A rabbi was brought in who explained to them in heavily accented English that Jewish law required absolute certainty about the death before the mourning rituals could be observed. In cases where there was no corpse, a witness to the death was considered enough. And even with no corpse and no witness, a report that the person had been killed by thieves, or drowned, or dragged off by a wild animal was enough. But in this case there was no corpse, no witness, and no report. No thieves, or wild animals, as far as anyone knew. Only an inscrutable absence where once their father had been.
No one could have imagined it, and yet it came to seem like a fitting end. Death was too small for Epstein. In retrospect, not even a real possibility. In life he had taken up the whole room. He wasn’t large, only uncontainable. There was too much of him; he constantly overspilled himself. It all came pouring out: the passion, the anger, the enthusiasm, the contempt for people and the love for all mankind. Argument was the medium in which he was raised, and he needed it to know he was alive. He fell out with three-quarters of everyone he had fallen in with; those that remained could do no wrong, and were loved by Epstein forever. To know him was either to be crushed by him or madly inflated. One hardly recognized oneself in his descriptions. He had a long line of protégés. Epstein breathed himself into them, they became larger and larger, as did everyone he chose to love. At last they flew like a Macy’s parade balloon. But then one day they would snag themselves on Epstein’s high moral branches and burst. From then on, their names were anathema. In his inflationary habits Epstein was deeply American, but in his lack of respect for boundaries and his tribalism he was not. He was something else, and this something else led to misunderstanding again and again.
And yet he’d had a way of drawing people in, bringing them over to his side, under the expansive umbrella of his policies. He was lit brightly from within, and this light came spilling out of him in the careless fashion of one who hasn’t any need to scrimp or save. To be with him was never dull. His spirits swelled and sank and swelled again, his temper flared, he was unforgiving, but he was never less than completely absorbing. He was endlessly curious, and when he became interested in something or someone, his investigations were exhaustive. He never doubted that everyone else would be as interested in these subjects as he was. But few could match his stamina. In the end, it was always his dinner companions who insisted on retiring first, and still Epstein would follow them out of the restaurant, finger stabbing the air, eager to drive home his point.
He had always been at the top of everything. Where he lacked natural facilities, by sheer force of will he drove himself beyond his limits. As a young man he had not been a natural orator, for example; a lisp had gotten in the way. Nor was he innately athletic. But in time he came to excel in these, especially. The lisp was overcome—only if one listened microscopically could a slur be detected where he had performed the necessary operation—and many hours in the gym, and the honing of a wily, cutthroat instinct, turned him into a champion lightweight wrestler. Where he encountered a wall, he threw himself against it over and over, picking himself up again until one day he went right through it. This enormous pressure and exertion were perceptible in everything he did, and yet what might have come off as striving in anyone else, in him seemed a form of grace. Even as a boy, his aspirations were gargantuan. On the block where he grew up on Long Beach, Long Island, Epstein had charged ten houses a monthly retainer fee, for which he was available twenty-four hours a day, with a cap of ten hours a month, to deliver his services, outlined in an ever-expanding menu he sent out with the invoice (mowing, dog walking, car washing, even unclogging toilets, for he did not have the switch in him that seemed to turn others off). He was going to have endless money because that was his fate; long before he married into it, he already knew exactly what to do with it. At thirteen, he bought with his savings a blue silk scarf that he wore as casually as his friends wore their gym sneakers. How many people know what to do with money? His wife, Lianne, had been allergic to her family fortune; it stiffened her and made her quiet. She spent her early years trying to erase her footsteps in the formal gardens. But Epstein taught her what to do with it. He bought a Rubens, a Sargent, a Mortlake tapestry. He hung a small Matisse in his closet. Under a ballerina by Degas, he sat without pants. It wasn’t a question of being crude or out of his element. No, Epstein was very polished. He was not refined—he had no wish to lose his impurities—but he had been brought to a high shine. In pleasure he saw nothing to be ashamed of; his was large and true, and so he could make himself at home among even the most exquisite things. Every summer he rented the same “shabby” castle in Granada where the newspaper could be thrown down and the feet put up. He chose a spot on the plaster wall to pencil in the children’s growth. In later years he grew misty-eyed at the mention of the place—he had gotten so much wrong, he had made a mess of it, and yet there, where his children had played freely under the orange trees, he had gotten something right.