When Solomon died and the workman’s compensation checks stopped coming, Louisa’s son, under great hardship, continued to support her. Now she lived only for the time when her granddaughter would find herself a husband and leave her to her old age surrounded by books she no longer read and a piano she no longer played. Since her granddaughter, now working as a receptionist at a New York City radio station, had moved into a Greenwich Village apartment with a roommate and seldom visited, Louisa briefly contemplated dictating her poetry to the landlord’s teenaged daughter who brought her a quart of milk once a week — and just as quickly decided against it. She drank the milk, and, except for an occasional grapefruit sprinkled with wheat germ, ate little else.

Then disaster struck…

Her grievances grew louder and more hyperbolic — aired to neighbors, storekeepers, the synagogue sexton — anyone who would listen, and even those who would not.

The landlord’s teenaged daughter married suddenly, and Louisa was given notice to clear out of the apartment within ninety days. Her son suggested hiring a lawyer and fighting the eviction, but she wouldn’t hear of it. While her son searched for another place for her to live, Louisa sat at the window composing imaginary letters pleading her case to the editor of the Daily Forward. Swallowing her pride, she even turned to the synagogue friends she’d once spurned. Too late, of course, for not one of the elegant blue-haired widows would take her in. It was during those trying final days at the apartment, with the landlord patiently granting one extension after the next, that Louisa, no doubt with Lear in mind, turned her wrath against her beloved son — even going so far as to accuse him of plotting to send her out into the wilderness to die. Her grievances grew louder and more hyperbolic — aired to neighbors, storekeepers, the synagogue sexton — anyone who would listen, and even those who would not.

No eleventh-hour Hollywood deus ex machina arrived with a reprieve. The apartment was lost. Her son found a kindly, conveniently deaf, old woman willing to share her flat behind a kosher butcher shop in the heart of the Jewish shopping district. Despite her consuming disgust for both the indignity of the butcher shop and the illiteracy of her new roommate, Louisa moved in. Spurred by her son’s gift of a tape recorder into renewed literary activity, her final years were filled with a continued stream of invective against the New York City Department of Health inspectors for failing to cite the butcher for the chicken feathers and roaches she found in her soup, the impenetrable stupidity and superstition of her “bovine” roommate, and — toward the end — a surprisingly clear-minded screed against Gamul A. Nasser, whom she’d dubbed “the 20th-century Nebuchadnezzer,” in her final published letter to the Daily Forward.

On a cold day in January, at the age of eighty-four or eighty-five (her exact date of birth is still in dispute), Louisa took ill and telephoned her son to announce that she would be “dead by this time tomorrow.” And it was so. On the day she was buried, the worst snowstorm in half a century began to rage. It continued for three days. The grave diggers went out on strike, and the highways leading to the cemetery were impassable. The cars in the funeral procession continually skidded off the road into snow banks along the entire route. Only the hearse in which Louisa lay in her casket moved smoothly ahead. (Witnesses later said it could have been no mortal man who was driving.) At the gravesite, the maniacal howling of the wind and snapping of falling tree branches drowned out the rabbi’s prayers. One great blast of wind nearly swept the mourners off their feet and into Louisa’s open grave, necessitating a hurried burial by her son and two hearse driver “volunteers.” It was a storm, as Louisa might put it, “of Shakespearean proportions.” Those present felt her wrath and were ashamed — for a time. Then Louisa gradually faded from memory.

Why am I telling you this story?

The truth is, I hadn’t thought about my grandmother’s brave and unfulfilled life until the day I received a message from her. Call it a dream, a hallucination, a voice from beyond — whatever you like. Here it is.

I am standing in front of the white stucco house on Clara Street wearing a chic black dress and black, large-brimmed garden party hat. I knock at the green front door. When it opens, I see the landlord’s teenaged daughter coming down the stairs in her bridal gown. As she passes me and goes out into the street, I realize that there are wedding guests gathered on the sidewalk behind me throwing rice. I look up and see unfamiliar garish curtains hanging in every window of Louisa’s apartment. And the walls beyond, what I can see of them, are no longer white but freshly painted yellow.