The Apartment
Our apartment in Salem was also on Lafayette Street (like Saltonstall School in last week’s post). So it was a short walk to and from school every day.
The building consisted of four stories, with businesses on the ground floor and six apartments on the three floors above. Ours was on the third floor on the left as viewed from outside the building.
The front door opened onto a small vestibule and hallway. A small room was on the immediate left, which during autumns and winters was my grandmother’s. Straight ahead was a room with a bay window which according to the normal plan, was the living room. But for our purposes it was my parents’ bedroom. There was a small room at the back of theirs that was my sister’s.
Taking the hallway to the right of the vestibule led to the rest of the apartment. It was a long hall, broken by a right turn and followed by a left turn that led to the dining room.
The dining room also doubled as the living room with the kitchen beyond that. A back balcony perched off the kitchen where my mom would pin up clothes to dry.
The Inner Sanctum
I shared a room with my brother. It opened off of that first right turn of the hallway. We had twin metal beds, painted to look like wood with a fancy heraldic type chevron as a decoration. From our window we only had a view of the apartment building across the way, but a bit of Salem poked up into view beyond it – the three smoke stacks of the Salem coal-burning power plant.
Such was our apartment, and the headquarters of the adventures of my young life.