“I’m not that great a cook,” our mother said, as if this had ever stopped anyone from ordering up a gourmet kitchen. “But, you know, I can sort of see a big table here.”
She could see more than that. She could hear her own children running up and down these staircases, flushing the less than modern toilets and bathing in the oversized claw-foot tubs. She could imagine playrooms and rooms for piling on a couch in front of the television. As she climbed the stairs to the attic rooms and descended to the basement, it seemed that the more rooms there were the more children she might have. She could see a different Salo in this house, as well: a father and husband, a man who felt able to take pleasure in life. That was what she wanted for him, and it might be possible here as it could never be possible in that dingy little apartment on Third. For the first time it struck her that staying in such a featureless and depressing place as their present apartment was somehow preventing her family from coming into being. If we lived here, she thought, our children would be here with us.
Of course, she didn’t tell Salo that. She told him that the house needed lots of work, but something about it felt right and he should come as quickly as possible to see it. Salo, lifelong New Yorker that he was, did not need to be told what he was looking at when he stood by the west-facing windows, but he was dumbstruck, nonetheless. It happened to be a late afternoon in November, and the sun was disappearing over New Jersey, trailing orange and pink along the water as a ferry headed home to Staten Island. Twenty-five-foot-wide single-family homes with twenty-foot ceilings （on the parlor floor, at least; the rest were a mere fourteen） and four fireplaces had already become both scarce and expensive in Manhattan. And not one of them actually overlooked … Manhattan.
He asked again what the price was, and when he heard it his heart leapt. Then he offered 75 percent, cash.
Not surprisingly, his parents were vocally opposed. Where would they shop for groceries in Brooklyn? Some kosher market in Williamsburg or Crown Heights? Where would they find doctors and dentists? What about a gym and a video store and a salon? Salo and Johanna should stay in that nice new building on the Upper East Side, and, when the time came, they could move to Park or Fifth or even the West Side, if they really wanted to go crazy and antiestablishment. There were some parts of the West Side that were just lovely. But Brooklyn? Why not The Bronx. Why not Staten Island!
“It’s absurdly inexpensive,” he told them.
“Well, there’s a reason for that,” his father said.
“It’s going to be gorgeous once we’ve fixed it up.”
“I think this idea that you’re going to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to work is very bizarre,” said his mother. “Who walks across a bridge?”
“Lots of people.”
“If you’re in the middle of the bridge and someone tries to rob you, who can help?”
The same no one who’d rush to help you on Park Avenue, Salo thought.
And, our grandmother added, this time to Johanna, and in a studiously offhand way so as not to make a thing of it, if the two of them had children one day, only think how long it would take to cart them into the city every morning to Brearley or Collegiate, and then back to Brooklyn again!
But there was a school nearby, very nearby, in fact, called Walden. And if that school did, oddly, refer to itself as an “educational collective” and was the kind of place where children apparently learned from drum-beating teachers, well, that was all right with her, not that she said this to her mother-in-law. Already—more than once—she had walked dreamily around its periphery, peering through the iron gate at the multicolored playground full of shouting girls and boys. Yes, their children could go to Walden. If, that is, they were ever born.
Chapter Three
Fertility and Its Discontents
In which a rosary is said for the Oppenheimers, with remarkable results