After he died she’d gathered herself up again, a devout Catholic, determined to live on “since that is what God wants for me,” though inside, she wished only that she could die, too, and be with him.

Meantime, she enrolled—at the age of 80-something—at the Fashion Institute. Wednesday afternoons she could be seen running across the marble-floored lobby in her three-inch heels and Chanel suits, crying out in her deep, Mexicani accent, “I’m late! I’m late!” She was on her way to the subway. She did not believe in taxis: too slow, she said.

She was a good six feet tall, and slim, like she perhaps had been a dancer, though I don’t believe she ever was. In the elevator she would look at me and smile broadly, saying over and over and over again:

“Oh, you are so beeeeeeeeauuuutiful.”

I thought she was magnificent.

I musn’t have been more than 12 when I first met her, but I was well into my thirties when she invited me to tea. In the dark, second-floor rear apartment where she had lived since 1943—first with her husband, then by herself (they had no children)—she showed me around the hall and living room: the paintings she had collected, the chairs that had belonged to her grandmother and then her mother, the Olympic medals (and some from her husband’s time in the U.S. military), silver and semi-precious stones that were all her family had been able to rescue from the mines before the Revolution.

She had begun her life almost as a princess, in enormous homes with her own personal maid—something, I imagine, like a lady-in-waiting. After the Revolution ended, the house was burned to cinders and they had lived not much better than some peasants they had known. She came to America and took a job as a translator at the U.N., which was where she met her husband.

Still, there were some things the family had managed somehow to keep, like the silver tea set she—by then 93 years old—carried, her arms shaking from the weight, from the kitchen to the parlor where her trembling hands poured tea for both of us and didn’t spill a drop. This task done, she was on her feet again and back inside the kitchen, from which she emerged with a silver tray of sandwiches: tuna salad, smoked turkey, watercress and tomato—all neatly quartered, crusts trimmed. I helped myself to the tuna, she to a smoked turkey which she lay across her plate and proceeded not to eat.

I said very little.

She had such wondrous tales to tell: of her childhood in Mexico, of the love she’d shared with a husband she still very obviously adored. Now, she said, she was finishing her studies at the Fashion Institute and was preparing to start her own label in the spring. “This,” she said, twirling in the center of the room so I could see from all directions,” is one of my designs.” And indeed it spoke of her, a navy silk-and-cotton suit, in a style almost from the 40s but with a shorter hem. Even heading towards 100, her legs were better than the legs I’d seen on women a third her age, and some, indeed, quite younger.

Only about ten people came to Eugenia’s funeral. She had not yet launched her label, having slipped silently and unexpectedly in her sleep. At 93, people would say, her death was not entirely unexpected. But it was to me—something I had somehow never thought of, never fathomed.

At St. Ignatius of Loyola Church, on 84th and Park, I stared at her blue casket and tried to comprehend: that was Eugenia. There. In that box. I would not go home and see her now, in the corner of the elevator where she had always stood when her husband was alive and in his wheelchair, in order to have the quickest access to the door. It was a post she’d held long after he was gone, and so often the doors would open onto the vision of her black, Spanish-olive eyes and white, white hair, her claret lipstick and the light that crossed her face: Beeeeaauuuuuuutiful!

After the service, a woman about my own age approached me. She had taken Eugenia’s photo once: they’d met on the Lexington IRT, and the woman found Eugenia so remarkable she’d asked if she would model for a book. Eugenia had shown it to me once, a full portrait in black and white, the page carefully marked in a book kept carefully in place.

“I’d love to have a copy,” I told the photographer, whose name I did not know.

“I’ll send it to you,” she said. But she never did.

Richie ran the news and candy shop on Sullivan Street in SoHo, just a few steps south of Houston. That had been his dream as a boy, he told me once: to own a candy store. But Richie’s store sold more than candy: He sold newspapers and magazines and Stove-Top stuffing mix and soup; he sold cigarettes and Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies and kept the coffee fresh all day, and he made the meanest, old fashioned chocolate egg cream in New York

Things were good for Richie when I moved into the neighborhood; he’d expanded the shop to be so big he couldn’t even fill it all. He bought an ice cream freezer, and a colr TV and VCR he mounted on a corner wall, and hung pin-up posters among the baseball ones so you hardly even noticed they were there. He had two college kids who helped him out on weekends, and they hung out there with their buddies when off-duty watching videos and ordering pizza from across the street. The whole neighborhood was Italian, spilled over from Littly Italy, with Arturo’s Pizzeria on the other side of Houston Street, Joe’s Fresh Mozzarella shop next door and St. Anthony’s Church across the street. Those who lived there had lived there, it seemed, forever; some were third generation on the block, with Mafia connections from some relative or another, and there were an awful lot of funerals at St. Anthony’s.

Richie’s store was where I bought my New York Times each morning, stopping in to pay for it on my way to the gym and picking it up on my way back (lest he run out of them in the time between, which occasionally happened). He would have just been another congenial storekeeper with a moustache except for the day he lent me money and wouldn’t take a check.

In those days, banks held deposited funds for days before allowing you to draw on them, which often meant being money-rich and still cash-poor. It was Friday and I was out of cat food. “Would you cash a ten dollar check?” I asked him.

He looked at me in his flannel shirt and lay five stubby fingers on his belly. “What am I going to do,” he said, “with a check?”

I wrote it anyway. He put it in his safe and handed me a worn ten-dollar bill.

“You need more?”

I did not need more. And Monday I returned with ten dollars cash and he returned my check.

Such kindnesses are always rare in a big city. In David Dinkins’ New York of the mid-80s, when crime was up and niceness down, it was practically unheard-of.

