She didn’t ask for the rest, but she got it anyway: Willa and her mother and sisters had been coming out of Odeon into a rainstorm, and there were no cabs. Then: there one was, splashing to a stop right in front of the restaurant. Willa’s mother waved at the driver and the girls huddled under one umbrella as they waited for the passengers to get out, which was when Willa had recognized him.
Not for one single second did Sally doubt that what her classmate had said was true, or that Willa had correctly interpreted what she’d seen. Willa and Sally (and, of course, Sally’s brothers) had been classmates since kindergarten. Hadn’t Willa seen Salo Oppenheimer at any number of parents’ nights and play performances and holiday parties and Halloween observances? Hadn’t Salo Oppenheimer picked her up at Willa’s house on Tompkins Place, more than once? There had even, before Sally had decided Willa was a bit of a wuss, been the occasional sleepover at the house on the Esplanade, with her father in the kitchen the following morning. Of course Willa had recognized Sally’s father, getting out of a cab and ducking through the rain into Odeon.
Willa had not, however, recognized the woman whose hand Sally’s father was apparently holding.
“What makes you think I don’t know about it?” she told Willa. Then she went to her last class of the day, fuming.
What really pissed her off, she later decided, was not that Salo had done this—to herself, to “the children,” even to our mother—but the notion that he might actually be making an effort with another person, which was something he hadn’t ever done with any of the aforementioned people, not in Sally’s own opinion. For a technically intact family (and intact families were not the norm at Walden; most people seemed to have steps and halves or a parent who had simply checked out) the Oppenheimers didn’t really operate as a unit, and when they did things together they mainly did them for Johanna’s sake. Yes, all five of them got dressed up to see The Nutcracker every year, because it was a family tradition. Yes, they walked over the bridge to Chinatown on Christmas Day and then went to see a movie, because that was what New York Jews did (if they weren’t actually observing the holiday!). Yes, they celebrated the magical anniversary of the (scheduled) birth together on Martha’s Vineyard. These were things the five Oppenheimers undertook together, but it didn’t mean they had tangible intimacy with one another’s lives, or (especially) that they actually liked one another. Sally’s family was not given to warm gestures, reassurances, encouragements, deferrals. They were not one another’s “biggest fans” or “persons.” They didn’t have one another’s backs. They weren’t, you know, close, and despite the tragic efforts of our mother, none of them ever tried to pretend they were.
Sally’s father had never once, for example, held Sally’s mother’s hand anywhere, let alone in public. Not that Sally could recall.
That first night she found herself watching him attentively when he came home, which was, as usual, after the three of them and our mother ate dinner. He sat in the living room with Johanna as he usually did, speaking pleasantly to the kids as they passed through, reading his art magazines and looking through his catalogs. How had the eighth-grade social studies teacher liked Harrison’s report on John Jay? Had Lewyn made up his mind about Androscoggin this summer? Was that a new shirt Sally was wearing?
Polite enough. Attentive enough. It was basically the way Salo had always behaved toward them, as if the fatherhood protocol had been explained to him by authorities, and he ceded to their expertise. Also, he was a benign sort of person, not at all a mean person. He’d probably never hurt anyone in his whole life.
And at the end of that evening, like any other evening, our mother and father went up the stairs lined by those birthday photographs and closed the door of their bedroom. Sally might hear David Letterman as she went up to her own room or down to the kitchen, but she never heard them speaking to each other (or—God forbid—any other kind of interactive activity). They were a quiet couple. We were a quiet family, that was all.
Except, as is now apparent, even to those of us who wouldn’t find out for years, that was obviously not all.
She began to pay closer attention. What, if anything, did he say about how he spent his time? And what, in particular, did he do with himself in the evenings?
“How come Dad never eats dinner with us?” she asked Johanna, once she’d worked up her nerve.
“He eats dinner with us,” our mother said, which wasn’t untrue, but it also wasn’t very common. Maybe one night a week.
“Would Dad take me with him sometime to look at the galleries?” she asked.
“Oh Sally, I think he’d love that.”
But for something he’d love, he never invited her, or either of the others.
“Dad,” she finally said, “are you busy tomorrow night? I thought maybe we could do something. Go to a play or something.”
But he had a work thing. He actually seemed genuinely sorry about it, too.
“What kind of work thing?”
“Just a dinner with some clients. They like Delmonico’s. Have you ever been to Delmonico’s?”
Of course she had never been to Delmonico’s.
“Well! We should go,” our father said. “It’s like visiting the nineteenth century.”
Sally, who had no great wish to visit the nineteenth century, just nodded.
One night, as he gathered up his catalogs at the end of the evening, an invitation fell out at her feet. He didn’t notice, and she picked it up and looked at it before handing it back. It was for the opening of a show at the American Folk Art Museum, for an artist named Henry Darger. The front of the invitation showed a line of little girls all tied together. Behind them was a row of men on horseback, each holding a flag.
“Who’s Henry Darger?” she asked, handing it over.
“An Outsider Artist,” her father said. “The most famous Outsider Artist, but not the only one.”
Sally had no idea what that meant, but those little girls seemed like more of an issue. “This is kind of sick,” she noted.
Salo actually smiled. “You’re not wrong.”
“They look like something he cut out from a magazine.”
“Yes, I think he did that.”
“And you’re going to buy something from this guy?”
“No,” our father said, a little too emphatically.
“But you want to meet this artist?”
Our father shook his head. “No, he won’t be there. He’s dead.”
“Oh.” This made even less sense to Sally, because when you went to these art openings, didn’t you at least get to meet the artist? “So why would you want to go to this?”
“Well, you know, I’m always trying to learn something new.”
That wasn’t much of a why, but more to the point, it wasn’t an “I’m not going,” either. In a little less than three days, this museum was where our father intended to be, perhaps even with the woman Willa had seen getting out of the taxi.
Sally decided that she would be there, too.