The Countess’s Private Secretary

One February day in 1988, I emerged from the subway on Lexington Avenue to find that East Sixty-eighth Street, where I’d recently begun working as a private secretary to a countess, was overrun by fire trucks and acrid with the stench of smoke. “The street is closed,” a fireman told me, as I tried to enter the block. Then, among the retracting ladders and dripping cornices, I noticed a head thrust from the window of a grand prewar apartment house. A guttural voice reached the fireman and me: “Let her through! That’s my secretary!”