BY FOUR fifty, I was the unhappiest adult male in the New York metropolitan area who was not locked in solitary confinement. If I was going to flush a grand down the toilet, didn’t I deserve the privilege of seeing it sucked into the sewer? Dinner was no consolation. A meal fit for a nursing home: poached chicken, diced carrots, and baked potatoes. The conversation was as dull as the food. The Riverdale-Yonkers Society for Ethical Culture meetinghouse was being renovated; Mrs. Rising was chairing the kitchen committee; and we were treated to a synopsis of her agony over the project.

“It’s been nightmarish,” she said to Glenna. “I’m dreading this week. I have to decide on the flooring. Your father’s been so busy with patients in the afternoons he can’t help, and his headaches have been keeping him in bed mornings.”

Glenna, who had shown a courteous, if somewhat aloof, interest in her mother’s tale of woe, said to her father with genuine concern, “You didn’t tell me you were still having headaches. Let me make an appointment for you to be seen by neurology. I passed Gardner in the hall Tuesday, and he asked for you.”

“It’s nothing,” Dr. Rising said. “If they keep up, I’ll phone Gardner myself.”

Mrs. Rising said to her daughter, “If you do have a chance, I could use your help with the flooring.”

“I’d like to, Mother, but I’m in my surgery rotation.”

From Mrs. Rising’s frown, she apparently thought her daughter was being evasive, but Glenna wasn’t using surgery as an excuse. It was a monster. At the hospital for pre-op rounds by 6:00 a.m., she didn’t complete her post-op rounds until after her patients had eaten dinner.

Dr. Rising broke the uncomfortable silence by saying to me, “Glenna tells us you’re writing short stories. You know my wife majored in Russian literature at Wellesley.”

“I’m partial to Gogol,” Mrs. Rising said.

“I’m not quite in his league,” I said, and listened to her discourse, with astonishing acuity, on Gogol’s incandescent realism, all the while thinking that her preference for Russian authors was fitting since she had the personality of Nikita Khrushchev, and you knew that she wouldn’t be above banging one of her Courrèges boots on the table if you disagreed with her.

As Mrs. Rising threw her engine into idle to serve dessert—a real treat, canned pears and graham crackers—I found myself, against my will, feeling sad for her. Underneath her frown I’d seen that her daughter’s refusal had hurt her, and not for the first time. Mrs. Rising was cruel, but she was also bored, and it was impossible to know if the boredom gave rise to the cruelty. I mean, what was a middle-aged woman, who had studied Russian literature at Wellesley, doing dolled up like a go-go girl and stewing over a remodeled kitchen as if she had been directed to redecorate the Kremlin?

And you had to admire Mrs. Rising’s persistence. As we drank our coffee, she tried to interest Glenna by describing the wallpaper she’d chosen for the meetinghouse kitchen—a white background brightened by sprays of tulips and daffodils. Glenna yawned, twice, and Dr. Rising looked reproachfully at his daughter, as though signaling her that they must hear out these childish preoccupations. I could only guess at how Mrs. Rising must have resented Glenna’s freedom to be a doctor and not to be interested in wallpaper.