This was not that. This was not that, at all.
Our father, for one thing, was not a person given to tracking beautiful women as they walked down the street or gathered in front of the school, and there were many, many beautiful women around Walden, aerobicized in the ’80s and increasingly yoga’ed or Pilate’d as the ’90s got underway. Some of these women worked, in the parlance of the day, “outside the home”; others took care of their kids and more highly calibrated care of themselves. A few Walden moms were even famous—actresses and media figures—yet they made a good-faith effort to leave their outside lives at the door and be informal and approachable within the school’s social enclosure. Salo hardly ever gave any attention to these women. Not even the beautiful ones. Not even the famously beautiful ones. “Tell me her name again,” he would ask Johanna as they made their way home after the fourth-grade play or all-school fundraising evening. “I know I’ve met her. She seems so familiar.”
“She starred in that movie you liked, about the bank heist,” our mother would say. “That’s why she seems familiar.”
Sometimes he told himself that their marriage worked because each of them ceded the authority of their respective spheres to the other. The fact that they didn’t crowd each other or push their way into each other’s daily affairs, that was a good thing. Wasn’t it? And of course he valued the work our mother did, running the family so smoothly that he could spend his hours in Red Hook or fly to Europe to see a picture or attend an auction, just because he wanted to. From the beginning our father had addressed family life as a party of one, setting a schedule around his personal needs and responsibilities and interests, while she was a many-tentacled creature, staying on top of the vaccinations and tutoring (for Lewyn, who needed help in math) and vet appointments (while the dog was alive) and upkeep on the house (both houses) and oversight of her parents (because her mother was beginning to have some difficulty with language, and her father refused to accept this, and Debbie was so busy and Bobby was incapable of doing a single thing in aid of anyone who wasn’t Bobby) and incidentally Salo’s parents as well. (Hermann had fallen the previous spring, on the corner of Seventy-Seventh and Park, and the resulting hospital stay had left him with an invasive staph infection leading to endocarditis. He was home now, but much diminished and not all that fun to be around, not that he ever had been. Johanna visited at least once a week.)
So our father certainly understood that he was not what was now being called an “involved” or “attached” father, but naturally he felt responsible for his children, and he approved of them, in general. Sally was fractious but she also had some deep strength the others did not—that boded well for a world in which people were always, essentially, alone. Lewyn was easily wounded, but he had a reserve of human warmth that our father respected. Harrison he never worried about for one moment. Harrison’s dark days were right now, with the constraints of Walden upon him, but once he went out in the world he would proceed directly to wherever his true peers were congregating, and be as content with those people, in those places, as he was capable of being.
The triplets, by this point, had reached the precipice of Walden Upper, home of the legendary Walden creativity and scholarship (and drug experimentation and broadly supported sexual expression); beyond that, the vision of their departure for college began to shimmer in the distance. Neither of our parents was blasé about this symbolic finish line, but beyond that tiny point of agreement they saw things very differently. Even before that day at the Outsider Art Fair, our father had long been aware of a certain excitement in the way he thought about the children’s departure, and what the transition might mean for his own future. Sometimes he thought of the houses he himself owned on Coffey Street, a few of them still with tenants, one empty. That appraiser hadn’t been wrong about the neighborhood, exactly, but there had been certain intriguing signs in the years since his ill-advised purchase: artists taking over the old buildings, young couples repainting the wood-frame homes. There was a new restaurant on Van Brunt Street that was surprisingly good, not all that different from the expensive places in Brooklyn Heights (or even, for that matter, Manhattan). Sometimes, before he got back into his car at night, he walked down to the empty house at the end, his favorite of the properties. No one had lived in it since his purchase, but Salo had been inside a number of times and he had some recurring thoughts about a renovation: bathrooms, a kitchen, care for the cracked walls. There was income potential there, possibly, especially with the intrepid young people now exploring Brooklyn’s nether regions. There was even some vague talk about a regular ferry service to and from Manhattan. But in the end it came to him that no one should live in this house but himself.
Johanna had no such daydreams about houses or apartments. Neither were there excited plans to work again, or go back to school, or even just enjoy herself once the day-to-day concerns of parenting came to an end. Our mother, on the contrary, contemplated the future with deep and growing dread, and Salo had good reason to worry about how she’d navigate this treacherous passage to whatever came next. Her life recoiled, even as his sped toward an opening.