“Maybe she should take up skiing,” Jack said.

“Doesn’t anyone do anything for the sake of the thing?”

“Sure. You and me.”

“What a way to live.”

—

We drove through Central Park to the west side of Manhattan and Jack zigged and zagged his way south so that we were able to enter Sixty-fourth from Broadway. Jack pulled over to the side and double-parked. “Want to look around?”

“Come with me?”

“Sure.”

He put a plastic-covered police marker plate in the window, made sure the cars at the curb could get out, and joined me on the sidewalk. “You think she lived in one of these buildings?”

“Either that or she lived on Sixty-fourth farther west, toward the river. Why else would we have met her on that corner?” I nodded toward the corner of Central Park West.

“So you could have the pleasure of seeing the Statue of Liberty.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Any idea how you’re going to move on this?”

“I think I’ll have to start where my father worked. It was a place in downtown Manhattan. And I want to look through the stuff my aunt has in our basement.”

“I’ve been afraid to ask you what’s down there.”

I wasn’t surprised. The basement was an accumulation of a lifetime or two of acquisitions, my aunt’s and my mother’s. When my mother died and the house was sold, Aunt Meg took whatever was left and put it in her basement, assuming I would want those things at some point. It seemed the point was now.

“There are probably things my mother couldn’t throw away, and I hope to find some photo albums down there. I promise I’ll throw out everything I can.”

“I’m not pushing.”

“But it would be nice to have an emptier basement.”

We had reached the corner of Central Park West, the Ethical Culture Society on the south corner. I remembered people lining the sidewalks and the stairs of buildings, hanging out of windows in apartment houses, standing on narrow balconies, all to see the parade. We had always stood on this corner, as close as we could squeeze to the curb.

“What do you remember about her?” Jack asked.

“Very little beyond her existence. But they knew each other. They smiled at each other. She knew my name.”

“Did she have a name?”

“If she did, it didn’t stick with me.”

We turned back and I looked up at the statue, wondering how long it had been there. At the corner where Sixty-fourth crossed Broadway and Ninth Avenue in the jumble of streets, we could see some of the buildings of Lincoln Center.

“There are apartment houses on the far side of Lincoln Center,” Jack said. “Over on Amsterdam Avenue.”

“I remember.” I’d been up this way before. “Probably thousands of people living there.”

“Probably.”

“Something’ll turn up,” I said.

“My wife the optimist. We done here?”

“I think so.”

He looked at his watch. “How about I take you to a cop bar to kill some time before our dinner reservation?”

“A place where cops go after work?”

“Right. Not much class but a good place to unwind. Let’s get rid of the car first. There’s a place I remember around here from my early days.”

It was nice for me to make a connection with Jack’s life before he met me. He’s been to St. Stephen’s several times and met the nuns I grew up among, but aside from a small number of his friends on the job, I knew less of his early life than he knew of mine.

I kept my ears open while we sat at a table and had a drink, hoping to hear cop talk, department gossip, some clever political scheming, but it was all pretty mundane and I wasn’t sure the voices I overheard even belonged to cops. But it was fun and relaxing and we did our own talking. About twenty minutes before our reservation, we left and took a leisurely walk down Broadway in the dark.

9

When the phone rang at five after twelve on Sunday, I had the feeling that the caller had waited till noon for the sake of politeness.

“Is this Christine Bennett?”

“Yes it is.”

“This is Steve Carlson from Hopkins and Jewell. I hope I didn’t wake you up.”

I had already been to mass with Gene and taken him back to Greenwillow. “I’ve been up for hours.”

“I talked to Wormy yesterday. I called her at home. There’s something weird going on.”

It’s the kind of news that gives my skin a prickle. “Tell me about it.”

“Wormy knows everything about that shop. The legend is she was the first person hired when H and J opened their doors. She may even be related to one of them in some way, I’m not sure. But she knows as much about what goes on there as H and J do. Maybe more.”

“Then she’s a good person to talk to.”

“She won’t talk to you.”

“Did she say why?”

“She said it wasn’t any of her business, that if Arlene spoke to you, what else was there to say?”

“I see. Well, I thank you for trying, Steve. Maybe on Monday I’ll go down and ask to see her.”

“I’ll give you her phone number.”

That surprised me. He had said on Friday that he wouldn’t. “That’s very nice of you.”

He dictated the number. From the area code I could tell she lived in Brooklyn, Queens, or Staten Island. “She has a husband and a couple of kids that are probably late teens or twenties. I’d appreciate if you wouldn’t say straight out that I gave you the number, but she’ll probably guess.”

“Do you have any sense of what she could be hiding or what she could be reluctant to talk about?”

“Not in the slightest. Natalie came to work in the morning and left in the evening like the rest of us. As far as I know, she did a hell of a good job.”

“I appreciate your help, Steve.”

—

I thought about it all day. I didn’t relish talking to a hostile informant who would prefer not to be called at home. After a light lunch Jack went upstairs to the little bedroom we had fixed up as a study, so I went down to the basement and started looking through the dozens of boxes that were my inheritance. The ones with my mother’s name on them were separated and pushed into a corner. I hadn’t thought to bring a knife with me, so I untied the rope on one that said SCRAPBOOKS AND ALBUMS on the top.

It was an afternoon of nostalgia and even a few tears. All my baby pictures were there, my parents looking like a couple of kids, I like a bundle of blankets. There was the house I grew up in, Gene and I playing in a sandbox, Aunt Meg and Uncle Willy, lots of smiles. Events I remembered were recorded, my graduation from grade school, this time without my father present, a birthday party we had celebrated at a bowling alley and then later at home with cake and ice cream, a school play in which I had had a substantial part. There were no pictures of any Thanksgiving Day parade, but I had not recalled my father taking a camera with him. Not all the people in the pictures were identifiable, but I was reasonably sure none was the mystery woman of the parade.

Deep in the box was a framed picture of my parents on their wedding day, probably the only existing picture of the occasion. I did not remember ever seeing an album or hearing of a large wedding, but they were dressed as a traditional bride and groom. I rubbed the glass with the bottom of my sweater and blew away dust. It would be nice to keep this where I could look at it, upstairs in one of the bedrooms.

A box a little smaller than a shoe box held many pictures of varying size and quality, most of them unfamiliar to me. Both sets of my grandparents were there in formal, unsmiling portraits as well as some more casual ones. Many pictures had dates and names on the back, but many others did not. Who was Joe Formica? Who was Mrs. Elsevere? I went through them one by one, turning them over into the top of the box to keep the order the same. There was my mother as a child with three unidentified children. There was my father with my aunt Meg—they were brother and sister—as little children at the beach, in the country, plowing happily through snow.