Tour This Art-Filled New York Family Home

My father was chaste in his clothing choices (white, beige, cream), but he could not resist the tug of a deep crimson shawl. I remember it as a family relic, packed with mothballs and stored away in a steel trunk every summer. A richly embroidered pashmina from Kashmir, the shawl was one of the few things that had traveled with his family during the furious conflagration of Partition in 1947, when East and West Bengal were split into two halves. My grandmother had packed that same trunk and left with her four children in tow. The overnight train had borne the family to a newborn India, torn into two, like a scrap of paper. Their adoptive city, Kolkata—once the most luminous of jewels in the crown of England’s colonial cities—was now in ruin. Its spine would break and recover, and break again, as the city heaved with wave upon wave of destitute migrants.

Intuitively, my father learned, perhaps, what the physiologist Claude Bernard had called “homeostasis”—the capacity of an organism to resist change by mounting counteracting forces. The process was not passive, Bernard had pointed out, but arguably one of the most active mechanisms in biology. For centuries, organismal physiology had been interpreted as 
a series of active machines: muscles, nerves, and ligaments that moved, turned, swiveled, sparked electricity. But Bernard inverted the thought. Standing there, standing in place, keeping equilibria; all required constant surveillance and work. It was the basis of survival, of renewal, of resistance. Resilience is invisible—until it breaks, and has to be mended again. In medicine, we call it “healing.”

How does one heal a house? In July 2019 we set about renovating our home in New York. It had once been a flourishing garment factory, but it had aged, albeit with grace. The floorboards creaked arthritically, but it was an undeniably beautiful space, with sly, spiraling nods to Corbusier (a circular staircase encased in a white shell, an oval skylight in the ceiling), flooded with cinematic light. We had been inundated with proposals to gut the deteriorating ’80s interiors, but our architect, Carmen Lenzi, advised the lightest of touches. This was not a renovation, she argued, but a renewal—a healing. We would not convert the loft into a modern, sterile steel trunk; we would design it to fill it with the belongings we loved. We moved out sometime that summer, leaving a contractor, Nick Villani, who with his equally deft touch had somehow intuited our desires.

We fortuitously returned to the space just in time, in early December. There was something organic in the “healing,” as if Lenzi and Villani had negotiated the challenges of an aging body. As we hauled our possessions back—a Corbu chaise, a timeworn Baughman couch, our clothes piled into garbage bags for transport—the streets were full of euphoric, sweater-less revelers, coaxed out by a strangely warm sun.

And then, as if without warning, the conflagration began. Two and a half thousand miles away, a man just off a flight from Wuhan, China, walked into a clinic in Snohomish County with a cough, and cases spiraled out in Seattle and its suburbs. Tourists carried a deadly virus on planes to East Coast cities. For a few months, it had seemed as if the news had been far, far away—devastations in Europe, ICUs overflowing in London, and body bags in Madrid. But like a tidal wave, it was soon upon us in New York City. At my hospital at Columbia University, I watched the terrifying crest of the infection. Stretchers with patients packed the hallways. I called a friend in the ER; a 30-something man was being intubated, his lungs drowning in fluid. The next morning, he was dead. The city went into a lockdown.