“Goddamn it!” I got myself up, rubbing my various damaged parts. The posts of the bannister were shorn off at the base. Actually, no—not shorn. They were smooth, polished, as though the stairs had simply been built without a handrail. First my condiments, now this. I would have cursed more, or kicked the stairs, or simply stood and marveled at the impossible mysteries of the universe, but something far more interesting than a vanished bannister caught my eye. The frame was cracked, the glass was broken, and the photograph made the bile rise in my throat.

It was a family portrait, taken when I was a fat, disgruntled baby. My father held my mother as tight as he could, and she held me, straining her wrists to keep me from wriggling out of her grasp. She looked like she always looked, like the most beautiful woman in the world. I wore an expression of extreme displeasure, but she clutched me to her chest, holding me tight.

Holding me through gloves nearly identical to Edith Copeland’s.

I found the gloves deep in my parents’ closet, in a box of her clothes Virgil never got around to giving away. They were muddy brown, unadorned by the flowers that danced across Mrs. Copeland’s glove, but the brand was the same. They were as roughly cut as the one I’d taken from Thieves’ Market. I could not imagine my mother wearing something so clumsily made.

My mother was Mary Fall, a peculiar creature of New York society. She expended the last of her fortune to buy the town house on Washington Square and spent my youth pretending we still had money, stuffing me into lavish dresses that I would revenge myself against by picking at their barely visible seams during interminable Sunday teas.

I’m told she was delicate, with a bird’s laugh and thick brown hair that fell in curls across her shoulders. Her hair I inherited; her delicacy I forewent. How porcelain Mary Fall was courted and wed by the NYPD’s brilliant barbarian was one of the most powerful love stories of the nineteenth century. Or so I assume—no one ever bothered to tell it to me.

She died of pneumonia when I was ten—a tiny mystery all its own, summer pneumonia, especially since I recall the house smelling like Christmas the day she died. My father kept vigil outside their bedroom, in the least forgiving chair he could find. I lay at the other end of the hall, outside his office, curled in a tight ball, face pressed against the floor, staring down the endless hallway at Virgil, who waited hours for good news that did not come. In my memory, he does not cry. He never cried. But again, in my memory, it smelled of Christmas, so perhaps I am not to be trusted.