The house on the Esplanade became a twenty-four-hour factory of rocking and feeding and cleaning and airing and rocking again, and feeding again. The various tenders （Johanna, eventually, among them） handed off the various babies to one another when someone needed to sleep （or eat, or pee, but mainly sleep）， and the babies did most of what they were supposed to do, in the mainly right order, though Harrison was first at every milestone and either Sally or Lewyn lagged, always. Harrison would only be distracted from his colic when placed in his car seat and set on the dryer. Sally cycled through every conceivable food in search of something she wouldn’t projectile-vomit. Lewyn was placid and amiable so long as someone was holding him. Two had eczema. Only one had hair. It was hard to imagine a time beyond this time, with its constant neediness, strong primal odors, and sheer physicality.
Johanna, for once, lacked the wherewithal to think about what Salo wanted, and so her husband fell more and more into the habit of stopping in Red Hook on the way home to sit in the presence of what he had made and was still making: not a thing to be rushed. The first time she paused for breath the children were four and in the pre-K program at Walden.
By then the baby nurses were long gone and also the two nannies who’d replaced them, and she’d downshifted to an afternoon-and-weekend assist from a couple of Hunter College students who came with her to Walden pick-up and helped walk them home or ferry them to activities. All three kids went to a Mommy and Child music class （where they shook little egg maracas and showed a dearth of musical feeling） and attended a Saturday-morning sports program in the little park by Cadman Plaza （where only Harrison agreed to keep running around after the first ten minutes）。 At home she furnished the basement playroom with every conceivable prop and aid, and waited for the magical creative synergy of her happy children to fill the house on the Esplanade.
And waited.
It meant everything to Johanna that her children be powerfully attached to one another, even more attached than some random sequential assemblage of “normal” siblings might have been, but the illusion took every bit of her will and strength to maintain. There was not, for example, one single thing that Harrison, Lewyn, and Sally seemed content to do together—not just at the same time and in the same place but together—no matter how she or one of the nannies （later babysitters） might suggest, cajole, bribe, or even admonish them. Play some game! Cooperate! Even persuading them to sit on the same couch in the basement and watch the same television show or video seemed to require a Himalaya of effort. The three of them might rise but they simply declined to converge, even if they happened to actually share some interest or preference. Harrison and Sally were both readers, for example, but wouldn’t talk to each other about what they were reading, even when they were reading the same thing. Lewyn and Sally had both been affected by the passing of Jürgen, but each came to Johanna, separately, and said they were fine with not having another dog. Harrison and Lewyn both went through a superhero phase—at the same time, no less—but even then had refused to cooperate in play. To call them collectively “quiet” or “self-reliant,” for example, was to ignore the fact that Sally isolated herself to feel annoyed, Lewyn to feel wounded, and Harrison to simply escape the other two. So powerful was the mutual aversion, and so ironic, given the triplets had never actually been apart, that you might even have said it was the single thing the triplets actually did share.
In the house on the Esplanade, home to three toddlers, then three preschoolers, then three primary-school-aged children, the only time our mother heard the sound of kids at play was when one of her children had a friend over. Otherwise: silence in the basement playroom with its puppet theater and cupboards full of board games and arsenals of foam weapons for active children to hurl at one another, silence in the bedrooms and in the living room, where she not infrequently came across a child with a book or art project or solo game. Her home was quiet—so quiet—with not even the shared quiet of a video they all liked down on the basement couch, or the companionable quiet of concurrent reading. When they gathered for a meal conversation might be made, grudgingly, and light chores could be jointly undertaken without too much complaint, but at the first opportunity they parted again, to tend to homework or activities or recreation, and to think separate thoughts about who knew what.