Sometimes, our mother made him think of Mandy Bernstein: her relentless focus on him, the force of her unqualified love. He understood that she thought of him as a good man, a man beaten down by the undeserved tragedy in his personal rearview mirror, but always on the edge of some beautiful redemption. Our father couldn’t bring himself to disappoint her, to tell her how wrong she was. He would not destroy another nice young woman who was so ill-advisedly determined to love him, and it was that, more than anything else, more than love for her or optimism about a life with her, that made him propose one night at Maxwell’s Plum under one of the ersatz Tiffany lamps, with a ring that had once belonged to his father’s mother. It was too big for Johanna—the size, not the stone—but she was happy with it. Wildly happy. She would also have been happy with a small wedding, just their families and the few friends they’d each kept from college, but they ended up with a big ceremony at the Harmonie Club, and plenty of Wurttemberg clients in attendance. His parents paid for everything.
By then, of course, our mother had a firmer grasp of what she was dealing with in regard to the Oppenheimers, their considerable wealth in particular. She had met his parents, the all but silent Hermann and the terrifying Selda (her expression so frozen Johanna truly did not know whether she was being singled out for special disapprobation or was merely a tiny part of a disapproved-of world), but mainly in restaurants, which delayed her complete awareness. Objectively she recognized that the Oppenheimers were people of means, far more so than her own family, but she had grown up in proximity to only one version of American wealth—the one represented by the students of the Lawrenceville school—and Salo’s parents were obviously not that. Also, Salo himself was indifferent to any display of wealth, unlike other boys she’d known (and dated) who had far less money but who seemed to require the most expensive version of anything in order to feel good about themselves. Our father, when they met, lived mainly in those elderly chinos and sweaters, sometimes over a T-shirt from his old school, Collegiate. He didn’t make any great change in his wardrobe even after he’d begun to work at Wurttemberg, and it was only when his own father spoke to him that he suited up to the appropriate degree. (Johanna helped him pick out a briefcase so he’d stop transporting his papers in a Big Brown Bag from Bloomingdale’s.) She was not yet enough of a New Yorker to recognize the significance of some of Salo’s touchstones: Collegiate, the weekend house on the shore in Rye, the summer camp long associated with Jewish families of a certain financial stratum, and above all the Oppenheimer apartment on Fifth Avenue, in a 1915 limestone co-op that had once been resolutely off-limits to Jewish people, no matter how much money they had. This mansion in the sky took up fully half (the better half) of a high floor, so its long line of rooms all overlooked the great carpet of trees in the center of Manhattan. There, the sofas were certainly not from Jennifer Convertibles and the chairs were certainly not from Habitat, and the paintings on the beautiful walls, which were certainly not Sheetrock, had little bronze nameplates and discreet lights overhead.
They went there one afternoon when Hermann and Selda were in Rye, to pick up some document from a drawer in Salo’s childhood bedroom. As they passed through the living room she happened to look up at the wall above the mantelpiece, and stopped. Then she took a step nearer. The bronze plate said … it actually said … édouard Manet.
“Is that…?” She’d been about to say “real,” but she already knew it was real. She would never be on intimate terms with her in-laws, but she already knew they weren’t the kind of people who’d have the work of a famous painter copied for display in their living room.
“What?”
“No, nothing.”
And she followed him down a long corridor, still stunned.
It was just one more thing to fold into the ongoing enigma of her boyfriend’s parents. When she went to Salo’s office, as she sometimes did, Hermann came to greet her with a smile and a formal handshake. When the four of them met for dinner, always at a restaurant with hushed service and frightening silverware, Selda asked solicitously about her mother and father and brother and sister. But her own boyfriend, then fiancé, then husband, seemed to have nothing at all to say about his childhood, and the details he offered Johanna were mainly to do with the household staff. There had been a housekeeper named Etta who stayed overnight in the apartment, in the small maid’s room off the kitchen, making it possible for Salo’s parents to travel or go to Rye without him (something they had done a lot). There had been a nanny named Rosa who’d walked him to nursery school, and another named Miss James who took him on the crosstown bus to Collegiate and picked him up, at least until fourth grade. He ate dinner at the kitchen table, sometimes with his mother before she went out, sometimes only with Etta or Miss James, who put a great quantity of salt on everything she was served, which was offensive to Etta, who cooked. His bedroom, far down the corridor from the room where his parents slept, had a green plaid bedspread and curtains and a desk where he was supposed to do his homework and a beanbag chair he used instead. (He hardly needed to describe this to her, since it was all unchanged.) On the wall outside his room there had been a painting of a boy with a spoon which wasn’t there any longer. Actually, Salo told her, a lot of the paintings he’d grown up with were no longer there.
But he could barely remember a childhood conversation with his mother and father together, or an outing, let alone a family vacation, only the three of them together. Having produced him they seemed to have retreated to a respectful distance at the edges of his childhood, politely applauding and dutifully accompanying him through those formative years but opting to leave some parts of the business of parenting to people better suited, which in this case meant nobody. He wouldn’t fault them, and she was careful not to insist he do so. They had not withheld from him anything he’d actually wanted at the time, or anything he now missed having had. On the contrary, Hermann and Selda had driven to Maine each summer to visit him at Androscoggin, standing with the other parents to watch the canoe skills demonstration and the archery tournament, and they’d stood with him at Temple Emanu-El (another Hermann Oppenheimer, the grandfather of Salo’s grandfather, had been a founding member in 1845). And then there was the night those two had swept into Ithaca and packed Salo in ether and taken him away, back to New York, and never once said a thing to him about what he had done. They had even brought him to Lawrenceville for Mandy’s funeral and to Newark for Daniel’s, waiting in coffee shops while he did what he needed to do, what was the right thing to do, what they themselves would have expected if, God forbid, one of those other young people had been behind the wheel and their own son, their only child, was so suddenly gone.
He never talked about that either, but our mother waited, even so. She perfected the making of safe moments for his profound utterances, should they ever come.