Ephraim shrugged. It was clear that he was sad about it, too.
“I don’t remember him, either,” I heard myself say.
“No. I’m sorry.” She sighed. “I suppose I’ll be getting a letter from Burke Goldman Finn and Emerson now. Reading me the riot act, because we’ve met.”
“You won’t,” Lewyn said. “Because we won’t be telling her.”
“Besides,” I said, “you might even call it fate.”
“Fate might have moved things along a little bit faster,” Lewyn said. “You’re sharing a street here, with my … our … our father’s art collection.”
Stella nodded. “At one point your father owned most of the street, the buildings on both sides of the warehouse. They were sold off, after his death. Except for this one. I had to fight for this one. But I didn’t see any other way. Too many changes, too quickly. Of course, I was terribly worried about money. And I knew it wasn’t what Salo would have wanted for us. Mostly I couldn’t face moving Ephraim on top of everything. He spent his whole life here, till he left for college.”
Lewyn was shaking his head. “I just … this is incredible. And I am furious.”
“You don’t look furious,” I observed.
“This is what furious looks like. How could she hide this from us? What was she thinking?”
Stella sighed. “She was thinking she had lost her husband. And I’m sure she was in great pain, because I was, also. And she wanted to be able to control what she could and protect her kids the way she thought they needed protecting, and I completely understand that, even if I disagreed with her idea of how to do it. I told her, at the time. I said, they’re going to need to know who Salo really was, and what made him that way. The accident, for example. I know why he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it, but after he was gone, I thought it was important. I told Ephraim, anyway. It might have been the most important thing I told him. Was it?” she asked her son.
“It was all important,” he shrugged. “Everything is important, since I can’t remember him on my own.”
“Wait,” said Lewyn. He seemed to have come fully awake now. “What accident?”
Stella said nothing. Ephraim said nothing.
“What accident?” Lewyn said again. And then I said it, too.
I could tell we were both afraid of the answer. But Ephraim was right: everything was important, and where our father was concerned, this turned out to be the most important thing of all.
We stayed for hours. We stayed long enough that we were hungry again, and Stella cooked dinner for all of us, and I went with Ephraim upstairs to his childhood bedroom. There was a desk at the window, which overlooked the roofs of three houses. Beyond them was the brick wall of the warehouse. “You kept an eye on things,” I noted.
“I did. I saw your brother occasionally, especially in the last few years, before I left for school. Never you or the others.”
“Lewyn took up the mantle,” I said. “I’ve only been out here a couple of times before today. Was it fun to grow up in Red Hook?”
“Except for the skateboarding, a blast. The cobblestones,” he clarified. “But I jest. My mom is extremely protective. She didn’t want me skateboarding anywhere. The Stuyvesant Spectator, that was my sport.”
I looked at him.
“Student paper. “The Pulse of the Stuyvesant Student Body.” No knee-pads necessary.”
“Stuyvesant! That’s some commute from Red Hook.”
“It was a bitch. A girl in my class made a database of commute times for our grade. I was in the ninety-first percentile with one hour twenty-eight minutes average, via two buses and a subway. But there were worse. Kids from Rockaway or parts of Queens. It’s a great school, though. I was very prepared for Yale.”