Bright, Precious Days

32

THE FIRST FRIDAY OF EVERY MONTH was the food giveaway at the Grant Housing Project in Harlem. Carol, the realtor, was among those who showed up for the volunteer orientation.

“I was going to call you,” she said, her unruly salt-and-pepper hair pulled back in a ponytail with a scrunchie. “I don’t know if you’re still looking, but there’s been a price reduction at that town house on West 121st. The bank’s threatening foreclosure and the owner’s desperate. It looks like they’re going to do a short sale.”

Much as this announcement piqued Corrine’s interest, she couldn’t help feeling this wasn’t the time or place for that conversation, though she had loved the house Carol had showed her two months earlier. Most of the families in the crumbling housing project were on some sort of public assistance, and the median income for a family of four, of which there were very few, was around twenty thousand.

“Let’s talk afterward,” Corrine said before setting up the separate stations for turnips, carrots and acorn squash.

They’d met here after Carol first volunteered a year ago, and within minutes Corrine had heard the whole story: “We were the perfect couple, Upper West Side liberal Jewish intelligentsia version. He taught political science at Columbia. Culturally we were Jewish — we did the bar mitzvah and the bat mitzvah — but basically we were nonobservant. We were secular humanists, and proud of it. We thought that religion was divisive; superstition, the opiate of the masses. Fast forward to 9/11: Howard’s brother worked for Cantor Fitzgerald; he’s on the one hundred and fifth floor when the first plane hits. They were close, so Howard’s on the phone with him when the tower collapses. And he goes into a funk. We all go into a funk, right? But Howard doesn’t come out of his, and he turns to religion. He starts going to synagogue and then he joins this Orthodox shul, and I try it a few times, but my heart’s not in it. I tell him, ‘Hey, honey, it’s your thing.’ He becomes ultra-Zionist and insists we keep kosher, and he wants to send the kids to Hebrew school, and eventually he quits his job and moves out of the house and joins this Hasidic sect in Brooklyn. Suddenly I’ve got no husband and no income. So that’s how I got into real estate.”

When she heard that Corrine was thinking about moving, Carol had talked up the virtues of the far Upper West Side, the high eighties and nineties, where they looked at several three-bedroom apartments in a nice prewar building. But Corrine’s price range kept driving them north, till Carol said, “For about the same money you could get a town house in Harlem. The housing stock is incredible — block after block of late-nineteenth-century town houses. As recently as five years ago, I wouldn’t have advised someone like you to consider it. I mean, I wouldn’t want that on my conscience. Now, I’d say jump before it’s too late. Sure, it’s still rough around the edges, but you’re already seeing features in New York magazine. You don’t want to be the last white people through the door.”

“I’d hate to think we were displacing the…local residents.”

“It’s not you; it’s the economy. Market forces. The neighborhood has already been ravaged. It was heroin in the sixties and seventies; then the crack wars in the eighties and nineties wiped out what was left of the middle class. A lot of these properties — the best values, really — are abandoned foreclosures. Boarded-up town houses used as drug dens for the last couple of decades. And the others are already renovated. Those are getting pricey. I’m not sure you could swing that. It’s funny, though, the kind of white people who consider moving to Harlem — I don’t count the speculators, of course — are precisely the kind most prone to liberal guilt.”

“What about, you know, crime?”

“Oh God, SoHa, it’s totally safe.”

“SoHa?”

“South Harlem. Get it? It’s SoHo for the aughts. I’m not saying it’s the Upper East Side, but it’s safer than the Upper West Side was when I was growing up. We lived on Riverside, and my mother wouldn’t let me walk to Central Park because Amsterdam and Broadway and Columbus were so dangerous. You’ve heard of Needle Park, right? They made that film with Al Pacino. That was Broadway and 72nd. You had these well-to-do Jewish upper-middle-class families on the river and on the park, but everything in between was the freakin’ Wild West. Junkies, muggers, perverts in raincoats. Broadway was lined with SROs full of released mental patients. The good old days. Hah! Compared to that, Harlem, today, it’s gotten to the point where it’s hard to score drugs, so they tell me. The trade’s mostly moved uptown to Inwood.”

—

Harlem. It was a heady concept. Russell had a completely irrational dislike of the Upper West Side, but Harlem, upper as it was, might just appeal to his sense of urban romance. She hadn’t even told him she was looking yet. She wanted to find something and present him with the whole package. A town house in Harlem was an evocative phrase, charged with tension, contradiction, vibrating between poles of domesticity and urban menace. Corrine had a tenuous ancestral tie to the neighborhood, her grandfather having fallen under its spell after being taken to a jazz club by his friend Carl Van Vechten, and he’d told her many stories about those visits.

The idea had grown on Corrine after she took a tour with Carol two months ago. They’d focused their search south of 125th, as close as possible to the kids’ new school on East 94th, looking at duplexes and town houses, whole and divided, including a few that were boarded up and derelict, fetid, the walls covered in graffiti, crack vials underfoot, some of them mere shells and others with century-old decorative flourishes intact: elaborate moldings and fireplaces, magnificent staircases and monumental arches.

She’d been completely and utterly smitten by the last house of the day, an Italianate brownstone on West 121st Street that had been partially renovated by the owner, who’d bought it in 2006 and quickly run out of money. This was the house that Carol wanted to talk about now. The parlor floor was composed of two theatrical rooms with fourteen-foot ceilings and egg and dart molding, joined by a soaring arch. The front room had been restored to its former glory, with Carrara marble fireplaces flanked by Ionic columns. “This kitchen wasn’t even here; it used to be downstairs. Look at this,” Carol said, on the day of the tour, beckoning her to the back room, a huge kitchen and dining area. “Sub-Zero, Miele dishwasher, granite countertops, the works.” Corrine could see Russell getting excited about this. “Plus the boiler and the roof are new,” Carol had added. “After that, well, it gets a little rough.” The rooms on the upper floors were in various states of disrepair, but by no means unrecoverable. Many of the windows were boarded up or bricked over, and the top floor was a junkyard, but Corrine was absolutely giddy, given the space, the sheer number of rooms, and the fenced-in backyard. “If she’d finished the job, this place could easily go for one five, one seven, but that’s the beauty of it. You can finish it yourself, and you’ve got a motivated seller.”

“It’s still a stretch,” Corrine had said wistfully.

“It would be easy to seal the lower stairs and rent out the basement apartment for income to defray the mortgage.”

She pictured herself here, in a house, with her family: Russell reading in front of the fireplace, the children playing with their friends in the backyard. It seemed almost attainable, and yet she knew that it was more than their present circumstances would allow. And then — she couldn’t help it — just for a moment, she wondered what Luke would think of the place.

“I’m pretty sure we can get it for one point one,” Carol said to Corrine now, after the last cabbage had been distributed.

She’d never been one to yearn beyond her means, but she desperately wanted this house and told herself if she could only find a way to get her family there, she would be happy with her lot, and with the man she’d married, and never wish for more.