Sally laughed. “Phoebe, I feel exactly the same. C’mon, I want to show you some stuff.”
Outside, my sister pointed out the pillared, classical pile across the quad. “I spent a lot of time there, after I reenrolled. I still had no big academic interest in anything particular, but there was this professor there, in women’s studies, who urged me to be part of that program, so that’s where I ended up. I had the business by then, and I was working all the time, but they were very accommodating. It was a good department for someone without a vocation,” she said thoughtfully. “I mean, I had a vocation. I have a vocation. But academically, no. Not like Harrison, or, I guess, Lewyn. Eventually.” She looked again at Goldwin Smith Hall. “MJ Loftig, her name was. I think she’s at Columbia now.”
“How come you dropped out?” I asked. “Or … took a leave, or whatever?”
“Oh, well, I was living in the house on East Seneca, with the woman whose business I took over. Her name was Harriet Greene. I was working for her and getting to know the business, and it was just so much more interesting than anything I was studying here. And also she wasn’t very well, and didn’t have any family.”
“So she was like your mentor.”
“Kind of. She was a very crotchety person, but fond of me. I think she saw me as a fellow traveler. There aren’t that many people who do what we do, and actually like it.”
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.”
I didn’t know what MySpace was.
“I also know for a fact that he told at least one person Oppenheimer was a common name, so another Cornell student named Oppenheimer wasn’t anything to him.”
“Like Simon Peter,” I laughed. “He denied you.”
“Well, we denied each other. We just didn’t want to know each other here.”
“I think that’s sad,” I told her. “Where are we going now?”
We were going to a place called Carol’s Café, a location all but unchanged from Sally’s student days, apparently. Inside, out of the cold, we brought our coffee to a table. “I asked Paula if she could join us for lunch, at Moosewood,” she said, stirring sugar into hers. “I honestly don’t care if you go to Cornell or not, but you have to experience Moosewood.”
Paula had made her appearance late the night before, when both of us had run out of steam and were sitting side by side on the Victorian couch in the formal living room, watching Stephen Colbert on television. She was a tall woman, still broad shouldered and strong from the rowing she had done in college. She’d blown through cheerily that morning on her way out to the Ag Quad, leaving a kiss on Sally’s cheek that was far more sensual than I had ever witnessed a kiss on a cheek to be.
“She’d like to get to know you better,” said Sally.
“Okay,” I said. “But I’m a carnivore. And isn’t Moosewood all the way on the other side of campus? Why did we come all the way up here?”
“Well,” Sally was stirring her coffee, “I was thinking, last night, that there was something else I wanted to talk to you about. And I wanted to show you the dorms, because you’re right, it’s sad what happened with Lewyn and me in college. I still think about it.”
“Another therapy goal?” I smiled.
“I’m afraid so. And the fact is, I did something really crappy to Lewyn back then. And he still hasn’t forgiven me. And he’s been absolutely right not to.”