Kappelman agreed with me politely—whether he believed me was another matter. He finished his grappa in a long swallow, winced as the raw alcohol hit his esophagus, and said he’d see me to my car. “Relatives are a trial, aren’t they?” he added sardonically.

He waited patiently while I looked around the car for any obvious signs of bombs, then shut the door for me with an old-fashioned courtesy at variance with his bedraggled clothes.

The temperature had dropped some ten degrees, just below freezing. After the dull fog of the last few weeks, the sharper air braced me. A few snowflakes drifted into the windshield, but the roads were clear and I had a quick run out the Eisenhower to York Road.

Ms. Chigwell was waiting for me at the door, her gaunt fierce face unchanged for the trying events of the last few days. She thanked me unsmilingly for making the trip, but I was beginning to know her and could tell her rough manner wasn’t meant to be as unfriendly as it appeared.

“I’m having a cup of tea. My brother keeps telling me it’s a sign of weakness, turning to stimulants when one feels troubled, but I think I’ve proved to be tougher than him. Would you like a cup?”

One serving of tea a day was all the stimulus I could handle. Declining as politely as I could, I followed her into the living room. It presented a scene of cozy domesticity worthy of Harriet Beecher Stowe. A fire burning cleanly in the grate refracted rich colors in the silver tea service on a low table nearby. Ms. Chigwell gestured me to one of the chintz armchairs facing the fireplace.

“In my day young ladies did not have lives of their own outside the household,” she said abruptly, pouring tea into a translucent china cup. “We were supposed to marry. My father was a doctor out here, when it was really a separate little town, not part of the city at all. I used to help him out. By the time I was sixteen I could’ve set a simple fracture, treated a lot of the fevers he saw. But when it came time for college and medical training, that was Curtis’s role. After Father died in 1939, Curtis tried keeping up the practice. He wasn’t much good at it, though; patients kept going elsewhere until finally he had to take a position at that plant.”

She looked at me fiercely. “I see you’re an active young woman, you do what you want, you don’t take no for an answer. I wish I’d had your backbone at your age, that’s all.”

“Yes,” I said gently. “But I had help. My mother ended up on her own in a strange country—she couldn’t speak the language; the only thing she could do was sing. She almost died as a result, so she swore I would never be as helpless and scared as she was. Believe me, that makes a big difference. You’re asking too much of yourself to think you should have done it all on your own.”