Ho, still lives—and still lives where I thought she did, off Kirkland Street. The address had made me imagine her in grand surroundings. Julia Child’s kitchen, now in the Smithsonian, was dismantled and removed from a house in that neighborhood. The late John Kenneth Galbraith, author of The Affluent Society, lived there. How convenient for him! To study personal wealth in American society, he merely had to stroll around the block. But Holly Winter, this other Holly Winter, does not occupy one of the grand old places. Elsewhere she might be said to rent a garage apartment, but since her abode is a short walk from the academic center of the American universe, which is to say, anywhere but elsewhere, she lives on the second floor of a renovated carriage house. Or does she? After a summer in England, she refers to the second story of the not-a-garage as the first floor and takes care never to say apartment when flat can be put to use. Her taste is minimalist: simple blinds, no curtains, sleek black couch and chairs, no throw pillows, black filing cabinets, no piles of paper, hardwood floors, no rugs, hundreds of books neatly aligned on bookshelves, no paintings, no prints, no pieces of sculpture, no photographs, certainly no snapshots, and nothing even remotely like geegaws or tchotchkes.
