“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 young, her father had rented his surgery under the stoop. Wanting to secure good tenants during the Depression, the landlord had soon offered her parents the two floors above, with three months rent-free. It was an excellent accommodation and they’d lived there ever since.

When she arrived, her mother met her at the door.

“Michael’s ready, and your father and Nathan will be down in a moment. Rachel was coming tomorrow, but she says they all have colds.”