Lena is ten years old when her father is promoted. To mark his success, he moves the family across the bay to San Francisco, where they take an apartment at the top of a steep hill. Mrs. St. Clair is not happy with the apartment, and an encounter with a drunken man upsets her even more. She feels that this apartment is "not balanced" and that all their good luck will vanish. She discovers that she is pregnant, but even this news cannot lift her mood. Meanwhile, Lena listens through the wall to an Italian mother and daughter, Mrs. Sorci and Teresa, arguing and fighting in the adjacent apartment. Their arguments sound so violent that Lena believes that the mother has probably killed her daughter. When she glimpses the daughter a few days later, however, she can't believe that the girl looks so unscathed.
Soon afterward, Mrs. St. Clair loses the baby that she is carrymg. In her grief, she cries out about another son whom she thinks that she apparently killed. She then begins to lose her already-fragile grip on reality.
One night, the girl next door knocks on the door of Lena's apartment. Her mother, she says, has kicked her out. She uses the St. Clairs' fire escape to sneak back into her bedroom, and later that night, Lena hears the Italian girl and her mother screaming at each other again. She is astonished when she hears them reconcile and fall into each other's arms with love. Lena dreams of saving her mother from madness.
