“I’m sorry,” she said, sensibly. “That must have been awful.”

“Well, not … as bad as for you … I mean …”

She shrugged. “We weren’t close. I hadn’t seen him for years.”

“Oh. Well, I know what it’s like not to … get along … with your family.”

“Do you? That’s nice. I mean, it’s … not nice, but I don’t know the right word for what it is. I’m Dena Savitch.”

“Roy Milano.”

We shook hands. Despite her matter-of-fact demeanor, I could still feel the tears that dampened her palm.

“May I buy you coffee?” she asked.

“Sure. Except let me.”

“No,” she said, definitively. “I insist.”

—

Dena Savitch also insisted on ordering for both of us. When our coffees came, she popped open the little milk container, sniffed it, then okayed it for my use. I assumed that her reaction to anxiety was to impose order. This was in contrast, of course, to my own obsessive recounting of film facts and stats. There were all kinds of ways to be trivial, I thought, hopefully.

“How did you know my father?” she asked me, bluntly.

“I didn’t. He contacted me.”

“You sell something? Have a business, what?”

Her grilling was unnerving yet kind of charming. “I think he wanted to sell me something.”

“A service of some kind? Some belongings? I have no idea what my father was into.”

After a pause, I decided to plunge in, to definitively see if she shared my way of life. “He said he had The Day the Clown Cried.”

She paused, but only to unwrap a sugar cube. “What’s that? One of those corny clown paintings?”

My heart sank. Had I thought wrong, was she really normal? As I watched Dena crush the sugar with her fist into just the right size sprinkles, I was heartened: right type, wrong topic, maybe.

“It’s a famous uncompleted film,” I said, and proceeded to explain. I told her how Jerry Lewis’s previous film had also been about World War Two: Which Way to the Front?, a comedy. As I went on and on, she proceeded to look around the room. Only when I finally trailed off did her attention return. Still, it was clear she’d heard something.

“Well,” she said, “I guess my father really needed cash.”

I stared at her. “You’re saying he might have actually had it?”

She shrugged. “As I said, I don’t know what he’s been doing lately. He left my mother when I was little. But he was a movie fan, I remember that.”

“It’s not enough to be a fan, see, he’d have to be …” and off I went again, explaining that Jerry Lewis had done a previous dramatic turn in The Jazz Singer on TV in the fifties. This time, Dena’s gaze floated upward, and she seemed to count the ceiling tiles. Only when my voice stopped—when I wet my whistle with my now-cool coffee—did she meet my eyes once more. This time, too, she’d heard just enough to respond. She checked me out, analytically.

“I can see why he called you,” she said, not unkindly. “Why anyone would have, under those circumstances.”

I studied her now. I remembered how, when I was a child, my mother would start doing chores—cleaning, cooking, sorting laundry—whenever I regaled her with trivia. “I’m listening, I’m listening,” she would say. Yet I knew she would sometimes sneak off by herself, in the afternoons, to the city, to see films.

For all my attempts to hew Dena to me and mine, maybe she wasn’t trivial; she was maternal.

But not necessarily in a bad way.

“Look,” she said, suddenly. “I think we can help each other.”

I leaned in, believing her; she said nothing frivolously. Dena shifted in her seat, too, and I caught a glimpse of a fallen black bra strap. A faint charge of arousal went through me and, under the circumstances—the memory of my mother—it was unnerving. Staring straight into my eyes, she pulled the strap back up, with what seemed intentional slowness. Fathers and mothers; falling bras and crying clowns; everything seemed to be mingling, in ways I didn’t understand. Whatever it was made both of us look away.

But I knew one thing for certain: I trusted Dena Savitch. So I went ahead and told her what I thought.

“I think your father may have died … for The Day the Clown Cried.”

She didn’t hesitate.

“Do you?” she said.

“Yes.”

“So do I.”

Neither of us spoke for a second. Then she said, “Roy? Would you like to go to the Hamptons with me?”

DENA DIDN’T LIVE ON THIS PART OF LONG ISLAND, A WORLD OF MANSIONS on the water, two hours or so from town. She worked for a man of whom, not surprisingly, she had barely heard.

Most people, however, were more than familiar with Howie Romaine.

Romaine was a stand-up comic who had parlayed an observational gift—creating routines from mundane details of everyday life—into an enormous success. He’d recently ended his stupendously popular TV sitcom, Romaine World, which had made him untold millions. Now married with a child, he lived in a compound in East Hampton, essentially retired at the age of forty. Dena was the au pair to his young son and lived on the grounds.

The job made sense for her. At lunch, Dena’s motherly aspect had made me confess more than I’d intended. I told her of my own mom and my unfortunate alliance with Abner, in such a miserable way that it made her think, as she always seemed to, practically.

“Howie spends all his time buying things now,” she’d said. “Fancy cars used to be his obsession. Now he’s into showbiz collectibles. So he might have some information on this, whatever, Clown film.”

I hesitated. Romaine’s comic oeuvre had always struck me—and, frankly, anyone with any taste—as pathetic. Who really cared about the rivalry between an electric and a manual toothbrush, as one of his routines dramatized?

Dena read my mind and was, as ever, sensible. “Don’t be such a snob. This is a way to keep our investigation going. I’m having my father’s belongings from his flophouse shipped to me at Howie’s place. You can help me go through them there.”

I sensed this was her real motivation and, to my surprise, I didn’t mind. It was very comforting being around Dena. She had suffered a greater loss than I—my silent mother was still alive—yet had been made stronger.

“Okay,” I found myself saying. “All right.”

“Oh,” she said, as she paid the check, “and you’ll want to lose that gun, I think. I hate those things.”

Just as she heard what she needed, Dena saw what she needed, as well.