Salo’s life at Wurttemberg was precisely what he had expected it to be. The limestone building on a corner near the Stock Exchange had been the shrewd purchase of his father’s grandfather at exactly the right moment, that moment being the fall of 1920, shortly after the Stock Exchange bombing. This Oppenheimer forebear declined the opportunity to build upward, insisting that the stubby little limestone corner remain a mushroom among redwoods. Inside, time slowed to a crawl: the quiet dignity of a rigorously private institution with stately reception and meeting rooms on the ground floor and elegant individual offices upstairs (some large, others very large). Floors were swept and woodwork made to glow by invisible nighttime cleaners, and every morning breakfast was arranged in chafing dishes in the dining room for the employees, as if they were all members of some titled family, gathering for kippered eggs and toast before dispersing to their busy days. The firm’s culture was somewhat suggestive of certain other institutions which had gone out of their way to make earlier generations of Oppenheimers as unwelcome as possible, and unlike other Jewish firms founded by equally adept and ambitious families Wurttemberg had been steered by a century of like-minded commodores with one eye on family wealth and another on the next generation. Unlike those firms, Wurttemberg resisted every one of the sinkholes that came along to bedevil the industry, among them leveraged buyouts, junk bonds, insider trading, “pumping and dumping,” and the occasional Ponzi scheme.
When Salo Oppenheimer assumed possession of one of the third-floor offices, he brought with him only that square gray painting his wife found so distasteful. The painting—its actual name was Dylan Study II—went on the wall opposite our father’s desk, where its stillness and depth would sustain him for many years. Johanna, making a rare visit at around this time, was relieved to see Dylan Study II in its new home, but the office as a whole looked a little dingy. She suggested a coat of paint. Maybe a brighter white? Or at least a pair of lamps from Bloomingdale’s? “It’s so dim in here.”
“I know. It’s always been like that, even before all those buildings went up.”
“There must be something we can do.”
No, he told her. “You concentrate on the house.”
The house, their new house, was in Brooklyn, a place where neither of them had ever considered living. Brooklyn in those years seemed much farther away from Manhattan than it later would, and represented a very different city. But at one of her work events Johanna met a magazine editor from People who understood the significance of our mother’s new last name. She also had a husband who was a young broker at Douglas Elliman, so low on the totem pole that he’d been assigned this Van Diemen’s Land of New York City. He called Johanna Oppenheimer the very next day and told her he had something he wanted to show her, in Brooklyn Heights.
Our mother had once watched a scary movie in which a Brooklyn Heights house actually contained the gateway to hell, and she felt a little spooked at the thought of looking out there, even if the Realtor promised it was spectacular, undervalued, and—the key to everything she thought about in those days—big enough for a family. She caught some heat from the driver of the taxi she hailed on Lexington, but an extra twenty persuaded him and he drove her, for the first time in her life, over the Brooklyn Bridge and through the cobbled streets of the Heights. The driver left her a few minutes’ walk away on Montague Terrace, unwilling to help her find the right number and so surly it was clear he thought she must be looking for something unlawful. (Drugs? Or a gun?) So our mother gave him his fare and the twenty and climbed out, already worried about how she was going to get home.
The agent was waiting for her down the block, and he came rushing to meet her, perhaps to make sure she didn’t flee. His name was Barton Zanes. He was twenty-five, tops, but already completely bald.
She took in the street, which was shabby. Once grand, she could see that, but in 1979 much diminished. “Where does that go?” she asked. There were very dubious people walking on a kind of footpath beside the house Zanes had led her to: a couple with their hands in each other’s back pockets, and a tall man with a rottweiler.
“It goes down to the Esplanade. On the waterfront. You know.”
Of course she didn’t know. She was a girl from suburban New Jersey who’d only just gotten used to the Upper East Side. As far as she was concerned, Brooklyn was where John Travolta went to the disco and Gene Hackman chased drug dealers, and where gangs on the subway roamed at will (not that she ever rode the subway in Manhattan, where gangs also roamed at will). And also, where blind priests guarded the entrance to hell: Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.
“It overlooks all of lower Manhattan. You see?” He was pointing after the rottweiler at a walkway above the open water. She didn’t even know what that water was. The Hudson? “Doesn’t your husband work in the Financial District? He can walk to work!”
“Walk?” she said, mystified. “How?”
“Over the bridge!” said Barton Zanes. He seemed delighted. “C’mon, let’s look. It’s completely insane.”
And it was, it was. Even she was breathless at the rooms, some of which had broad views of that spectacular water—New York Harbor!—and the buildings of Wall Street and the Fulton Fish Market and even the Statue of Liberty. The floors were dingy and scratched, but they were all there, inlay and parquet. The plaster walls were flaking and seemed in places to emit strands of something, waving in the air—horsehair, Zanes said helpfully, as if this were a good thing. (Horsehair? In the walls?) The great carved bannister wobbled. A few windows were cracked or patched with duct tape. Some of the bathroom tiles had crumbled to dust. There was a kitchen somebody had obviously started to renovate, but lost the will to proceed with after the appliances had been extracted. “So you can start over!” said Zanes. “Marble everywhere! A big commercial stove! Gourmet kitchen!”
“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.