So our father certainly understood that he was not what was now being called an “involved” or “attached” father, but naturally he felt responsible for his children, and he approved of them, in general. Sally was fractious but she also had some deep strength the others did not—that boded well for a world in which people were always, essentially, alone. Lewyn was easily wounded, but he had a reserve of human warmth that our father respected. Harrison he never worried about for one moment. Harrison’s dark days were right now, with the constraints of Walden upon him, but once he went out in the world he would proceed directly to wherever his true peers were congregating, and be as content with those people, in those places, as he was capable of being.
The triplets, by this point, had reached the precipice of Walden Upper, home of the legendary Walden creativity and scholarship （and drug experimentation and broadly supported sexual expression）; beyond that, the vision of their departure for college began to shimmer in the distance. Neither of our parents was blasé about this symbolic finish line, but beyond that tiny point of agreement they saw things very differently. Even before that day at the Outsider Art Fair, our father had long been aware of a certain excitement in the way he thought about the children’s departure, and what the transition might mean for his own future. Sometimes he thought of the houses he himself owned on Coffey Street, a few of them still with tenants, one empty. That appraiser hadn’t been wrong about the neighborhood, exactly, but there had been certain intriguing signs in the years since his ill-advised purchase: artists taking over the old buildings, young couples repainting the wood-frame homes. There was a new restaurant on Van Brunt Street that was surprisingly good, not all that different from the expensive places in Brooklyn Heights （or even, for that matter, Manhattan）。 Sometimes, before he got back into his car at night, he walked down to the empty house at the end, his favorite of the properties. No one had lived in it since his purchase, but Salo had been inside a number of times and he had some recurring thoughts about a renovation: bathrooms, a kitchen, care for the cracked walls. There was income potential there, possibly, especially with the intrepid young people now exploring Brooklyn’s nether regions. There was even some vague talk about a regular ferry service to and from Manhattan. But in the end it came to him that no one should live in this house but himself.
Johanna had no such daydreams about houses or apartments. Neither were there excited plans to work again, or go back to school, or even just enjoy herself once the day-to-day concerns of parenting came to an end. Our mother, on the contrary, contemplated the future with deep and growing dread, and Salo had good reason to worry about how she’d navigate this treacherous passage to whatever came next. Her life recoiled, even as his sped toward an opening.
Stella went back to Oakland, where her life was. Of course she did. Salo, when he thought of her, which was often, had reason to be grateful she lived so far away. But when she came to the city he met her for dinner in some formal restaurant, the kind where people conducted business affairs, not personal ones. And they did have business to discuss, now that the Rizzoli paintings were safe in the collection of a single owner, an owner more than willing to make the works available to her for filming and study. She moved to secure funding from her previous partners: the Arts Council of California, the National Foundation for the Arts. Her project moved at the usual glacial pace, but it did move. Certainly, the film she envisioned was impacted by the public’s unyielding interest in Henry Darger, the painter of little girls at war who, to no one’s surprise, had become the shining star of the entire genre of Outsider Art, casting all other artists into corresponding shadow. Already there were books about Darger, and films about Darger, and innumerable magazine stories about Darger, and the works themselves were making their way around some of the country’s most important art museums. No one seemed interested in a different backward, antisocial guy who’d left his life’s work in a hopeless pile after his lonely death. It frustrated Salo but not Stella, who reminded him that documentary filmmaking was a long game, and any number of superb, even classic films had taken years of dogged stewardship and suffered many varieties of setbacks on their way to getting made. In the meantime, she had actually managed to find a couple of elderly San Franciscans who’d worked with the reclusive draftsman, and a neighbor who’d once stepped into his apartment on the day of his annual exhibition to the public. （And emerged moments later, mystified.）