We started to walk north, to Thurston Avenue.
“You mean buy and sell antiques?”
“No,” Sally laughed. “I mean clear out putrid old houses. For Harriet the clean-outs were what she had to do, sometimes, to get to the furniture, or whatever else of value might be in there. For me, I think it’s kind of the opposite. I love old things, and I definitely love finding something great that I can sell or find a good home for, but sometimes I feel like they’re my excuse to go in there and empty out the houses. The first time I did it, it just made total sense to me, and I never cared that people found it strange, or thought it wasn’t a real job. I don’t even mind that the clients think it’s crazy, somebody making a career out of clearing away their mess. Harriet taught me how to talk to people about what we could do for them, and the psychology of it, and then also how to make money from what we found. She taught me everything I needed to know.”
I walked with my hands clenched in my pockets. “So this woman, Harriet, did she die?”
“Uh-huh. About three years after I moved in. By that time I was running things by myself, pretty much. I never formally bought the business or anything, I just took over her contacts, and she had one employee I kept on. He still works for me. And her name, I made part of the new business name, Greene House Services. Sort of a tribute, I guess.”
“Oh!” I looked at her. “I always thought it was ‘green,’ like environmentally green. I didn’t realize it was someone’s name.”
“It’s both. There’s absolutely an environmental element. Some houses get toxic. They’re full of plastic and waste. They’re a pollution in itself. Getting them clean, recycling what can be recycled, making a space habitable for human beings, all good for the planet as far as I’m concerned. Actually,” she said, “Harriet’s own house wasn’t in the best of shape when I moved in. She was clean, but she had the space packed out with furniture. It needed a bit of liberation, too.”
This was hard to envision. Both times I’d visited before this one, the East Seneca Street house had enjoyed Sally’s signature order, not to speak of her passionate cleanliness.
“So she left the house to you then?”
“Oh, no,” Sally said, smiling. “We never discussed it, and she died without a will. But after the executor came in, I told him I’d buy it at fair market value, with the furniture, and he agreed. Nothing in the house was updated, so it wasn’t going to be an easy sell. But I loved it. I still love it.”
“What happened to all that furniture?”
“Sold some. Kept some. Here’s the bridge.”
At the Thurston Avenue Bridge, I looked down into my very first Ithaca gorge, now outfitted with a suicide net but still spectacular. We stood as long as we could bear the chill, staring at Triphammer Falls, then walked the rest of the way across, bending forward into the wind. Sally led me into a gray stone courtyard, where she stopped. “Lewyn lived there, freshman year,” she said, pointing. Then she gestured at the building right in front of us. “I was here.”
“So close! You must have seen each other all the time.”
Sally smiled. “We might have seen each other, occasionally. But we stayed out of each other’s lives, completely. Almost as if we’d talked about it beforehand, which we didn’t. I never told anyone I had a brother at Cornell. I’m pretty sure he didn’t tell anyone he had a sister, either.”
“But didn’t people know?” I asked. “I mean, you had the same name.”
“It wasn’t like now,” said Sally, “with everything online. There wasn’t an ‘online,’ really, except for chat groups and stuff on AOL. There was some kind of university database, but only computer students did anything with it, and you couldn’t just google someone, or try to find out about them on social media. There wasn’t any social media, not even MySpace.”