“Do you … work here?” Sally asked.
“Volunteer. I’d say it’s altruistic but it’s business. The people who come to see this, sometimes they turn into my customers. Dealers or collectors. It’s just smart.”
Sally looked at her. She had a face that seemed at once taut and wrinkled, like someone who had spent a whole lot of time outside, under a weak sun, getting blown around in the cold. Not a speck of makeup. Not a piece of jewelry. She was, in her way, as plain as the furniture.
“You mean, some of this belongs to you?” Sally heard a note of eagerness in her own voice. I could buy it, she was thinking. She had been born to wealth, raised in wealth, and yet she had never felt this way about an object. How much could it all cost? A table? A chair?
“Oh no.” The woman laughed, this time without restraint. “No, no. I appreciate it, but I’m not stupid. You don’t hold on to Shaker just ’cause it’s pretty. I sold that”—she pointed at the long table—“to a dealer called Russell, in Westchester. And that”—she gestured across the room, to a rocking chair or a smaller, square table, Sally couldn’t tell—“to a lady up in Boston. There’s not that many people who specialize in Shaker, and they know all the collectors. Shaker’s a very particular commitment. Not something your average Joe would just make up their mind to buy, on the spur of the moment.”
“Because it’s expensive?” Sally asked, feeling like an idiot.
“You could say!” The woman laughed again. “Not something a college student could afford,” she added, almost comfortingly.
This college student could, Sally thought, but she only nodded, and held out her hand.
“My name is Sally,” she said.
Chapter Fifteen
Wonder of Wonders
In which Lewyn Oppenheimer introduces a group of muscular Christians to the Seder ritual
Room 308 in Clara Dickson Hall might have lacked a beer can pyramid or a miasma of cannabis, but apart from that it was pretty typical for the temporary living space of two randomly selected college-aged boys. Jonas, for example, had stuck a poster on the wall during move-in and then forgotten about it as it puckered and drooped and folded forward. Lewyn had brought home a plant on a whim, declined to water it, and failed to notice when it died. They both put their stuff down on the floor when they were finished with it—that was what the floor was for—and neither of them saw the overflow of their shared trash bin as a cue to empty it. It was true that Jonas made his bed every morning—that was a mission thing, he’d once explained—but the sheets on both beds were dingy and slippery, and there was a film of grime over every surface. They lived, in other words, inside a tableau of discarded clothing, candy wrappers, and shoes that were often parted from their mates and bearing spring mud. Back in November, Jonas had met a very pretty girl named Lauren, from Arizona, and though he refrained from overnighting at Kappa Delta, Lauren’s sorority, he came back later and later at night as the winter term wore on, sometimes slipping into the long bed opposite Lewyn’s far nearer to the next day than the day before. When Lewyn woke at his normal time to get himself to art history, Jonas would be there: face to the wall, forearm protruding from the strange long underwear he wore. (For months Lewyn had been under the impression that this sartorial item was an ordinary undershirt, paired with some style of long undershorts favored by people from the rustic lands of the West. The true nature of the thing had been revealed in one of their conversations on Mormonism, ancillary to that first one, in which such topics as evangelism, cosmology, handcarts, and sacred garments had all been touched upon.)
Squalor aside, Lewyn did feel fortunate to be living with Jonas, and on those (increasingly rare) occasions they were both in the room—Jonas cramming for his bovine anatomy midterm, say, and Lewyn drafting an art history paper—they fell easily into their way of being together. After that first magical narrative in the fall it had taken weeks for Lewyn to stop thinking of his roommate as some kind of mystic, an ecstatic possessed of occult knowledge and a personal relationship with angels, but gradually he had managed to draw a kind of curtain around the topic of spirituality in general, and Jonas’s religion in particular, and move on into the quotidian business of cohabitation. He and Jonas might represent different political inclinations, different prospects (both career and celestial), and opposite ends of the country, but they were both polite people who spoke kindly to each other as a rule, especially in the morning when they were most often in the same place at the same time. Not infrequently, they even went for breakfast together at North Star, where they were sometimes joined by Jonas’s vet school friends and new fraternity brothers.
“Lewyn, my roommate,” Jonas always said. He said it the first time he introduced them, and the fourth.
Lewyn wondered if a few of these guys might also be Mormons. He didn’t yet possess the expertise he later would, to tell such a thing without asking. He did recognize that they were all some version of Christ-follower, but the distinctions among even the commonplace denominations were a terrible blur. (The Walden School had indoctrinated him with the notion that spirituality was a matter of self-definition, and apart from one wildly out-of-place guest speaker the previous fall, no Walden teacher had ever attempted to impart the actual beliefs of actual Christian people. As a result, Lewyn could barely have distinguished a Baptist from a Catholic. Besides, for all of its vaunted “diversity,” Walden students and faculty were overwhelmingly Jewish.) With Jonas’s friends he began to observe, if not exactly understand, the commonalities and the distinctions among them. One boy said grace before consuming his breakfast pastry; another did not. One boy was enjoying robust relationships with several willing girls while another had allowed himself only “side hugs” with his longtime girlfriend and presumptive future wife back in Virginia. Several of Jonas’s fraternity brothers were heavy drinkers, and one, an ice hockey player from Milwaukee, was so clearly compromised that his fraternity brothers had already (and unsuccessfully) attempted an intervention.
But they were nice enough to Lewyn, and as the weeks passed they began to present an almost uniform interest in him, or at least in one aspect of him. Not one of them, it had become clear, had ever had occasion to talk—that is, really talk—with a representative of his people.
“So, like,” said the Virginian, whose name was Mark, “I can’t help but notice that you’re eating bacon there, Lewyn. Isn’t that, like, against the rules?”
Lewyn explained that his family was not Orthodox, nor even particularly observant. “We’re more cultural Jews.” What he meant was: dutiful observation of a couple of holidays, correctly sliced Nova from Russ & Daughters, and an extremely broad interpretation of Tikkun olam. But what he actually said was: “There are all different kinds of Judaism, you know.”
Of course they didn’t know, and unfortunately they were all ears. So he had to give them the basics:
Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist. Also nothing at all, but still Jewish.
And how could you still be Jewish but also nothing at all?
Lewyn, by now mentally exhausted, merely shrugged. You just could. People just were. It wasn’t like you turned in a card or something. “A lot of the families I grew up with were Jewish but they also had Christmas trees.”
This the boys absolutely could not process.
“Are you serious? Christmas is Jesus Christ’s birthday.”