When she slowly pushed a small stepladder into position to reach her tea bags, I moved forward to help. She waved me off with a brusqueness like her son’s.

“Just because I’m old and slow doesn’t mean the young and swift need muscle me away. My son keeps wanting to install a housekeeper here so I can vegetate in front of the television or behind my binoculars. As you can see, we’d be tripping over each other all day in this tiny space. I was glad to give up all that nonsense when I moved out of the big house. Housekeepers, gardeners, you can’t take a step without consulting someone else’s feelings and timetables. One of my old maids comes every day to tidy and prepare meals-and to make sure I haven’t died in the night. That’s enough intrusion.”

She poured hot water over tea bags into slender porcelain mugs. “My mother would be shocked to see me use tea bags, or to drink my tea out of a great mug. Even when she was ninety herself, we had to get down the Crown Derby every afternoon. Mugs and tea bags feel like freedom, but I’m never sure whether it’s freedom or laxity.”

These cups, with their gold-leaf rims and intricate stencils, weren’t exactly Pacific Gardens Mission service. When Ms. Graham nodded at me to pick them up, I could hardly get my fingers into their slender handles. The tea scalded my fingers through the eggshell-thin china. Following her slow tread down the hall to her sitting room felt like some kind of biblical ordeal involving furnaces.

If Geraldine Graham had been living in a mansion like those across the street, the apartment might seem like tiny space, but the sitting room alone was about the size of my whole apartment in Chicago. Pale Chinese rugs floated on the polished wood floor. Armchairs covered in straw satin straddled a fireplace in the middle of the wall, but Ms. Graham led me to an alcove facing Larchmont Hall, where an upholstered chair stood next to a piecrust table. This seemed to be where she lived: books, reading glasses, her binoculars, a phone, covered most of the tabletop. An oil painting of a woman in Edwardian dress hung behind the chair. I studied the face for a resemblance to my hostess and her son, but it was the oval of a classic beauty. Only the coldness in the blue eyes made me think of Darraugh.