I never found out just why Miss O’Hara hated the Sullivans with such a passion. Perhaps it was because they were so unkempt and she was so superciliously clean. Perhaps it was because Miss O’Hara had a great deal of Irish pride and they were stereotyped Irish. Perhaps it was because she merely had no reason to like them. She was a fanatic about cleanliness and put out her little bit of garbage wrapped very neatly in yesterday’s Christian Science Monitor and tied in a bow with a fresh piece of string. Collecting all those little neat packages, I would wonder where she got the string and imagined her at night picking meat-market locks with a hairpin and hobbling off with yards and yards of white cord concealed under the gray sweater she always wore. I could even imagine her back in her little apartment chuckling and rolling the cord into a great white ball by candlelight. Then she would stash it away in her breadbox. Miss O’Hara kept her door slightly open until late at night, and I suspected that she heard everything that went on in the building. I had the feeling that I should never dare to make love with gusto for fear that she would overhear and write down all my happy-time phrases, to be maliciously recounted to me if she were ever provoked.

She had been in the building longer than Sullivan, and I suppose that her greatest ambition in life was to outlive him and then attend his wake with a knitting ball and needles. She had been trying to get him fired for twenty-five years or so and did not know when to quit. On summer nights when I painfully mopped the second floor, she would offer me root beer, apples, or cupcakes while trying to pump me for evidence against him.

“He’s just a filthy old man, Robert,” she would declare in a little-old-lady whisper. “And don’t think you have to clean up those dirty old butts of his. Just report him to the Company.”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” I would tell her, gulping the root beer as fast as possible.

“Well, they’re both a couple of lushes, if you ask me. They haven’t been sober a day in twenty-five years.”

“Well, she’s sick too, you know.”

“Ha!” She would throw up her hands in disgust. “She’s only sick when he doesn’t give her the booze.”

I fought to keep down a burp. “How long have you been here?”

She motioned for me to step out of the hall and into her dark apartment. “Don’t tell him”—she nodded toward Sullivan’s door—“but I’ve been here for thirty-four years.” She waited for me to be taken aback. Then she added: “And it was a better building before those two lushes came.”