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I reached my own house, I was filled with the pleasant conviction that the strange woman on the steps had gone inside and the way was now cleared. I resolved to try again. The boys in the street hadn’t started their after-school game yet, although some were already gathered around Bill Corrigan in his chair. One was swinging a broomstick, Walter Hartnett was tossing a pink Spaldeen up into the air. Mrs. Chehab was leaning out of her parlor window, rubbing the outside of the glass with a piece of newspaper. She looked over her shoulder and called, “You’ve missed your house, Mary dear. You’ve walked right past it.” There was no reason for me to lie to the woman—the poor woman, as she was still called, three years after Pegeen fell down the stairs—but I felt, nevertheless, an urgent sense to do so. “I’m just going back to school,” I said vaguely. “I forgot to remember something.” There was the smell of vinegarfrom the doused newspaper. “I just remembered that I forgot something.”
    Mrs. Chehab laughed, with her daughter’s crooked teeth in her mouth. “Never good to forget to remember,” she said. “Always better to remember you forgot.”
    I bowed my head and hurried on, walking in a suddenly clipped and urgent way that I thought would nicely match my lie.
    At Gerty’s house, sure enough, the stoop was empty, and a kind of confidence in my own prescience made me take the steps two at a time. But no sooner had I gotten into the gloomy brown light of the vestibule than I saw that the fat woman was now sitting on the inside stair, halfway up, tilted over a bit to lean against the banister. There would be no getting by her without first saying, Excuse me please. But neither could I turn around, with the woman looking down at me, and dart out the door. All reluctance, I put my hand to the rail and my foot on the first step, simply because I didn’t know what else to do.
    From above me the woman said, “You don’t live here, do ye? I saw you pass by before.” She had a voice like a man’s, deep and smoky, with a brogue—if that’s what it was—that was thicker even than the accents of the McGeevers, my father’s cousins, who spoke Irish to him when they came for their interminable Sunday visits and, through their narrow mouths, an unintelligible English to me. “I thought you were coming up then, but you went on,” the woman said. She leaned away from the banister, straightened her back somewhat wearily, as if the conversation were a task she had been putting off until now. She touched one hand to the step beside her, inviting me to sit. The other hand gripped the feathered fan. All against my own will, I continued to climb the stairs. The woman’s calves, even in the dim stairwell, were bright white, veined with gray and blue like marblepillars, the rolled stockings at her ankles as solid as stone. There was a basement odor about her, the odor of cold dirt. The apron that looped over her dark blouse and stretched across her black skirt was dim and gray, soft with wear. “I take it you’re a friend of little Gertrude Hanson,” she said, a small smile making her words seem warm. “I take it you’re coming to call for her.” A bit of light from the transom above the door might have caught her eyes as she cast them down at me on the stairs. Her short hair, carefully curled, had a goldish, grayish hue. She shook her head. “But I’m here to tell you she’s gone away. Her father took her out this morning. To his people in New Jersey. There’s nobody home upstairs.”
    Now I paused. I said, “Oh,” and the woman suddenly leaned back. I thought at first that she was trying to see me more clearly in the gloom, but then I realized that she was leaning in order to push her apron aside as she reached for the pocket underneath, in her skirt. She stretched out one of her great ivory legs as she maneuvered her free hand beneath the apron and briefly rolled her eyes to the ceiling as if to