“Do you go through this every night?” he asked. His tone was both incredulous and concerned.

“We usually manage to get a bus in bad weather,” she said. “Tonight they were so full, there was hardly room for the driver.”

The block between Lexington and Park was filled with high-stooped brownstones. Jenny pointed to the third house on the uptown side. “That’s it.” She eyed the street affectionately. To her the rows of brownstones offered a sense of tranquillity: houses nearly one hundred years old, built when Manhattan still had large neighborhoods of single-family homes. Most of them were gone now, reduced to rubble to make way for skyscrapers.

Outside her building, she tried to say good night to Erich but he refused to be dismissed.

“I’ll see you in,” he told her.

Reluctantly she preceded him into the ground-level studio. She’d made slipcovers in a cheerful yellow-and-orange pattern for the battered secondhand upholstery; a piece of dark brown carpet covered most of the scarred parquet floor; the cribs fit into the small dressing room off the bathroom and were almost concealed by the louver door. Chagall prints hid some of the peeling wall paint and her plants brightened the ledge over the kitchen sink.

Glad to be released Beth and Tina ran into the room. Beth spun around. “I’m very glad to be home, Mommy,” she said. She glanced at Tina. “Tina is glad to be home too.”

Jenny laughed. “Oh, Mouse, I know what you mean. You see,” she explained to Erich, “it’s a little place but we love it.”

“I can see why. It’s very pleasant.”

“Well, don’t look too hard,” Jenny said. “The management is letting it run down. The building is going co-op so they’re not spending any more money on it now.”

“Are you going to buy your apartment?”

Jenny began to unzip Tina’s snowsuit. “I haven’t a prayer. It will cost seventy-five thousand dollars, if you can believe it, for this room. We’ll just hang in till they evict us and then find someplace else.”