howell liked to introduce himself with a bottle of Château Mouton Rothschild. The name intrigued him. He was certain it couldn’t be found in the Bronx.
    The little duchess sat on her aluminum throne at the dinner table, in the wondrous light of a candle. She had aged, certainly, and could have been puffed with cortisone, but she had on the same lipstick she wore at seven, the same red