He made an honest attempt to hold them, to stare into their foreign little faces, but even as he seated himself in the strange gliding rocker and took awkward possession of a baby from one of the nurses, he felt the insurmountability of what he faced. The infant would be at its best, newly bathed and diapered and swaddled, sated from a bottle and drifting toward sleep, but despite such favorable conditions he invariably handed it back and went to find the dog to take him for a walk on the Esplanade. A fair and warm September evening. Across the river, Wurttemberg Holdings was hunched somewhere in the nineteenth-century lowland between the American International Building and the World Trade Center, and everywhere in that dense and frenzied triangle of Manhattan Island young men swarmed the bars, and young women slipped off their office heels and laced on their sneakers to power-walk home. He did not want to be there, particularly. But he did not want to be where he was, either. Johanna, his parents, the fraternity brothers who’d made a point of not shunning him, the colleagues who deferred to him because he was an Oppenheimer, even these three little lives he’d helped to make; he recognized, not for the first time, that he didn’t seem to want any of it. But what did he want, instead?
The joint birth announcement was accompanied by the first of the enforced photographs, taken after the last of the babies (Harrison) came home from the NICU: three long infants in matching onesies, one stoic, one sleeping, one in tears. The baby nurses had been standing by when the new family arrived home, all systems at the ready, but Johanna still couldn’t settle. She was in a certain amount of the worst pain she had ever experienced from her caesarean, but she still had to fight the compulsion to jump up (and wrench open her sutures) whenever one of her children cried, which amounted to a near-constant challenge. The house, indeed, reverberated with infantile unhappiness (largely from Harrison, who gifted them all with his colic) and also stank of all the ordinary baby things. The two nurses didn’t get along, and one quickly dispatched the other and replaced her with her own sister-in-law, a silent woman who merely glowered. The dachshund made a point of climbing many stairs, just to soil the carefully chosen carpet in the boys’ room. (It was a lot of effort for him to go to, but apparently worth it.) Our mother’s maternal anxieties shifted from gestation to lactation, and she spent those first months in an armchair on the parlor floor as one whiny triplet after another was brought to her and taken away. Then, an intervention of nannies, the pediatrician, and her sister Debbie (who certainly had not breastfed either of her superior sons) persuaded her that she had done her duty and the children would sleep a lot better if they got a little formula. In a rare show of unity, all three babies instantly declared an allegiance to the bottle, and refused the breast thereafter.
The house on the Esplanade became a twenty-four-hour factory of rocking and feeding and cleaning and airing and rocking again, and feeding again. The various tenders (Johanna, eventually, among them) handed off the various babies to one another when someone needed to sleep (or eat, or pee, but mainly sleep), and the babies did most of what they were supposed to do, in the mainly right order, though Harrison was first at every milestone and either Sally or Lewyn lagged, always. Harrison would only be distracted from his colic when placed in his car seat and set on the dryer. Sally cycled through every conceivable food in search of something she wouldn’t projectile-vomit. Lewyn was placid and amiable so long as someone was holding him. Two had eczema. Only one had hair. It was hard to imagine a time beyond this time, with its constant neediness, strong primal odors, and sheer physicality.
Johanna, for once, lacked the wherewithal to think about what Salo wanted, and so her husband fell more and more into the habit of stopping in Red Hook on the way home to sit in the presence of what he had made and was still making: not a thing to be rushed. The first time she paused for breath the children were four and in the pre-K program at Walden.
By then the baby nurses were long gone and also the two nannies who’d replaced them, and she’d downshifted to an afternoon-and-weekend assist from a couple of Hunter College students who came with her to Walden pick-up and helped walk them home or ferry them to activities. All three kids went to a Mommy and Child music class (where they shook little egg maracas and showed a dearth of musical feeling) and attended a Saturday-morning sports program in the little park by Cadman Plaza (where only Harrison agreed to keep running around after the first ten minutes). At home she furnished the basement playroom with every conceivable prop and aid, and waited for the magical creative synergy of her happy children to fill the house on the Esplanade.
And waited.
It meant everything to Johanna that her children be powerfully attached to one another, even more attached than some random sequential assemblage of “normal” siblings might have been, but the illusion took every bit of her will and strength to maintain. There was not, for example, one single thing that Harrison, Lewyn, and Sally seemed content to do together—not just at the same time and in the same place but together—no matter how she or one of the nannies (later babysitters) might suggest, cajole, bribe, or even admonish them. Play some game! Cooperate! Even persuading them to sit on the same couch in the basement and watch the same television show or video seemed to require a Himalaya of effort. The three of them might rise but they simply declined to converge, even if they happened to actually share some interest or preference. Harrison and Sally were both readers, for example, but wouldn’t talk to each other about what they were reading, even when they were reading the same thing. Lewyn and Sally had both been affected by the passing of Jürgen, but each came to Johanna, separately, and said they were fine with not having another dog. Harrison and Lewyn both went through a superhero phase—at the same time, no less—but even then had refused to cooperate in play. To call them collectively “quiet” or “self-reliant,” for example, was to ignore the fact that Sally isolated herself to feel annoyed, Lewyn to feel wounded, and Harrison to simply escape the other two. So powerful was the mutual aversion, and so ironic, given the triplets had never actually been apart, that you might even have said it was the single thing the triplets actually did share.