Mrs. Schiff did like to be visited, and it was soon their settled custom, when her day’s work was over and he had returned from the Metastasio and taken Incubus twice round the fountain and back home, to sit in her bedroom, with a pot of gunpowder tea between them and a packet of cookies (Daniel had never known Mrs. Schiff to eat anything but sweets), and to talk. Sometimes they might listen to a record (she had hundreds, all horribly scratched), but only by way of intermission. Daniel had known many good talkers in his time, but none of them could hold a candle to Mrs. Schiff. Wherever her fancy lighted, ideas formed, and grew, and became systems. Whatever she spoke seemed illumined, sometimes in only a whimsical way, but often seriously and even rather intensely. Or so it seemed, till, with a turn of a phrase, she’d veer off on some new tangent. Most of it, in the way of much supposed “great conversation” was mere mermaid enchantment and fool’s gold, but some of her notions did stick to the ribs of the mind, especially those ideas that derived from her ruling passion, which was opera.

She had a theory, for instance, that the Victorian Age had been a time of massive and systematic repression on a scale more awful than was ever to be achieved again on the stage of history, even at Auschwitz, that all of Europe, from Waterloo to World War Two, was one colossal police state, and that it was the function of Romantic Art, but especially of opera, to train and inspire the rising younger generation of robber barons and aristocrats to be heroes in the Byronic mold; that is, to be intelligent, bold, and murderous enough to be able to defend their wealth and privilege against all comers. How she’d come to this theory was by listening to Verdi’s I Masnadieri, based on a play of Schiller about an idealistic young man whom circumstance requires to become the head of a band of outlaws and who ends up killing his fiancee sheerly on principle. Daniel thought the whole thing ridiculous until Mrs. Schiff, peeved at his obstinacy, got down her copy of Schiller and read The Robbers aloud, and then, the next evening, made him listen to the opera. Daniel admitted there might be something to it.

“I’m right. Say it — say that I’m right.”

“Okay, you’re right.”

“Not only am I right, Daniel, but what’s true of Schiller’s apprentice mafiosi is true of all the heroic criminals from that day to this, all the cowboys and gangsters and rebels without causes. They’re all businessmen in disguise. Indeed, the gangsters even dispensed with the disguise. I should know — my father was one.”

“Your father was a gangster?”

“He was one of the city’s leading labor racketeers in his day. I was an heiress in my gilded youth, no less.”

“Then what happened?”

“A bigger fish gobbled him up. He had a number of so-called residence hotels like this one. The government decided to eliminate the middleman. Just when he thought he’d become respectable.”

She said it without rancor. Indeed, he’d never known her to be fazed at anything. She seemed content to understand the hell she lived in (for such she insisted it was) with her best clarity of apprehension, and then to pass on to the next apprensible horror, as though all existence were a museum of more or less malefic exhibits: instruments of torture and the bones of martyrs side by side with jeweled chalices and the portraits of merciless children in beautiful clothes.

Not that she was callous herself, but rather that she had no hope. The world dismayed her, and she turned from it to her own snug burrow, which the wolves and foxes had somehow not yet discovered. There she lived in the inviolate privacy of her work and her contemplations, seldom venturing out except to the opera or to one or another of her favorite restaurants, where she would hold forth to other musician friends and dine on a succession of desserts. She had surrendered long since to the traditional vices of a recluse: she didn’t bathe, or cook meals, or wash dishes; she kept strange hours, preferring night to day; she never let sunlight or fresh air into her own rooms, which came to smell, most intensely, of Incubus. She talked to herself constantly, or rather to Incubus and the dolls, inventing long wandering whimsical tales for them about the Honeybunny twins, Bunny Honeybunny and his sister Honey Honeybunny, tales from which all possibility of pain or conflict was debarred. Daniel suspected that she slept with Incubus as well, but what of that? Was anyone harmed by her dirtiness or dottiness? If there was such a thing as the life of the mind then Mrs. Schiff was one of its champions, and Daniel’s hat was off to her.

So, for that matter, was hers, for she was beset, like so many who live apart from the world, with a naive self-conceit that was at once ludicrous and deserved. Indeed, she was aware of this, and prone to discussing it with Daniel, who had rapidly been elevated to the status of confessor.

“My problem has always been,” she confided one evening, a month after he’d moved in, “that I have a hyperkinetic intelligence. But it’s also been my salvation. When I was a girl, they wouldn’t keep me in any of the schools my father bundled me off to, as part of his program of redeeming the family name. My problem was I took my education seriously, which would have been forgiveable in itself, except that I tended to be evangelical in my enthusiasms. I was labeled a disruptive influence, and treated as such, which I resented. Soon I made it my business to be a disruptive influence, and found ways to make my teachers look like fools. Lord, how I hated school! My daydream has always been to go back, as a celebrity, and give a speech at the graduation exercises, a speech denouncing them all. Which is perfectly unfair of me, I know. Did you like school?”

“Well enough, up to the point where I was sent off to prison. I did well enough, and kids seemed to like me. What are the alternatives at that age?”

“You weren’t just deathly bored?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes I still am. It’s the human condition.”

“If I thought that were the case, I’d kill myself. Truly.”

“You mean to say you’re never bored?”

“Not since I’ve been able to help it. I don’t believe in boredom. It’s a euphemism for laziness. People do nothing, and then complain they’re bored. Harriet does, and it drives me up the wall. She actually supposes it would betray a lack of breeding to take an active interest in her own life. But, poor dear, it’s not her fault, is it?”

This question seemed to be addressed less to Daniel than to Incubus, where he lay in his mistress’s rumpled sheets. The spaniel, sensing this, lifted his head from its dozing position to one of alert consideration.

“No,” Mrs. Schiff went on, answering her own question, “it’s the way she was brought up. We none of us can help the way our twigs are bent.”

The question having been answered, Incubus lowered his head back to the pillow.

She knew the Metastasio’s operas by heart and would cross-examine him minutely about every performance he worked at: who had sung, how well or poorly, whether a tricky piece of stage business had come off. She knew them so well not from having seen them that often but because, in many cases, she’d written them herself. Officially she was no more than the Metastasio’s chief copyist, though sometimes, when a text was well-known to be so corrupt as scarcely to exist, the program would include a small credit: “Edited and arranged by A. Schiff.” Even then, she got no royalties. She worked, she declared, for love and the greater glory of Art, but that, Daniel decided, was only half the truth. She also worked, like other people, for money. If the fees she received were small, they were frequent, and enough, when you added them to the rents from the buildings, to keep her supplied with such essential luxuries as dogfood, books, rare records, and her monthly chits at Lieto Fino and La Didone, where, rather than at home, she chose to entertain.