In her seventh month, the art movers arrived and the pictures began to leave: the scribbles and splashes and dark mazes of color. With many apologies and obvious embarrassment, they came into the bedroom and gently removed the triptych and took it, like all the rest, to that other place.
Which brings us, now and inevitably, to our father’s warehouse.
The warehouse had previously been part of a portfolio Salo managed, itself descendant through Wurttemberg as part of an estate from his grandfather’s time. This had once included several acres of Brooklyn, and even after being forced to sell a portion of its land for the future construction of the Red Hook Houses, it retained a row of structures in Red Hook, on Coffey Street. Red Hook in 1982 was a neighborhood that could not imagine itself becoming anything but what it was: industrial and remote and rudely bisected from the rest of the borough by that massive swath of public housing. Small wonder, then, that it was also a place Salo Oppenheimer, native New Yorker, had never set foot. Until the day he did just that.
The current principals in the estate were a pair of brothers in Fort Lauderdale who had not spoken to each other in a decade and were both childless （or as good as, since the brother who’d actually fathered a single child had gone to extreme legal lengths to disown her）。 Salo had never met either man in the flesh; he communicated with Abraham Geller of Fort Lauderdale by fax （with a cc to Myron Geller of Fort Lauderdale by standard mail）， and with Myron Geller of Fort Lauderdale by standard mail （with a cc to Abraham Geller of Fort Lauderdale by fax）， almost always about unremarkable matters. Over time both brothers had expressed their strong desire to “off-load” （in the words of Myron Geller of Fort Lauderdale） Coffey Street, but selling wasn’t a straightforward proposition because of one of the trust’s more archaic mandates, which was to obtain valuations of every structure in the portfolio every ten years and restrict any initiation of sale to an eighteen-month window following that valuation. Thus, the properties were forced to languish through the ’70s as their value declined and the estranged brothers of Fort Lauderdale raised their voices in a crescendo of strangely harmonic （under the circumstances） protest.
In the fall of 1981, as Johanna began her final, magical round of in vitro fertilization, the mandate and its magic outlet rolled around again. Accompanying the appraiser through some of these shabbier Brooklyn locales might have been delegated to a Wurttemberg employee whose last name wasn’t Oppenheimer, but our father, now newly resident in this self-same borough, found that he was curious about the addresses he’d known for years. They proved to be old residential buildings abutting a former sugar refinery on a cobblestone street sloping down to the water. The homes were old and basically intact, with rough wooden floors and crumbling walls, and fireplaces that looked far from safe. A couple of them had tenants. The factory building was vacant.
“What do you think of the neighborhood?” our father asked the appraiser.
“This isn’t a neighborhood,” the appraiser said. “Red Hook? You kidding?”
“It was, once,” Salo observed. He had been reading up. Red Hook had originally been a Dutch village, then a busy port, then a warren of tenements full of Norwegian dock workers. That was before the Red Hook Houses, of course.
“Nah. This place’ll never come back. If these buildings were in Brooklyn Heights or Park Slope. Even Cobble Hill, maybe, in time. But your clients picked the wrong place to inherit a chunk of the city.”
Salo nodded. He didn’t disagree. He didn’t know enough to disagree, but he was already thinking. And when the valuation for those Coffey Street buildings came in even lower than he’d imagined, he did nothing at first except try to explain to the brothers that neither the firm nor a Brooklyn Realtor he’d consulted at their request felt that any of the properties had a market. But neither Abraham Geller nor Myron Geller, both well into their eighties, saw any reason to wait. Soon, every one of their Red Hook properties was offered for sale to a highly uninterested market.
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.