Twice a month, Grete drops Kaja with Paul in Harlem. “He explains that we cannot be together right now,” she told me. “He tells me that he must be part of the community. But really, this is quite funny, because when the Harlem newspaper first hired him, I suggested that we move there, and he said no. You see, it is much more convenient to keep your white wife on one side of the East River and your black girlfriend on the other.” She said this while you and Kaja were stacking empty cereal boxes at the other end of the room, and I wanted to rush to Kaja and cover her ears. I don’t think Grete did it deliberately: I just think she was too angry and too lonely to care what Kaja heard. This made me question my own resolve. Will my frustration get the better of me? Will Ken’s? If anyone’s character is to be assassinated, it will be mine. Not because Ken is less well behaved but because my faults are more glaring.

54. Hotel Bossert, Brooklyn, 1961

Daughter or wife? If it weren’t the front entrance or such a swank hotel, she might be his mistress (she’s young enough), but whoever she is, she clearly knows where her fur-trimmed coat comes from. They’re not actually touching, but the way she’s positioned behind his arm, it’s like he’s holding an invisible leash in his kidskin gloves. Knowing what I know now, I’m guessing Lillian saw a small piece of herself in this couple. Regardless, it’s one of the last photos she took in Brooklyn Heights.

Having gone almost thirty years without speaking to Kenneth Lowell, a telephone interview should have been no big deal; or perhaps those three decades were exactly what justified my shaking hands as I dialed. As with Deb, I knew he wouldn’t recognize me unless I outed myself, which I didn’t think I wanted to do until the moment I did it. He and I agreed to meet for lunch, since we were both in New York. When we saw each other, we traded restaurant-appropriate versions of our lives and talked the way normal people meeting for lunch might talk. Someone could have taken him for my kindly uncle.

Since being made to leave him at age five, I had spent lots of time with the idea of Kenneth, but lunching with my father prototype didn’t wreck me the way I’d expected it to. Sitting across a table from Kenneth Lowell was like peeking behind the palace curtain of my own personal Emerald City, except instead of a humbug, I saw a happy older guy with a wife and two grown children, neither of whom was me.