On the night of the birthday itself, Johanna told them, Lobster Tales would be coming to make a clambake on the beach.
Harrison immediately claimed some crucial work project and retreated to his and Lewyn’s room. He might possibly have been hoping that someone, perhaps Salo (whom he still had some interest in impressing), would ask him more—or indeed anything—about where he had been all summer, and what he had done there, but Lewyn was the only one who seemed at all curious about his time in Virginia. Lewyn (naturally) had never heard of Friedrich Hayek, but he did seem capable of lucid questions. What was the retreat and who went there? What kind of activities went on and who paid for it all? (Harrison did not answer this last. He wasn’t entirely sure of the answer, and besides, it wasn’t any of Lewyn’s business.) He said more than he’d expected to say about Eli, managing to convey that Eli was (a) their own age and yet (b) supremely accomplished and (c) fated for great achievements and positions of deep influence and, most surprising of all, (d) someone Harrison actually admired.
“Where’s he from?” said Lewyn.
“Virginia. Well, West Virginia. I mean, western Virginia. Right on the border, actually.”
He said this as if his brother cared about the specifics.
“Okay,” said Lewyn.
“I mean, down there, the state and county lines are much less important than the geography. People identify by the valleys and ridges. They’ve been populated since the eighteenth century.”
“By whites,” said Lewyn.
“What?”
“Populated by whites since the eighteenth century. I imagine they were populated long before the eighteenth century, by people who were not white.”
This was a very Walden thing to say.
“Well, of course. Also by Blacks, if it comes to that. Eli thinks his family migrated from Georgia. Before the Emancipation Proclamation there were Black families hiding in Appalachia. People left them alone.”
Lewyn frowned. He had never heard of escaped slaves being “left alone” anywhere in the Antebellum South, but for merely the thousandth time in his life, he decided Harrison must know better.
“So Eli is Black?”
“I can’t believe you even asked that,” said Harrison unkindly. “Race is irrelevant.” He picked up his book and pretended to read it, but Lewyn could tell that he was too irritated to actually read.
“Well,” Lewyn said, “I couldn’t care less if your friend is Black or white or green, but it’s relevant to him, surely. A Black person growing up in Virginia or West Virginia has de facto had his life impacted by hundreds of years of endemic racism.”
“Oh?” Harrison sneered. “So basically, whatever Eli has accomplished, and everything he’s going to accomplish, is irrelevant in the face of his eternal victim status. My ancestor was enslaved! My ancestor was killed in a pogrom! So what? At some point, we get to stop holding a grudge, Lewyn.”
A grudge? Lewyn thought.
“Well, our ancestor was killed in a pogrom, as a matter of fact,” he said. “A pogrom for one. I mean, throttled, gibbeted, corpse displayed for six years. That’s pretty bad, I think even you can agree. Hard not to hold a grudge, if you ask me.”
“Throttled! Gibbeted!” Harrison grinned. “Big words, Lewyn!”
Lewyn, annoyingly, only shrugged. “I mean, you have to feel for the guy. I feel for the guy. If Joseph Oppenheimer had agreed to convert to Christianity he’d have been home by dinnertime.”
“I doubt that. Our great-great-whatever was done for the minute his boss dropped dead. In any case, as usual, you fail to see the bigger picture. Yes, this very unfortunate thing happened to our ancestor, but as a direct result of this same unfortunate thing, his descendants left Germany and ended up in America. So, good for us! If he hadn’t been killed, he’d probably have stayed right where he was, and also his kids, and their kids, and on down the line till Dad’s father ended up guess where in 1939? And you and I wouldn’t be sitting in this nice house on Martha’s Vineyard having this conversation.”
Lewyn stewed. As usual his brother was persuasive, but only because he himself had somehow agreed to stand still as Harrison ran around him. On this particular subject, he had only one argument, and it bent toward the emotional.
“Don’t you feel sorry for him, though? Don’t you feel we owe those people something? The ancestors who suffered so you could … I don’t know, have a nice house on Martha’s Vineyard? It’s like … it’s a responsibility.”
“Don’t be pathetic, Lewyn,” his brother snapped. “We’re responsible for fulfilling our own potential, and that’s it. If Eli had sat around thinking about how his forebears were slaves, I doubt he’d have had the wherewithal to do what he’s done.”
“Well, it’s great what he’s done,” Lewyn said carefully. “I mean, writing a book before you’re even out of high school, and getting it published…”
“He didn’t go to high school.” Harrison said “high school” as if he meant reformatory for the incorrigible and pathetic. “He educated himself better than any high school could have educated him. And he didn’t just get his book published. Some of the most important innovators we have in this country consider his work critical to the intellectual conversation we’re having. Or should be having,” he added. But Harrison was already unsure about the conversation the two of them were actually having, let alone the one they—or … somebody else?—should be having.
“I’m glad you’ve made such a good new friend,” was all Lewyn could think of to say, though this, predictably enough, only made his brother turn from him in evident disgust. There would not, of course, be a reciprocal query from the other child’s bed under the peaked ceiling. No How was your freshman year? or What are you going to major in? let alone Have you happened to fall in love with a person who may just possibly be as clever as I am, and much, much nicer to boot? Lewyn, the aimless and pudgy brother who’d taken his leave one year earlier, bound for a college of least resistance and without a single affinity or interest, let alone a vision for his future? Lewyn, who’d never kissed a girl let alone had sex with one (whether or not she provided the condom)? That Lewyn was not the Lewyn who had reappeared, and there was much about him of potential interest to Harrison (even if that interest were of the teasing and disbelief variety), but Harrison never asked him a question and Lewyn, who had some pride now in addition to his other new attributes, declined to make an unforced offering.
“Must be nice for you and Sally,” Harrison said pointedly on the morning of the birthday. “Having each other so close by. To lean on,” he finished with a kind of flourish.
“Yes!” said Johanna. They were all—except for Salo—in the kitchen, drinking coffee. The baby was in her highchair, and Johanna was feeding it something vile and brown. “I’m happy thinking of the two of you, meeting up to study or have coffee. Even just running into each other by accident.”
“Weirdly,” Lewyn said, “it never happens.”
“Big campus,” Sally said, blowing into her mug. “Anyway, we were both doing our own thing. Busy. You know.”
“Busy doing what, exactly?” Harrison said. “I’m curious. What’s a real college like? What do people do there?”
Then he grinned, in case either of them might have thought he was sincere.
“Well, it’s like this,” Sally said. “People spend years keeping their heads down, working really hard so they can get into an Ivy League school, doing sports and music and community service and getting straight As. It’s been the only thing for so long, and then they get in, and now here they are together in the same place, all these high-achieving good boys and good girls who’ve delayed adolescence, and they’re like, Now what am I supposed to be trying to accomplish? And they kind of realize they’re on their own—no more parents or coaches or advisors keeping them on the straight and narrow, and suddenly it’s Billy has a keg in his room.