As far as our mother was concerned, her parents had completely missed the true star of the Hirsch family, which was not Bobby and certainly not herself. Our aunt Debbie, the oldest of the three siblings, was very smart and also very ambitious, in the subdued manner of girls coming of age with the Second Wave in the ’70s, all too aware of the fact that doors were opening and that she was going to be allowed—if not exactly encouraged—to walk through them. Debbie opted for a safe (though quietly roiling) Mount Holyoke for college, and afterward a retail training program at Macy’s, chosen for no other reason than the fact that she still got a little trill of excitement from department stores. That trill wouldn’t last long, not once she was spending her days unpacking boxes and checking inventory, but things clicked into place as she realized how many ideas she had about adjusting chains of command to streamline operations. Her supervisors, shockingly enough, were not interested in Debbie Hirsch’s ideas, so she went to business school and eventually found somebody who was. By the time her younger sister Johanna was settling into married life and embarking on her fateful “fertility journey,” Debbie Hirsch Krieger was a full partner in a consulting firm, living in a Classic Six at 1065 Park Avenue with her husband and boys, and summering in Bridgehampton.
Between the unacknowledged star that was Debbie and the perpetual fuckup that was their younger brother Bobby, our mother ducked through adolescence in a furtive attempt not to be noticed. Johanna was an average student, a volleyball team member who mainly sat and watched, and a non-mixer in either of the two cliques that dominated her high school (these were known as the Beautifuls and the Weirdos). She kept company with a half dozen or so girls from back in elementary school, was generally fearful around boys, and gave her parents not one reason to worry about (or otherwise pay attention to) her. When she was sixteen she joined B’nai B’rith Girls at the suggestion of her sister Debbie, who was about to leave home and who worried Johanna would simply disappear once she’d gone. That was when the wondrous Mandy Bernstein, not only a Beautiful but also a twelfth grader, had materialized to sprinkle her magic fairy dust over Johanna Hirsch. Months later, Mandy was gone, off to Cornell. A year after that she was gone for good.
“I’m very sorry,” said Johanna to Salo Oppenheimer that day after the service had ended. She was one of perhaps forty young women to approach him and extend her hand and say these exact words, and there was no reason for him to remember her, and in fact he did not remember her, though that had less to do with Johanna’s ordinariness than with the shrieking voice in our father’s head all through the service and burial and reception. Afterward she went in one of the cars to the cemetery and watched Mandy’s broken parents and sisters throw red clay on the coffin, and Salo Oppenheimer throw red clay on the coffin, and by the time she reached the open grave there was little left to throw. Afterward, Salo Oppenheimer had been taken away by a dowdy, dignified couple in a Lincoln Town Car, and Johanna would not see him again for several years, until the Rudnitsky wedding in Oak Bluffs.
By then, Johanna was a rising sophomore at Skidmore, not that her heart was in either her nominal major (sociology) or anything else of an educational nature. She also didn’t like Saratoga, which was full of dancers and horse people in the summer and brutally cold the rest of the time, and the series of crushes she’d developed on boys at the college always ended in some variation of It isn’t you, it’s me, usually delivered over mugs of terrible beer in one of the town taverns. If you’d asked Johanna Hirsch what, in the whole wide world, she cared about, she’d have been hard-pressed to come up with anything, not even—or perhaps especially not—herself. Basically, she was drifting, as she had always drifted, once in the gully of her family and now in the gully of her college “experience.” Until, suddenly, she wasn’t.
It was one of those It isn’t you, it’s me young men who invited her to his brother’s wedding on Martha’s Vineyard. He did not explain that our mother’s role would be that of a beard (perhaps he thought he didn’t need to), but he did warn her that the likelihood of family meltdown over the course of the wedding weekend was high: his brother was marrying (and this was his parents’ word, he insisted, not his) a schwartze, and his mother had been on the verge of hysteria all spring. (In other words, no, this would not be an opportune moment to turn up without an unobjectionable female date. In other other words, it would also not be the time to make any grand announcement about his own clarifying life choices.) Johanna was game. She had never been to the famous island where, a few years earlier, that ghastly accident had occurred with the young senator and his aide, and she was curious about the family of her nominal date, who would call a Black person a schwartze, and the brother who was brave enough (or perhaps antagonistic enough) to marry someone so certain to provoke them. (To be completely fair, she’d taken the opportunity to share the relevant detail with her own mother, who’d reacted pretty much the same way as Joshua Rudnitsky’s mother had.)
When they arrived on the afternoon before the wedding, she was fairly swiftly deposited with the bridesmaids: eight women of Spellman plus Wendy Rudnitsky, the only sister of Joshua and Michael, the groom. This was hugely uncomfortable as far as Johanna was concerned, not because she was white (the bride and bridesmaids were gracious and welcoming) but because the women were mostly familiar and affectionate with one another while her own connection to the event was so very tangential. She tried to at least peel off for the rehearsal dinner, but they insisted on bringing her along to the Inn at Lambert’s Cove, and that was the place she recognized Salo Oppenheimer, a person she had sometimes thought of in the years since that terrible funeral. After the toasts, as the older family members began to drift off, and only the bride and groom and their friends remained chatting around a long table, she saw him outside, leaning on the porch railing with a glass of Champagne. Our mother went to him and reintroduced herself, extending, for the second time, her hand.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you where we met before,” she said.
Our father turned to look at her. “Oh,” he said, after a moment. “Daniel or Mandy?”
Daniel must have been the other one, she realized. The friend.
“Mandy. I knew her.”
“She was such a good person,” said Salo.
“Yes. I’m Johanna. I’m here with Michael’s brother. Joshua.”
“Oh,” Salo said. “I thought Joshua was homosexual.”
Incredibly, this was when the meaning of It isn’t you, it’s me finally reached her.
“We’re just friends,” our mother said, having already expunged whatever notions she’d held (and, let’s face it, till that instant maintained) for the brother of the groom. From this moment forward it was all going to be about our father, and the great purpose of her life would be to love him enough to relieve him of his great burden, and to free him from that one, terrible shard of time in which he was so unfairly trapped, and to salve at last that wound of his, that one that wouldn’t heal. It didn’t occur to her, and wouldn’t for years, that she wasn’t the one—the only one—who’d ever be capable of doing that.
Chapter Two
The Stendahl Syndrome
In which Salo Oppenheimer tumbles and Johanna Oppenheimer begins to understand
what she’s dealing with
When our father’s Jeep lost contact with the earth, its tether of gravity stretching, stretching, then suddenly, irredeemably gone, I imagine a rasping sound of breath all around him, then a weirdly graceful tumble through the tumbling space inside: four bodies coiling and snapping in a fatal ballet. The feeling would have been bizarrely not-unpleasant if one could manage to excise the actual physical sensations from a broader understanding of what was happening, and it would never leave him. Sometimes, awake or asleep, he might find himself looking into Mandy’s surprised eyes, or hearing Daniel Abraham’s weirdly pleasant “Hey!” from the back seat, or sensing that fourth person, the invisible girlfriend, somewhere behind him in the confused air: a shadow passing darkly across his right wrist. And all that contributed to his new and very specific and lifelong challenge, which was how to continue drawing breath after having caused the deaths of two people.