“Did what?” I said. “I mean, could you be any more annoying right now?”
“Well, they sat us down one day. Senior spring. And said, basically: Yay! Your baby sister is on the way. You were being born in Florida somewhere, in the summer. We were all in shock, obviously. I can’t speak for Sally and Harrison, but I can tell you I assumed it was an adoption. So I said, ‘You’re adopting a baby?’ and Mom said, no. There’d been four of us, at the beginning. Four … I guess, embryos. But you didn’t put four embryos into a uterus at the same time. It was too dangerous. So the doctor had one frozen and the other three … well, were us.”
I stared at him. I couldn’t form words, and even if I’d been able to, what was there to say? The revulsion of having to think about our mother’s uterus was bad enough, but imagining yourself in a freezer, for years, was otherworldly.
“You had no idea,” Lewyn observed.
I shook my head.
Until that moment, the great, impenetrable drama of my life had been those planes, hurtling into conflagration, rendering our father only a tiny part of so much sudden nothingness, but also, appallingly, in the same abhorrent instant, somehow a party to the mass murder of others. The unspeakable act, or series of acts, had transformed us, the four Oppenheimer children—but especially my infant self—into human repositories of this great American tragedy, and tragedy had accompanied all four of us from that day forward. It was obvious to me already that I’d missed the best time of our family. I’d missed the young parents, the parents energetic enough and interested enough in young children to get down on the ground with them and shake maracas in Music Together class, or cheer from the sidelines of some game in the park. I’d missed the full house on the Esplanade, its rooms lively with arguing or laughing kids and grown-ups. I’d missed the full dinner table (and the actual food cooked for it), and the paternal grandparents with their massive Manhattan apartment. I’d missed a dachshund called Jürgen and the end-of-summer birthday celebrations on Martha’s Vineyard, in a house likewise full of kids and food and noise and summer books and summer board games, at least as our mother described it. What I got instead of all that was a widowed mom, so much older than the mothers of my friends, bowed down by understandable grief and not remotely capable of solo parenting a toddler, child, or teenager. I also got a single living grandparent in New Jersey who never looked at me (or even at our mother, her own daughter) with recognition, a large empty house with myself and my mom in separate rooms on separate floors, and meals that arrived in plastic containers packed in plastic bags and hung from bicycle handlebars. And naturally, not a single actual memory of our father, Salo Oppenheimer. It wasn’t fair.
It also, apparently, wasn’t fated, not if I was understanding my brother correctly. I’d always accepted that I wasn’t a spontaneous (if late) flowering of our parents’ love, or even an “accident” (as the term was generally understood) because the surrogacy quashed that notion even if Johanna’s advanced age at the time did not. But I’d always assumed that I’d at least been, well, made at the general time of my birth. Not— Oh.
It was, just …
“You had no idea,” my brother said again.
“No. Shit. What did they do, pick out the three best-looking blastocysts? And throw the dud in the freezer?”
“No clue,” said Lewyn, “but I’m impressed by your use of the word ‘blastocyst.’ Are you sure you’re not STEM?”
“Or maybe they just did eenie meenie mynie mo?”
Lewyn signed. “I wasn’t there. Or I was, but I was just a—”
“Blastocyst. Yeah. Fuck.”
“I’m sorry, Pheebs. If it’s any comfort, I always thought the whole thing was completely awkward and horrible, but on the other hand, not personal, either. It was only about the best chance for the best outcome. And the outcome was good, at least in the sense that they got three healthy babies, and childbirth didn’t kill the mother.”
“That’s a low bar,” I said, but I also knew it wasn’t.
“Drink your wine,” he said, and I did. In the receding shock, it went down well.
“So it could have been me and you and Sally, with Harrison in the freezer.”
“And I would have had a much nicer childhood, yes.”
“Or me and Harrison and Sally, and you’d be a senior in high school now.”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“We might as well. Like, it’s on ice. We can get a surrogate. Why not?”
He shrugged. “As I say, I wasn’t present, and I wasn’t consulted. If you really want to go there, you’re going to have to ask Mom.”
“I can’t,” I said, my voice flat. “Because I hate her.”
We sat together in silence. Finally, Lewyn said, “You don’t really. I don’t, either. We’re not the hating type.”
I nodded, reluctantly. I actually loved that my brother could say this and apparently believe it was true. I wasn’t at all sure that could be said of the others: Sally, who had quite pointedly exiled herself, and Harrison, a self-styled oracle of intelligentsia to people in MAGA hats all over the country. They represented the opposite of Lewyn, who had not only come back home but hadn’t left again.
“Actually,” I said, remembering, “this is not what I came to talk about. So maybe we’ll put a pin—you should pardon the expression—in this topic—”
“Ouch,” he said, but he was also obviously relieved to move on.
“And you can tell me what you make of this.”
I handed him the letter from the American Folk Art Museum. Lewyn took it from its envelope and read, frowning.
“What does it mean?” I asked, impatient.
“I’m not sure. This was addressed to Mom?” He checked the envelope and frowned again. It was clearly established that he, Lewyn Oppenheimer, oversaw the Oppenheimer Collection. This had been a consequence of his temperament and affinity, and also of the fact that he was an accredited curator. This was also clearly stated on the collection website and in all publications. Scholars, dealers, and fellow curators at museums all over the world had always dealt with him directly on matters involving the nearly two hundred works assembled by Salo Oppenheimer.
“Apparently not the first time they’ve tried to contact her,” I said.
“About somebody named Achilles Rizzoli. And we supposedly own nearly all of his paintings. Which is very strange, since I’ve never heard of him.”
“I googled him. He died in the 1970s. He’s an ‘Outsider Artist.’ I googled that, too.”
Lewyn got up from the couch and retrieved his laptop. “Well, I’m quite sure they’re mistaken. We don’t own a single piece of Outsider Art. He came close to buying a Warhol once, but he decided against it. He didn’t want to open the door to Pop Art, I think. He was such a purist.”
“Too bad,” I said. I wouldn’t have minded owning a Warhol. Who didn’t like Warhol?
“Oh, this is interesting,” my brother said. He had the laptop open on his kitchen counter. “There are a couple of Achilles Rizzoli works in the Bay Area, one in a private collection and one at the De Young. Nothing else has been seen since the first Outsider Art Fair in 1993. A lost collection!”
“Very dramatic,” I said. But the truth was that I wasn’t all that into art, any art, not even Warhol. “Are you going to say something to Mom?”
But he didn’t answer. He was looking at the letter again.
“Lewyn?”
“Oh,” said Lewyn, looking up. “I just saw … I think, maybe there’s a connection after all, but I still don’t…” He returned to the letter from the museum and stopped talking.
“Lewyn! What?”
“It’s just … this documentary filmmaker. Give me a second,” he said.
I watched him lean closer to his laptop. This was obviously going to be very annoying, waiting for him to spit it out. I walked across to his desk and picked up the letter myself.
“S. S. Western,” I read. “Never heard of him.”
“Her,” said Lewyn, but he didn’t look away from the screen.