Harrison’s first memory was of Jürgen the dog, growling at him.
Sally’s first memory was of her brother Harrison grabbing a piece of apple out of her brother Lewyn’s grubby hand.
What was the first shared memory? Settling on even that trifling common denominator would have required conversation and the acknowledgment of a shared history, and that was not to be, at least not while they were still children. Harrison, who did most things first, would opt out before the other two, but Sally wasn’t far behind. Lewyn, poor Lewyn, held on longer than would be reasonable to anyone else. In fact, he wouldn’t give up entirely until his sister dismissed him at the start of their shared freshman year at their mutual alma mater. But without the cooperation of the others, did it ever matter what Lewyn wanted?
Only days before their arrival, the house in Brooklyn Heights had been cavernous and still, classically proportioned rooms full of air, with only an immobile woman upstairs in the bedroom and a lazy dachshund guarding the Esplanade from a couch in the parlor. Now three infants sent forth their existential discontents into the void, and two baby nurses and a housekeeper raced around in an endless cycle of feeding and comforting and changing and bathing as Johanna looked on in pain and disarray. Still, three new souls had entered the world! More than replacing the ones Salo Oppenheimer had taken! Our father might have read in this cosmic redress some whiff of redemption, a tether （three tethers!） to set against his ongoing and incessant ricochet through life, but he could not seem to get there. He stood over them in the NICU, and later in their beautiful wooden cribs at home, sincerely trying to recognize these tiny, wrinkled, angry bundles as being somehow associated with himself, but he failed to do it. He would always fail to do it. Still, our father had been looking at paintings—often quite difficult paintings—for years by then, and because of that he was able to read an essential truth about those three tiny people—that they had arrived as they already were and would ever be: Harrison wild for escape, Sally preemptively sullen, Lewyn full of woe as he reached out for the others. There was no changing them, just as he had no real hope for change, himself.
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.