New York - The Novel

wasn’t Italian.”
    “I’m sorry—since when?”
    “His father was Italian, but his mother was Jewish. That makes him Jewish. Ask my family.”
    “Okay. How do they feel about Robert Moses? Both his parents are Jewish.”
    “We hate him.”
    “He’s done a lot for the city.”
    “That’s true. But my Aunt Ruth lives in the Bronx, and he’s just destroyed the value of her property.” The great Cross Bronx Expressway that Moses was carving across that borough was the most difficult project the masterbuilder had ever undertaken. A lot of people were being displaced, seeing their property values go down, and they didn’t like it. “She says she hopes he breaks his neck.” She grinned. “My family’s close. We support her. Moses will eventually be destroyed.”
    “You have a big family?”
    “A sister, two brothers. My mother’s family all moved out of New York. Aunt Ruth is my father’s sister.” She paused. “My father had a brother, Herman, who used to live in New York. But he went to Europe before the war and then …” She hesitated.
    “He didn’t come back?”
    “We don’t talk about him.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    She shrugged, then changed the subject.
    “So, your son lives on Staten Island. Does he have a mother?”
    “Yes. My ex-wife.”
    “Oh. I guess it’s not my business.”
    “That’s okay. She and I get along.” He smiled. “You know, when the gallery said you were going to organize Keller’s show, I wasn’t too certain about it.”
    “What changed your mind?”
    “What you said about Keller’s work and Stieglitz. Of course,” he added, “I still have to discover if you’re competent.”
    “I am. And I’m a big fan of Alfred Stieglitz, by the way. Not just his own photography, but all the other shows he arranged. Did you know he organized one of the first exhibitions of Ansel Adams in New York?”
    The show of Adams’s astounding photographs of the huge American landscape had been the highlight of Charlie’s year, back in ‘36, shortly before he went to the Spanish Civil War.
    “I was there,” he said.
    “I also admire his personal life. A man whom Georgia O’Keeffe marries must be pretty special.”
    In Charlie’s view, the affair and marriage of the photographer and the great painter had been one of the most significant partnerships in the twentieth-century art world, though it had been quite stormy.
    “He wasn’t faithful,” he said.
    “He was Stieglitz.” She shrugged. “You’ve got to hand it to him, though. He was nearly fifty-five when he started living with O’Keeffe. And he was sixty-four when he took up with that other girl.”
    “Dorothy Norman. I knew her, actually.”
    “And she was only twenty-two.”
    “Hell of an age difference.”
    She looked at him. “You’re only as old as you feel.”

    On Friday afternoon, Sarah Adler took the subway to Brooklyn. She had a new book to read.
The Bridges at Toko-Ri
was a short, fast-paced novel by James Michener about the recent Korean War. She hardly noticed the stations go by until she got to Flatbush.
    Sarah loved Brooklyn. If you came from Brooklyn, you belonged there always. Partly, perhaps, it was the basic geography of the place. Ninety square miles of territory, two hundred miles of waterfront—no wonder the Dutch had liked it. There was something about the light in Brooklyn,it was so clear. The English might have come and called it Kings County. Huge bridges might link it to Manhattan—in addition to the Brooklyn Bridge, there were the Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges now—along with the subway. Seventy years of growth might have covered much of its quiet, rural space with housing—though huge parks and leafy streets remained. Yet on a quiet weekend morning, walking along a street of brownstone houses with their Dutch stoops, you could still almost think, in that limpid Brooklyn light, that you were in a painting by Vermeer.
    It was still light as she made her way from the station. The whole of Flatbush was so full of childhood landmarks, from the modest pleasures of the soda fountain where you had egg creams, the kosher delicatessen and the restaurant on Pitkin Avenue where you went for a treat, to Ebbets Field itself, that cramped but sacred holy ground where the Brooklyn Dodgers played. She went by the candy store where all the children used to hang out, then entered the street where they used to play stoop ball.
    The Adlers lived in a brownstone. When Sarah was very