For me, no ride in Disneyland (then under mythic construction) could rival privileged glimpses into Yankee strangers’ squalid apartments. Plaster walls were painted bright as my tubed paints, so unlike the dull beige bandaging every WASP interior at home. “Today,” she said close by my ear, “we’re bound to the museum and I intend revealing their centerpiece, no less a treat than something called the Human Heart. All right with ye? Well, I should think so. But till then, mine Owl most Honorsome, please tell me just what it is you’re presently a-seeing.” Aunt’s command. And, oh, to do that!

Kneeling on the rattan seat, I pressed my forehead to the window, sticky and corrupt but clear; and there came forth a narrative. It was apparently almost always good. At least it made her laugh as, planning our grand day’s learning, she unfolded her museum map, used so often, I saw, the creases were worn suedey. My telling pleased a few adjacent strangers. Odd, even the toughest black people—wearing ushers’ red uniforms or carrying dry mops in empty buckets—seemed amused at the sight of us together; they would watch us with a fond kind of idle sarcasm. I now think my Southern accent made people chuckle. At the time, I assumed it was my insights or the joy I took in chronicling this fine slum. It all looked like slum to me. Every building appeared six hundred years old, crusted with soot, carved garlands, pigeon tributes. Aunt, map opening ever wider, was just a head that nodded, nodded, some metronome I sang to.—Plus, today I’d get a free ticket to the Human Heart, whatever THAT was.

Hailing as I did from mere suburbia—margins of lawn privacy framing each family—I felt ashamed at how much you could see of city people’s lives. Throw pillows, crucifixes. It was Muriel who sensed I was embarrassed—not of staring, but of being caught. “If you can see in and spy something of interest, then I say go ahead and Look at it. And if you can look hard enough long enough, you can maybe learn what you see by saying what it is. If you try all of that, believe me, you’ve gone a long way toward helping to justify such …”

“‘Peeping’?” I laughed. “As you like. ‘Peeping,’ then, my sweet Peeper Tom.” She pretended to squeeze my nose off, then showed me her own thumb’s pink tip. She tilted forward, listening to all I described as passing, trust me, just behind her back. Aunt claimed she “didn’t care a fig” what other passengers thought. She’d said she’d told them I was coming.

As I knelt here, describing, enlarging, my shoulder touched hers and I was enveloped in her cleanly scrubbed and punitive Scottish smell. Being (among other things) a boy of eight, I admired the great bronze spears holding the chains supporting an old theater marquee where pigeons the color of carbon paper socialized. A woman in a slip, canting forward at a sink, washing her hair, blinded by suds, patting for a towel and missing, missing it. On somebody’s stove, a red pot boiled three white eggs (it appeared significant because framed by the first and greatest of all picture frames, a window in the house of living people).