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asked.
    “With my sister in New York. I invited him to move in with us years ago, but he said he liked the city, that he was a city boy and he didn’t want to live in the country. My sister lives in an apartment in Manhattan, and that gives him the chance to walk in the city. But he’s never given up the old apartment, the one we all grew up in. And now he says he wants to go back and die there.”
    “Is it still furnished?”
    “It’s pretty much the way he left it a couple of years ago. The furniture is all there, my mother’s china, the old seventy-eight records, the rugs. I don’t want him to go back, but if he insists, we’ll have to go along with it. He’s likely to walk out of my sister’s apartment one day and take a taxi home. That’s the way he is.”
    I didn’t blame him and I told her so. Then I took out my notebook and turned to a fresh page. “Tell me what you remember of Iris, from as far back as you can.”
    “Well.” Mrs. Margulies gave me a small smile and sat back. She was wearing a two-piece knit dress in a fine black wool with a little white around the hem of the skirt, the round neckline, and the edge of the sleeves. Several thin gold chains hung around her neck, and I could see gold on her right wrist and on several fingers. Some of the rings, I recalled, were antique and very beautiful, with the kind of work one doesn’t see much nowadays. By contrast, her daughter and I wore wedding rings and little other jewelry.
    “I think she was always everyone’s favorite aunt,” she said. “She wasn’t more than twenty years older than I and she lived with my grandparents—that’s my father’s parents—when I was growing up. So whenever I went to see my grandparents, I would see Aunt Iris. The others were gone. They were older, they got married, they moved out. But Iris stayed for a long time. I think she must have been in her thirties before she left home.”
    “Was there a problem when she left?”
    “These are things I wouldn’t know,” Marilyn Margulies said. “My father would know because he was her brother. I have to tell you I come from a family that felt it wasn’t proper to tell children stories about the older generation, and that continues to this day. I’m sure my father knows gossip about people who are long gone, but he would never tell me because I’m a child.”
    “I know about things like that, Mrs. Margulies. My own family also kept secrets in much the same way.”
    “Chris.” She leaned forward in her chair. “You must call me Marilyn.”
    “OK.” I smiled. It would make things easier, and I was happy to be part of her circle of friends. “So she left at some point and got her own apartment. Did she have a roommate?”
    “Oh, I don’t think she ever lived with anyone. She didn’t have to. She could afford her own place, and I think she liked keeping house. My grandmother helped her when she got started. I know this because when Aunt Iris died, many of my grandmother’s things were in Iris’s apartment.”
    “Then your grandparents probably weren’t upset that a single daughter left home before she married.”
    “I don’t think so. And if they were, they came around.”
    “Tell me about her work.”
    “She was the world’s greatest secretary. She worked for one man for years and years. It wasn’t her first job, but it was her longest and the last one. She was always there when he needed her and he was good to her. I think he once paid her way to Europe for a vacation.”
    “Do you think there was anything romantic between them?” I asked.
    “You mean like an affair? No, I wouldn’t think so.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because—well, Iris wouldn’t do that. I’m sure she kept her social life separate from her work.”
    I was somewhat amused at Marilyn’s instant shooting down of my little balloon. It was pretty clear that she had no idea what Iris’s social life was all about, if she had one, but the thought of her aunt engaged in