“At least until last week,” Rachel Maddow said.
“And,” said Ephraim, “we should also recognize, with race and self-identification, the picture gets less and less precise all the time. Thirty-five percent of African American men today have a white ancestor, and thirty percent of white Americans have a Black ancestor. I absolutely believe there’s a role for self-identification, but do we want to walk around with a menu of our genetic components? I myself have a white father and a Black mother, but my Black mother’s DNA is eight percent white, so does that make me fifty-four percent white and forty-five percent Black? I mean, life’s too short! I’m Ephraim. I identify as Black. Okay?”
“But isn’t that what Eli Absalom Stone did? I’m Eli, I identify as Black.”
“He never did, though. Not once, at least not on the record. He darkened his skin permanently so you identified him, then he castigated you for making assumptions about his race and his accomplishments. He built a post-racial platform on a racist lie. It was all a con. A very long and very sustained con. And who knows how long it would have continued?”
Eli Absalom Stone’s publisher (still the same one, all the way back to Against Youth) had stopped shipment of his books (though whatever was already on the bookstore shelves sold out quickly), and his upcoming appearances at CPAC and the Conservative Partnership Institute were canceled. King’s College, a Christian college in Manhattan, withdrew its offer of an honorary degree, and Harvard, initially befuddled, canceled Eli’s Phi Beta Kappa speech, which was to have taken place the following June (though it took no action on his Harvard degree—how could it?). Even those who held fast to the embattled figure seemed unsure of what they were holding on to. When the Hayek Institute, in a rare public statement, insisted that its longtime member was a writer and thinker of rare gifts, who had lifted issues of race and philosophy to a new level of discourse in America, they were ridiculed, even by other conservative groups.
No response of any kind had come from Eli Absalom Stone himself. He had not been seen in public, according to the scrum around his Sutton Place apartment building. No one had seen him privately, either, except, possibly, for his great friend and coauthor, Harrison Oppenheimer, who lived close by. But he wasn’t talking to the press, either.
By the time Ephraim completed his round-robin of media appearances he was seriously behind on his schoolwork in two classes and had lost five pounds from sheer adrenaline, but he’d also received offers to intern at the Washington Post and Slate, and he was ecstatic. (He had also received four death threats; that wasn’t so good.) Stella, returning home from Los Angeles, found a nice potted geranium from one of her neighbors on Coffey Street, its accompanying note congratulating her on having such a remarkable son.
I could not have agreed more. I was ridiculously proud of Ephraim.
On the morning of our Harvard Club meeting, he picked me and Lewyn up in an Uber and we went in together, not saying much on the way. Lewyn, by then, was preoccupied by a number of things, but chiefly by the astonishing return of Rochelle Steiner to his life, sixteen years on and each of them now adult enough to at least recognize when they were behaving like idiots. A week earlier, seated at her brand-new (old) bright-green-and-chrome kitchen table, they had reached a fully mature decision to take things slowly, which meant that he would be waiting another month before moving into her apartment in Murray Hill and possibly two before proposing to endow her with all his worldly goods and otherworldly love. In the meantime, they’d been spending the weekends out in Ellesmere, reckoning with the flotsam and jetsam of Rochelle’s excavated childhood. When that was over, and the cleaners were through with their work, and the painters with theirs, and even, at the advice of the Realtor, the stagers with theirs, Rochelle’s childhood home would look like a house some other family might imagine as their own: a pretty place on a leafy cul-de-sac in a suburb with a good school district. It sold on the day of its open house.
Neither Lewyn nor I had ever entered the Harvard Club—technically, he had never even entered the Cornell Club, since the purpose of his sole visit, many years earlier, had been to board a bus parked outside—but Ephraim had indeed passed this way before, and he entertained us with an account of his Harvard interview on this very august site as we entered the lobby. He was talking a lot, we both noticed. He was nervous, obviously. In fact, he seemed far more nervous about meeting Harrison than any of his other siblings. And I suppose he had good reason for that.
Upstairs, we found our brother in a paneled conference room. Harrison said that he had ordered coffee before he said hello.
“Harrison,” Lewyn responded, “this is our brother, Ephraim.”
“Yes,” said Harrison.
“I’m very happy to meet you,” Ephraim said. He extended his hand. After a pause slightly too long to go unnoticed, Harrison shook it.
“Yes,” he said again.
“Actually, I had my Harvard interview in this exact room,” Ephraim tried again, clearly grasping.
“I certainly hope it doesn’t hold a lingering unhappiness for you.”
“What? Oh. No! I mean, I got into Harvard.”
Harrison’s mouth tightened. Lewyn and I, on the other hand, were trying not to laugh out loud.
“Okay, Harrison,” said Lewyn, “you finally got a smart brother. Be happy.”
“I never said you weren’t smart,” Harrison said to Lewyn.
“Oh no, just every day in every way. C’mon, we’re not here to talk about that.”
There was a knock on the door, and a waiter in a crimson uniform entered with the coffee.
“Well, you’ve been busy,” Harrison said once he had left.
He meant Ephraim, obviously.
“Yes, but I’m going back to school this afternoon. I think it’s over, at least until your friend decides to come out of hiding. I wonder if he will.”
“It’s up to him.” Harrison stirred his coffee but showed no sign of actually drinking it.
“Certainly,” Ephraim said.
“He doesn’t owe anything to anyone.”
“You think?” I said, with a laugh. I had to admit, I was completely loving this.
“I’m not sure any of our lives could withstand the kind of attention you’ve brought to bear on Eli.”
“May I ask you something?” said Ephraim. “I’m sincerely interested. Fascinated, actually. What is it about him that earns your loyalty?”
Harrison glared at Ephraim. He glared at Lewyn, then at me. Then he seemed to recall that we were there to attempt some sort of progress.
“Eli is brilliant. An autodidact. A prodigy. And an original and important writer. He has been brave enough to take on some very difficult and complex issues. He personally represents a repudiation of ideas that are currently popular. He has also been immensely supportive of me since we were eighteen years old.”
Ephraim was nodding. “All right. First, as I think you may have already accepted, or you’re at least considering, his name is not Eli. He is not an autodidact. There may be bravery involved in what he’s done; I’m open to that argument. But he can’t personally be representing anything because his identity is a construct built on falsehoods. He’s lied to every person who read his books, every person who has interviewed him, honored him, bought a ticket to one of his talks. And you. It may also be true that he’s supported you as a friend. I can’t speak to that. But if he was my friend, I’d be deeply discouraged and confused to find that I’d been lied to about so many things for such a long time.”
Harrison shook his head. “Self-invention is a thoroughly American virtue. It always has been. We’re a country of fabulists and seekers.”