Untold is a good word. Meaning, of course, not recounted or narrated. But also, too much or too many to say. The untold story of his youth. Untold suffering.

The air in the homes of old people, have you noticed, is always stale. Even when the windows were open I felt stifled. Usually when I dropped by, in the afternoon, she had the blinds closed and the only light in the room came from the television, which seemed to be always on. I didn’t want her to go through any trouble so I always came with coffee and muffins that I’d bought at the corner coffee bar. This she clearly appreciated, and I was grateful for the way it gave some structure to these visits, something for us to do, something to share, and, once the coffee and muffins were finished, it was not too awkward to use this as a sign that it was time for me to go.

She was a big complainer. Mostly she complained about our building: the garbage piling up in the basement, the super who took too long to fix things and whose English she had so much trouble understanding, the high-heeled clacking of her neighbor upstairs (“in her Jimmy Choo-choos”), children throwing balls in the courtyard. She was particularly irritated that the smell from the litter box of someone’s cat occasionally drifted through the vents into her own bathroom. (This happened once when I was there; in fact it was the smell of someone smoking weed, but I didn’t say this.) She batted away questions about her early life. She didn’t like to remember being young, she said. It just made her feel old. About my own life she had no curiosity. I was single, I was childless: What life? Once she’d finished complaining about the building she moved on to the world at large, her feelings about which could be summed up in four words: hell in a handbasket.

It was summer again and I went away, I had some traveling to do, and when I returned six weeks later I learned that while I was gone she had been briefly hospitalized for what her son described only as a coronary event. She didn’t seem to me much changed at first: same old litany, more or less, but the countdown to the presidential election had begun, and she was becoming increasingly agitated. Was it really possible that Americans would elect to the highest office in the land, to the most powerful position on earth, a person so manifestly unfit, so brazenly immoral and corrupt, a person who lied with every breath and was a complete incompetent to boot?

Never had my neighbor’s faith in humanity been so shaken.