“Fabulists and seekers!” said Lewyn. “Why don’t you just say fakes and charlatans? It’s nothing to be proud of. Look,” he attempted a conciliatory tone, “I can imagine you find this humiliating.”
“I would imagine no such thing,” Harrison snapped. “And let me clarify that just now I’m not thinking about myself at all. I’m thinking about my friend.”
All four of us were quiet. Harrison aggressively stirred his coffee.
“Did you ever have any doubts?” said Ephraim.
Harrison sighed.
After a moment he said, “You intend to be a journalist, is that correct?”
Ephraim, surprised, said: “That’s correct.”
“Then you will understand what’s meant by ‘off the record.’”
“Certainly.” He looked across the table at Lewyn and me. But we had no idea what Harrison was going to tell us, either.
“I had a call last night, from someone I haven’t seen for years. To be honest, I haven’t thought about him for years, either. He was a classmate of mine. And Eli’s.”
“At Harvard?”
“No. At Roarke. He and Eli had a … well, we can call it a conflict. And he left school, in the middle of the term. In the middle of the night, actually, as I recall. His name is Carlos. He’s a professor of political science at the University of Chicago.”
“Okay.” Ephraim was doing his best not to show any excitement.
“He wanted to know if I believed him now.”
“About what?” Lewyn said.
“Eli accused him of stealing something. Plagiarizing something of his. It was very serious. It was his word against Carlos’s. It was very stressful for the community. I guess Carlos just … blinked first, and he withdrew from Roarke. At the time, I interpreted that to mean that he had actually done what Eli accused him of doing. He left and, I assumed, went on with his life somewhere else. Eli and I became good friends around that time. He invited me to come down to Hayek with him.” He looked at Ephraim. “Obviously you are well-informed about Hayek. You’ve created an unprecedented crisis there.”
“I have created nothing,” Ephraim said defensively. “I have exposed something that already existed.”
“Fine. Well. Carlos reminded me that he had been reading Eli’s book, just before this happened. Reading it, and talking about it with some of the others. He told me last night that he’d never suspected anything. He thought the book was amazing and Eli was a genius. He was a fan. And then he was a pariah in our school. It affected him for many years, apparently. He said he was unable to reenter university. He had to give up his place at Princeton. He was hospitalized, he said, for depression. Eventually he managed to get back on track. I found it very awkward that he still wanted to reassure me he hadn’t stolen from Eli. And, as I said, he asked if I believed him now.”
“And what did you say?” Lewyn asked.
“I said I did. I felt I had to say that. But it might also be true.” He looked at Ephraim again. “I reiterate. Off the record.”
Ephraim nodded. “Understood.”
“I think,” said Harrison, “what happened was that I had made a choice. I had no reason not to believe that it was the correct choice. I still want it to have been the correct choice. Everything that came after that…” He stopped without ending.
We waited.
“Well, I think that’s what I can say.”
Lewyn and I looked at each other. It was as near to an admission of weakness as we had ever heard from Harrison. It was seismic.
“Harrison,” Lewyn said. “I may never have understood the … appeal of this friend. Eli. I thought his ideas about people were rigid and punitive. And I sometimes … often … had a sense that he was, on some level, insincere, though obviously not to this extent. I don’t think I’m especially insightful about people. I’m as shocked as anyone else by what Ephraim discovered. But I never once questioned the affection and the loyalty between the two of you.”
After a moment, Harrison nodded.
“And, I want you to know, I respect those things. You and I have never been close, unfortunately, but you’re still my brother. As far as I’m concerned, you’re entitled to hold on to this relationship, if you want to. You don’t owe anyone an explanation. You certainly don’t owe me one. Of course, I’m always here if you, you know, want to talk.”
Harrison was staring at him. After a while he managed a curt nod. “Okay,” he said. He was trying to sound gruff. But he didn’t look gruff.
“Me, too,” said Ephraim suddenly.
“I just met you,” Harrison said. “I don’t know the first thing about you.”
For a moment, Ephraim did not respond. Then he sat up very straight in his chair and placed his hands on the long wooden table before him. “My name is Ephraim Solomon Western. I am the son of Stella Western and Salo Oppenheimer. On one side, I’m descended from Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, who was a court Jew in Stuttgart, Germany, in the 1730s. On the other side, I’m descended from a man whose name I don’t know, but I know what he cost in 1792, in South Carolina. I’d like us to be brothers. Well, we are brothers. But I’d like to know you as a brother.”
“We’re not starting off on the best of terms,” said Harrison, locating, again, some of his essential rancor. “What happened between our father and your mother caused great unhappiness in our family. It affected all of us. The marriage never recovered. Our mother never recovered. She fixed on this idea about having another child, which was a crazy thing to do. Crazy and desperate. Do you remember how disgusted we were?” he asked Lewyn. “And Sally, too—it was one of the very few times we were all in agreement about something. Not that we ever talked about it. We should have talked about it.”
“You’re right about that,” said Lewyn.
“I’m sorry, Phoebe,” said Harrison. “I wouldn’t want you to leave here associating the words ‘crazy’ and ‘desperate’ with your birth. But it was so unfair to you, bringing you into that.”
“No worries,” I shrugged. “Went right over my head at the time.”
“I’m sorry, too,” said Ephraim, as if he bore responsibility for any of it.
“Oh, I can get past it, I think,” said Harrison. “It’s not the biggest problem.”
Ephraim sighed. “Okay. What else?”
“You were admitted to Harvard and chose to go to Yale. It’s insupportable.”
For a long moment no one made a sound, and then Lewyn, of all people, started to laugh. He laughed at his brother Harrison, and then his brother Ephraim joined him and they were both laughing. Finally, even Harrison broke, that infamous Fox News sneer faltering into some weird approximation of a smile.
I looked at the three of them, absurdly different in spite of their common denominator, laughing, trying to laugh, finally together.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The Big Reveal
In which the 10th of September is observed, and also the 11th, and the last of the Oppenheimers leaves home