“Oh, indeed,” said Ruth.

“Fate may be kind,” added George.

“Stop it, George. I mean it. So, Lou Lipman?” said Rebecca. “His son Jonathan?”

“Yes, Jonathan Lipman has bestowed upon me the ultimate faith and trust for which a scholar can hope,” Ruth explained. “He has provided me with total access to his father’s papers, and this includes all of his interview notes with numerous sources, all the people connected to the events with whom he met or corresponded, including thirty-two individuals who survived the fire. Sadly, all of these people are now deceased. And so these notes are quite valuable. Your grandmother, Rebecca, was the very last living survivor.”

“I know that.”

“But you don’t know that he had a great deal of significant material that he chose not to include in his book. Times were different in 1962. Many things were not discussed in polite company, let alone put in print in a scholarly book that was published by a prestigious imprint. There would have been a desire at the time to respect the privacy of the victims, which outweighed the import to our understanding of this tragic event that changed America.”

“Maybe he cared more about humanity than posterity,” George said.

“That is not the place of the true historian,” Ruth sniffed. “He censored a very significant part of the story.”

“Like for example?” Rebecca said.

“Well, would it be a shock to you if I tell you that three different women who worked at the Triangle told Lou Lipman that they believed your great-aunt Pauline had been sexually harassed and possibly sexually assaulted as well by one of the men who worked on the floor?”

“Where do you get that?” Rebecca asked.

“Lou Lipman’s interview notes. Apparently it was something of an open secret among the workers on the ninth floor that something was going on with Pauline and one of the bosses. It comes up in three different interviews with survivors. I have the pertinent pages photocopied here.”

“Who was the man?” George asked. “Did he die in the fire also?”

“I have every reason to believe, given that Lou Lipman used shorthand in his notes and used only initials for this individual, so this can never be absolutely verified, but I do believe that the M.J. in his notes indicates Morris Jacobs—which makes a certain sense when you consider the inevitable access and contact with your grandmother and her sister, given that he was the contractor for whom the Auerbach sisters worked. I have also been unable to ascertain that any other man working at the Triangle in this time period had those initials. There were numerous men with first names starting with M, more than one Max and Melvin, and there was an Isidore Jablonski on the eighth floor, but nobody else matches M.J.”

“Really!” Rebecca said. “Morris Jacobs the scheisskopf! The one who tried to close the door on Esther?”

“Exactly. Which brings into question what happened at that door, and why. At the time of my interviews with Esther, I had not read all of the Lipman notes, as he kept very haphazard records in a variety of notebooks and it was very time-consuming for me to go through all of them. But I will always regret that I had not completed the task when I interviewed Esther, because I could have followed up more closely on this topic had I been as certain then as I am now about the identity of the perpetrator of the sexual harassment against Pauline.”