When Salo Oppenheimer assumed possession of one of the third-floor offices, he brought with him only that square gray painting his wife found so distasteful. The painting—its actual name was Dylan Study II—went on the wall opposite our father’s desk, where its stillness and depth would sustain him for many years. Johanna, making a rare visit at around this time, was relieved to see Dylan Study II in its new home, but the office as a whole looked a little dingy. She suggested a coat of paint. Maybe a brighter white? Or at least a pair of lamps from Bloomingdale’s? “It’s so dim in here.”
“I know. It’s always been like that, even before all those buildings went up.”
“There must be something we can do.”
No, he told her. “You concentrate on the house.”
The house, their new house, was in Brooklyn, a place where neither of them had ever considered living. Brooklyn in those years seemed much farther away from Manhattan than it later would, and represented a very different city. But at one of her work events Johanna met a magazine editor from People who understood the significance of our mother’s new last name. She also had a husband who was a young broker at Douglas Elliman, so low on the totem pole that he’d been assigned this Van Diemen’s Land of New York City. He called Johanna Oppenheimer the very next day and told her he had something he wanted to show her, in Brooklyn Heights.
Our mother had once watched a scary movie in which a Brooklyn Heights house actually contained the gateway to hell, and she felt a little spooked at the thought of looking out there, even if the Realtor promised it was spectacular, undervalued, and—the key to everything she thought about in those days—big enough for a family. She caught some heat from the driver of the taxi she hailed on Lexington, but an extra twenty persuaded him and he drove her, for the first time in her life, over the Brooklyn Bridge and through the cobbled streets of the Heights. The driver left her a few minutes’ walk away on Montague Terrace, unwilling to help her find the right number and so surly it was clear he thought she must be looking for something unlawful. （Drugs? Or a gun?） So our mother gave him his fare and the twenty and climbed out, already worried about how she was going to get home.
The agent was waiting for her down the block, and he came rushing to meet her, perhaps to make sure she didn’t flee. His name was Barton Zanes. He was twenty-five, tops, but already completely bald.
She took in the street, which was shabby. Once grand, she could see that, but in 1979 much diminished. “Where does that go?” she asked. There were very dubious people walking on a kind of footpath beside the house Zanes had led her to: a couple with their hands in each other’s back pockets, and a tall man with a rottweiler.
“It goes down to the Esplanade. On the waterfront. You know.”
Of course she didn’t know. She was a girl from suburban New Jersey who’d only just gotten used to the Upper East Side. As far as she was concerned, Brooklyn was where John Travolta went to the disco and Gene Hackman chased drug dealers, and where gangs on the subway roamed at will （not that she ever rode the subway in Manhattan, where gangs also roamed at will）。 And also, where blind priests guarded the entrance to hell: Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.
“It overlooks all of lower Manhattan. You see?” He was pointing after the rottweiler at a walkway above the open water. She didn’t even know what that water was. The Hudson? “Doesn’t your husband work in the Financial District? He can walk to work!”
“Walk?” she said, mystified. “How?”
“Over the bridge!” said Barton Zanes. He seemed delighted. “C’mon, let’s look. It’s completely insane.”
And it was, it was. Even she was breathless at the rooms, some of which had broad views of that spectacular water—New York Harbor!—and the buildings of Wall Street and the Fulton Fish Market and even the Statue of Liberty. The floors were dingy and scratched, but they were all there, inlay and parquet. The plaster walls were flaking and seemed in places to emit strands of something, waving in the air—horsehair, Zanes said helpfully, as if this were a good thing. （Horsehair? In the walls?） The great carved bannister wobbled. A few windows were cracked or patched with duct tape. Some of the bathroom tiles had crumbled to dust. There was a kitchen somebody had obviously started to renovate, but lost the will to proceed with after the appliances had been extracted. “So you can start over!” said Zanes. “Marble everywhere! A big commercial stove! Gourmet kitchen!”