After months of consulting with contractors, woodworkers, tile-makers and architects, he began the restoration. The vinyl siding was removed, revealing, beneath nine layers of peeling paint, the redwood planks of which the house was constructed. Mr. Donohue had chiseled off some of the decorative woodwork, but most of it he had simply covered over. Now Bill saw what had been there before: traces of a carved frieze of oak leaves and acorns, decorative shingles on the upper floor, scrolls upholding the second-floor bay window and a sunburst above it. The columns framing the porch had Corinthian capitals and the entrance archway was decorated with carved serpentine designs that still bore traces of gold leaf. When he beheld all this, once lost and now revealed, he wept.

Misunderstanding his tears, Mrs. Donohue said, “I told you she was a wreck. It would have been better to leave her be.”

“No,” he said, wiping his eyes on his sleeve. “She’s beautiful.”

“Then why are you crying?”

“Because under all that crap, the paint and the vinyl and everyone neglecting her for so long, her heart is still beating.”

“Houses don’t have hearts.”

“They do,” he insisted. “Hearts and souls.”

By then, Mrs. Donohue had come to love her “boys,” the Bills and the Waldos, who had brought her dying neighborhood back to life. They, responding to her kindness, confided their stories to her, stories of being discarded, rejected and despised for something over which they sincerely believed they had no control and which was part of them. She understood that Bill wasn’t talking about the house, he was talking about himself.

“Why, yes,” she said, patting his arm. “I see that now. She was just waiting for someone like you to appreciate her.”

Six months later, the renovations were done. He had had the body of the house painted a creamy yellow, the balcony and the fretwork white, other details in forest green and had gold leafed the Corinthian capitals, the oak and acorn frieze and the sunburst above the second-floor bay window. To him, it was like the prow of a glorious vessel cutting through the sea of time, a voyage that would continue long after he was gone. Mrs. Donohue had exacted his promise that he would leave the interior of her apartment alone but in the upper unit, where he now lived alone, walls had come down, windows had been enlarged and a skylight installed to flood the space with light. The old wood floors were sanded and refinished, the chimney retiled, the walls painted in the spectrum of browns that ran from cinnamon to sand, and furnished by an interior decorator in beige and ivory, glass, chrome and leather in compliance with Bill’s single directive: “Modern and nothing queeny.”