And maybe, it occurred to him, to our parents. He wondered if Johanna and Salo knew about Sally. True, they hadn’t had the advantage of intimacy with their daughter’s roommate or known the strange and wondrous pleasure of Rochelle Steiner’s sweet head close by on a shared pillow, slipping into sleep but still speaking, confiding, connecting. But perhaps they’d noticed something Lewyn and his brother had been too obtuse or uninterested to see. Salo, so fixated on his solo navigation through life, and Johanna, frantically absorbed in her Potemkin family—they were probably as clueless on the matter of Sally’s inner life as her brothers had been, though it did seem to Lewyn that they must care more about Sally and her prospects for happiness than he and Harrison did, and perhaps be paying closer attention. A mite closer attention.
All summer he’d been dreading the enforced fiction of these days in early September, as much as he dreaded the inescapable assembly of the Oppenheimers itself. He would gladly have skipped the observance of his own nineteenth birthday, and he knew Harrison resented having to leave that all-male bastion in the forest he went to. Sally might be marginally more sentimental about their milestone, but then again she’d apparently passed up an entire Vineyard summer to stay in Ithaca and do whatever weird thing she was doing with the owner of this elderly automobile. He’d struggled with how to explain his impending absence to Rochelle, considering and rejecting a sick relative (too much concerned interest) or a reunion of high school friends. (What friends? He’d never mentioned anyone in particular.) He despised having to lie to her, which was another way of saying he despised having already lied to her, and having continued to lie to her every single moment of every day, as they rose together and ate together and walked together and studied together and ate together again and, finally, lay down beside each other in their pushed-together beds, with Rochelle’s stalwart fan blowing over their pale bodies. Liar, liar, the whir sometimes seemed to coo, after she had fallen asleep in her distinctive position, hands together in prayer and trapped between her knees. Liar, liar, liar.
At last, he had hewed as close to the truth as he dared and told her that his family went on a retreat at this time of year, and it was something he couldn’t get out of or bring a guest to. He wasn’t sure what was being planned, only that he would have to leave Ithaca for a few days, and he couldn’t wait to get it over with and come back. He hoped she wasn’t upset with him for going away.
She said she wasn’t, and she didn’t seem to be. In fact, the mildness of Rochelle’s response made Lewyn worry more than he had at any time since that strained trip to Palmyra earlier in the summer. Rochelle had plenty to take care of on campus, like packing up her summer room and getting early access to Triphammer, the cooperative house she’d finally decided on for sophomore year. Where was the family retreat to be? she wanted to know, and Lewyn, caught off guard, and thinking, perhaps, of Harrison, said something about New Hampshire. The White Mountains. (Or were they the Green Mountains?)
“Oh, that sounds nice,” she’d said. Then she went back to her book.
When they were together again he was going to tell her. He was. Because he had to and also because it was the right thing, and because he had suffered under the lie every single day since that early morning in the back of the bus. And then he would apologize. A lot. And he’d tell her he wished he’d made a better choice, back when he’d had the chance. And sure, he’d try to shift the blame, or some of it, to Sally, who had denied him long before he’d denied her back. That Sally had chosen not to tell her roommate he existed was painful, of course, but it was no excuse for his own lack of disclosure. Now, he wanted to go forward with transparency, if Rochelle would absolve him and allow it. Honesty, complete honesty, from this point forward.
He and Harrison carried the Champagne inside and promptly separated, Harrison to their room upstairs and Lewyn to the back porch, where Johanna had the baby on her lap.
“Oh good,” said our mother. “I wasn’t sure that car could make it all the way to Edgartown and back.”
“No, it was fine,” he said. “A truly vintage driving experience.”
When the people from Lobster Tales pulled into the driveway a few minutes later, Lewyn was conscripted to haul coolers, bins, and the big rectangular firebox down to the beach. He alone, it appeared: Harrison declined to emerge from the bedroom (though he could hardly have missed the big truck in the driveway beneath their window) and Sally had apparently gone off somewhere in the Volvo. Our mother, after greeting the caterers, had retreated. He didn’t know where Salo was.
When they got the cast aluminum pan settled on the sand, Lewyn stood back to watch them work. They lit the wood fire and started to layer in the corn, clams, mussels, lobsters, and seaweed. It was far too much food for the five of them, and he wondered again how Johanna had decided on this particular form of festivity, but he could only imagine they must once, in the misty past, have appeared to enjoy some similar event. Johanna was a collector of moments like that, Lewyn knew. Sally favored a certain green T-shirt: she must have an Emerald City–themed party! Harrison went through a pretentious bow tie phase: off he went with Salo on a father-son trip to Savile Row, to have matching three-piece suits made! (Where was an eight-year-old supposed to wear a three-piece suit? Plus, he outgrew it in a matter of months.) Our mother, as long as Lewyn could remember, had hoarded and imbued with great significance such tiny moments, all while seeing so little of who the three of them actually were, and even less as they’d each learned to deflect her oversight. Johanna had been happiest when they were small, he thought, all three dependent on her and competing for her attention. He wondered if the baby had made her happy again, but he suspected not. He suspected our mother was slipping down a long and rough decline, grabbing as she went and very possibly calling for help. And all of them—himself, his brother and sister and father, and even the impervious toddler, herself—were watching Johanna slide away and doing not a thing to stop it.
These were Lewyn’s thoughts as the last of the summer sun departed and, upstairs in their bedroom, Harrison typed away at an email to Eli Absalom Stone, detailing the recent revelation that his sister was apparently gay and his brother, Lewyn, the chubby one (chubby no longer, in fact, though Harrison left this out), was claiming to have found himself a girlfriend in college, and it was a sad, sad day when one had to confront the notion that one’s family were wholly uninterested in the dire impact of a generation of liberalism on a once robust notion of American integrity and so forth, and he could not wait to get back to Roarke and impart some of his ideas for the project he and Eli had (eagerly) agreed to take on for the Hayek Institute, a coauthored collection of essays in which two young conservatives addressed the deficiencies of liberal American academia. Johanna was also upstairs, rigid on her back in bed with her arm slung across her eyes, grasping at sleep as she listened to the baby. The baby was banging away on a toy xylophone across the hall, the single Oppenheimer whose state of being approached anything remotely like contentment.
But she was fourteen months old and would have no memory of this day, or the next, no matter how significant they would appear in hindsight.
Salo, in the little upstairs room that everyone called his office, was on the phone. He had been on that phone for most of the day.