That year, I made Richie a valentine and he hung it on the wall behind the counter, in a frame.

I did the same the next year, and the next. He framed them all.

And when I left New York and moved across the ocean to the Netherlands, he saw me off with an American flag, a Pittsburgh Pirates tee-shirt and a hug. And I still sent him valentines.

The economy got better. The old Italians started dying faster and as real estate prices went up throughout the neighborhood, the younger generation all got married and moved away. Riche cut his space in half, subletting the rest to a vintage furniture shop with Corbu chairs and Fiestaware. Still, somehow, he sent his kids to college: to Cornell, if I recall correctly, and to Cooper Union. “No more candy stores,” he said. And a yuppie who had lived down the block but had since moved to Park Avenue came by while I was visiting one day and ordered one of Richie’s egg creams. “I come downtown once a week for this,” he told me, laughing. “You don’t get this anywhere else.”

The shop grew smaller and Rich grew bigger, his belly so large he barely fit behind the counter. I visited him when I could. Sometimes in Amsterdam I dreamed he’d moved here, too, and was running a shop near the city center. I’d waken disappointed, and confused.

You could see the Twin Towers from Richie’s place like your own reflection in the morning. When they got hit, he was among the first people I thought about: was he fit enough to withstand this kind of shock? He was far enough uptown not to have had to run from the collapse, but far enough downtown to have felt it.

And then the neighborhood emptied out.

I never went back to Sullivan Street after that. I was too afraid I’d find the store shuttered, or worse, not there at all.

Perhaps I should have, after all. I could have had an egg cream: thick, just like in the olden days, and sweet.

Moments later, the train stalls outside the 42nd Street/Grand Central station. I sigh and go to check my watch, forgetting for a moment that this is chain-snatching season and I never wear jewelry on the subway. Instead, I sneak what I hope is a discreet glance at the wrist of the man next to me, and sigh again. I left the publishing office where I’m working for the summer, on 32nd and Fifth, at 5:10. It has taken twenty minutes to get practically nowhere. It’s hot, I’m tired, and I would like to get home.

“I’m convinced,” says the gentleman attached to the watch, “that it would be faster on the back of a turtle.”

I’m sure this is funny but I’m too weary and irritated to laugh, so I flash a smile and go back to staring at the ads, as if I haven’t read them all sixty times already: “Let Georgi Do It,” offers one; “Alive With Pleasure!” promises another. I’m not even reading them, but they are so imprinted in my unconscious that by now I don’t have to.

“Dino,” says my companion as it becomes clear that our subway isn’t moving anytime soon, and extends his hand. I take it and introduce myself, and we begin the standard exchange: You live in the city? I grew up here but I go to college in Ohio, just back for the summer; you? Just moved here from Jersey; where do you go to school? What do you do? What are you studying? Do you enjoy it? Would you like to have dinner sometime?

By now the tracks have cleared and we are inching out of Grand Central, toward 51st Street. I look him over: neat, nicely dressed, about 26 or so, I reckon, a little small for my taste but trim and in good shape; big nose, thinning hair, dark eyes. “Why not?” I think, and he hands me his card. He’s funny, in a Woody Allen sort of way. As the subway clatters and bangs along the tracks, he tells me the invented life stories of the people in the car around us: “See that guy with the jacket and the wrinkled suit? He still lives with his mother. That girl across from him? She met him in a bar once and is trying to get him to notice her. She has one brother in med school and another one in jail.” 86th Street comes before I know it, and we both get out. “So,” says Dino at the exit on the corner of 86th and Lex. “So, I guess, see you.”

“See you,” I say.

I wait a week, and then one night leaving work, notice his business card in my wallet. I phone him when I get home. He remembers me right away. “Should we grab a drink?” he asks. I don’t know where he lives, exactly, but since we’d gotten out of the subway at the same stop, I assume it’s nearby, so I suggest neutral territory: my favorite neighborhood bar, Eric’s, on 89th and 2nd. On the way there, I tuck my engagement ring into my purse.

Dino turns out to be a very likable guy: Greek, bright, well-read, ambitious. He works in plastics – for a company that makes plastic bags, to be exact. His shirt is well-ironed. Nice. He holds the door for me as we go in. Nice. He asks me what I’d like to drink and orders for me. Nice, nice. We exchange bemused pleasantries about the fact that we live so near one another and yet met somewhere else entirely, somewhere far more random and unconnected. I decide he is, like my fiance, just very, very nice, and when I get home, I slip my engagement ring back on my finger.

It’s a nice ring.

I never married the other guy, but I did see Dino twice after that. The first time was when he again invited me to dinner, and, deciding to give it another chance, I accepted. We had what can only be described as a very nice evening, at a candlelit restaurant where we tried very hard not to look like we were on our first date (because, after all, in a way, we weren’t). He phoned after that a few times, wanting to see me again, and each time I’d be happily entertained and promise to call him back, but I never would; and come September I went back silently to Ohio.

A couple of years later I ran into him again, outside a store somewhere on Third Avenue. Did he recognize me, or I him? He was better-looking than I’d remembered (or was I just older?) and still very, very nice – a a quality I’d learned by then was not a bad thing in a man. But it wasn’t everything. We spoke for a few minutes and then parted. Our lives had just as easily moved on.

And yet still, every now and then when I am in New York, I’ll look for him on the Lexington IRT. I imagine he’s a father now, with children not much younger than we had been when we first met. Perhaps he’s even seen me on occasion, and, having certainly by now forgotten, invented my life story for a stranger seated at his side: “That woman there? She’s remembering a man she once met here, on the subway coming home, a long, long time ago.”