Salo had no plan, but he found himself thinking about that old factory, and the houses beside it. Sometimes, when he was going out for something for his wife, or heading into Manhattan with the car, he detoured to Red Hook and drove down Coffey Street. The row of run-down houses felt like a memory of another New York, and the adjacent warehouse was spacious. Very, very spacious. And also very, very cheap. And he needed a place to put his paintings, and a place to go and look at them that was, somehow, not the place where he lived with his wife and, soon, the utter strangers they had spent years willing and striving and (for Johanna, at least) suffering to produce. People had begun to open storage facilities designed for just this purpose, Salo knew; one, in fact, had just been built in Long Island City, secure and climate-controlled and expensive and more distant from Brooklyn Heights than Coffey Street. How could this not be a better plan than that? If it was a plan.
“That’s an awful idea,” said our grandfather, who nonetheless invited Salo to persuade him, and so Salo did. Hermann Oppenheimer was himself spending several thousand a month on storage for only three paintings at a facility in Westchester. “You can’t just move a painting into an old building and leave it there,” he said, as if his son were an idiot.
“Absolutely not.” Salo already had an estimate. Twenty thousand for a climate-control system and the same security the Frick had at its off-site storage in Queens. “And there are four houses adjacent to the warehouse. I’d like to renovate and rent those.”
“Who’s going to want to rent in Red Hook?” said his father.
Salo shrugged. He still had neither seen nor read a single thing that challenged the appraiser’s verdict on the neighborhood, present or future. “It’s still New York City,” he told his father. What he didn’t tell him was what he’d felt as he walked through that empty warehouse, and the small, elderly homes packed with other people’s junk and declining fortunes. They were so unlike the gilded and upholstered apartment of his childhood, or the gracious house on the Esplanade a few miles to the north where his wife lay incubating; these humble buildings promised no great comfort or beauty, and yet they called to him. And he was going to continue buying paintings, obviously. If they couldn’t be in his home, they had to be somewhere.
Of course the two brothers took the offer. They were mad to sell. They were mad for cash! (One had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. The other had a new wife.) It was fast-tracked and over inside a month.
As for our mother, she would spend years of her life perched on the most genteel edge of Brooklyn, but Brooklyn Heights represented the extent of her exoticism. She never troubled herself to learn much about the rest of the borough, and as a result she could never seem to remember the name of the neighborhood where her husband’s warehouse was. Coney Island, she called it, in fact, for years—she had heard of Coney Island, and knew it was out there, somewhere, in that general direction—and Lewyn, when he was young, would develop a strange fancy that his father ran some private fun house or waxworks in proximity to Nathan’s and the rides, and Sally, who was partial to amusement parks, considered it very unkind of her father to spend so much time in one without her. Harrison never concerned himself one way or another, which was ironic as he was the only one our father ever actually took to the warehouse (once, when he was nine or ten). Johanna herself he took one Sunday morning as soon as the children were on a schedule and secure in the competent arms of two baby nurses, and she had gaped in dismay, predictably, at the neighborhood. Inside the renovated building, she could see that he had already bought more paintings, more pictures of nothing rendered as blocks and scrawls and bright colors hurled against canvas. She took her leave of those, and the familiar ones, more or less without regret and more or less for good. In fact, she would only return to Red Hook once, many years later (a visit with unintended consequences for herself and a number of people she cared about, not to mention a major museum).
That day, in her gestational bed, their bed, with the bad fairy triplets listening in as our father told her about Red Hook, she had asked: “If the paintings all leave the house, though, what will we have on the walls?”
“Whatever you like. I’d say it’s your turn to pick.”
But there was nothing she would ever want except the faces of her own children. Every year a birthday picture would be taken on the back porch in Chilmark, the three of them holding hands for as long as she could make them, crowded as near to one another as they were willing, briefly, to go. These photographs would climb up the staircase wall, step by step and year by year, three fussy babies, three impatient toddlers, three sullen children, three teenagers who would disperse the instant they heard the shutter click.
Chapter Five
Already Gone
In which the Oppenheimer triplets arrive and immediately commence to grow apart
Lewyn’s first memory was of a rocky beach (later to be identified as the one behind our Vineyard cottage), and a long strand of brown seaweed he held up to the sun.
Harrison’s first memory was of Jürgen the dog, growling at him.
Sally’s first memory was of her brother Harrison grabbing a piece of apple out of her brother Lewyn’s grubby hand.
What was the first shared memory? Settling on even that trifling common denominator would have required conversation and the acknowledgment of a shared history, and that was not to be, at least not while they were still children. Harrison, who did most things first, would opt out before the other two, but Sally wasn’t far behind. Lewyn, poor Lewyn, held on longer than would be reasonable to anyone else. In fact, he wouldn’t give up entirely until his sister dismissed him at the start of their shared freshman year at their mutual alma mater. But without the cooperation of the others, did it ever matter what Lewyn wanted?
Only days before their arrival, the house in Brooklyn Heights had been cavernous and still, classically proportioned rooms full of air, with only an immobile woman upstairs in the bedroom and a lazy dachshund guarding the Esplanade from a couch in the parlor. Now three infants sent forth their existential discontents into the void, and two baby nurses and a housekeeper raced around in an endless cycle of feeding and comforting and changing and bathing as Johanna looked on in pain and disarray. Still, three new souls had entered the world! More than replacing the ones Salo Oppenheimer had taken! Our father might have read in this cosmic redress some whiff of redemption, a tether (three tethers!) to set against his ongoing and incessant ricochet through life, but he could not seem to get there. He stood over them in the NICU, and later in their beautiful wooden cribs at home, sincerely trying to recognize these tiny, wrinkled, angry bundles as being somehow associated with himself, but he failed to do it. He would always fail to do it. Still, our father had been looking at paintings—often quite difficult paintings—for years by then, and because of that he was able to read an essential truth about those three tiny people—that they had arrived as they already were and would ever be: Harrison wild for escape, Sally preemptively sullen, Lewyn full of woe as he reached out for the others. There was no changing them, just as he had no real hope for change, himself.