Abraham Dias was buried in the First Shearith Israel Graveyard near Chatham Square, wound in white linen, as he’d wished to be, placed into his grave without a coffin so that he might become a part of the earth without delay. He had belonged to a congregation of Sephardic Jews who had wandered the globe, searching for a safe place in which to live and die. They had found what they were searching for in Manhattan. The burial took place on a blue June day, and the achingly beautiful weather made the loss cut more deeply. It would have been more fitting had there been rain or hail or black storms blowing in from the sea, a world from which a man wished to escape, not this perfect day. The women stood on the fringes of the gathering, their heads covered, and the men wore prayer shawls that their wives and daughters had stitched. The men joined in the mourner’s Kaddish, the ancient Aramaic prayer Jews recited to honor the dead. Samuel Dias did not practice his religion, but with a borrowed prayer shawl over his shoulders, he, too, recited the Kaddish and sang laments in Portuguese, as his father had done on the night of their family’s murder. Then he got down on his knees at the gravesite and wept. He had refused to shave and his hair fell to his shoulders; he looked rough, but he cried more than any man the congregation had seen before.

The unmarried women watched him, so moved by his raw emotion they felt their feet lift off the ground. How could a man feel so much? What else was inside of him? If only they could find out, if only they knew, a great mystery would be revealed to them. The married women gazed at their own husbands with disapproval, for the men looked away from Samuel’s passionate display. It was too much for them, it was a story they had forgotten a long time ago, when they were thirteen and became men and locked their emotions away so they might navigate the cruelty of the world.

That night the house on Maiden Lane felt much too empty. Samuel had torn his clothes, as mourners are commanded to do. For seven days he sat outside, even when it rained. He wept until his dark, handsome face was swollen; he had stopped talking, as his father feared he might. Instead, he began to drink rum and he didn’t stop, growing more silent and moody with every drink. When he finally came inside, Maria brought him his father’s wedding ring, hoping it would start him talking. Samuel held it up to the firelight, squinting to see it more clearly.

“There’s a reason my father left this with you,” he said.

“Because he wanted you to have it.”