I did turn off the television after that.
It had always been like this. Every time I got it into my head to spend time with Harrison, to get to know him a little bit better and be, perhaps, a little bit better known by him, I had run into the very same obstacle: Harrison. More specifically, the noxious, unbearable opinions and associations of Harrison, ostensibly the family star, certainly its most visible member. Harrison, as current president of Wurttemberg Holdings, was also the one responsible for maintaining and extending our individual and collective wealth, and I supposed that was a good thing (I personally had no intention of declining the security and advantages that came with that wealth), but his extracurricular activities as toady to the current president and inhabitant of that vile gray zone between fiscal conservative and Tiki Torchbearer made him less and less palatable every time I resolved to try again.
After returning from Ithaca the week before, and in an ongoing effort to avoid the now-looming task of applying to college, I’d emailed my brother and suggested we talk. In person.
Arranging this turned into an ordeal of its own.
[email protected] October 17, 2017. 10:21 A.M.
Yes, lovely to hear from you. Certainly we can meet. Why not come to office next Tues 11:15 am.
Cc’ing Flora who will confirm.
H. Oppenheimer
[email protected]
October 17, 2017. 10:40 A.M.
Harrison, I am a high school student. At 11:15 next Tuesday I will be in Latin class.
Hi Flora.
Phoebe
[email protected]
October 17, 2017, 12:10 P.M.
Delighted to hear that Walden is finally offering Latin. Begged and pleaded, to no avail.
Tuesday at 4 pm office.
Cc’ing Flora who will confirm.
H. Oppenheimer
[email protected]
October 17, 2017, 12:31 P.M.
Sorry, track practice. Can I just come visit on the weekend?
Phoebe
[email protected]
October 18, 2017, 9:33 A.M.
Will be at board retreat in Virginia. Suggest 10/28 6:30 Harvard Club.
Cc’ing Flora who will confirm.
H.
And on like this for another half dozen go-rounds, with his proposed dates stretching into November. At last he suggested I meet him at Fox News the following Saturday, then come back to his apartment. Whether or not he’d finally sensed there was something of possible consequence I wanted to talk about I wasn’t sure, but naturally I accepted. Not the Fox News part, though. Waiting for him in a limo in front of the studio was about as close as I could bear to get to Fox News.
After Ithaca I’d taken a few days to think through Sally’s various revelations; they were intense, intermittently distressing, and, in complete contrast, somehow also a great relief, as the previously invisible pegs of my own secret history began to drop into their appointed holes. I’d also decided to stop wondering why this was apparently my job, this reweaving of the shredded fabric of our family, the figuring out what was owed to whom by whom and how we were all supposed to become unstuck with one another. Maybe I just wanted it more than any of the others did, or was better able to understand that I wanted it, or to say that I wanted it, or all of that at once. But the bald fact was that there wasn’t anybody else volunteering to make it happen. Our father was dead. Our mother was basically estranged from Lewyn—despite his physical proximity—and Sally, and not terribly interested in me (except, at the moment, in where I was going to college and how far behind I was on my applications). Sally and her brothers did not speak, Harrison and Lewyn were locked in mutual disdain. I had a real sense that if things didn’t improve by the time I graduated Walden and (presumably) left home, the center—whatever center remained in our family—would not hold, not for one moment longer.
If not me, in other words, who?
If not now, in other words, when?
“I hear you’re going to see Harrison appear on Fox News tomorrow,” our mother announced on Friday afternoon, as I made my post-practice tea.
“Well, yes and no. Yes to Harrison, no to Fox News. I cannot deal. How do you stand it?”
“He’s entitled to his opinions. You can’t say he isn’t well-informed.”
I could if I wanted to, I thought. Instead, I hedged. “I doubt they’re very proud of him at Walden these days. He’s like a one-man repudiation of everything they hold dear.”
“I sent my children to Walden to be educated. Not indoctrinated.”
“Fair point.”
“And one thing I have always admired about Harrison is his self-awareness, and his drive.”
That’s two things, I thought, but I didn’t interrupt.
“He knew from an early age what he wanted, and he worked very hard for it. I wish Sally and Lewyn had had a bit more of that.”
I got a spoon from the drawer and lifted my tea bag out of the mug, depositing it in the trash. There was no point in noting that Sally, too, had chosen an occupation at a relatively early age, or that she ran a hale little business which more than supported her and more than fulfilled her. Or that Lewyn, after some undeniable wandering, had found work commensurate with his talents and interests.
“Drive is fine. But not everyone knows what they want as early as Harrison did. I don’t know what I want, for example.”
I don’t even know where to apply to college, I almost said. I didn’t. It didn’t matter.
“Have you decided where you’re applying to college?” she said, meeting my expectations.
“I’m narrowing it down,” I said. An utter fiction.
I waited in the limo for another half an hour after switching off Harrison’s panel, time I passed in monitoring its lively Twitter response. This debate ranged in substance from deeply unpleasant comments about Shaunta Owens’s “Black accent” to the usual praise for Eli Absalom Stone and his great, self-reliant rise. Regarding Harrison himself, the predominant words were: “blowhard” and “dickwad,” with an opposing cluster of “sensible” and “hypocritical libtards!” but none of this struck me as at all remarkable. I put my phone away when he finally turned up.
“Hello there,” my brother said, climbing in beside me. He gave me a perfunctory kiss on the cheek, then another on the other cheek. (It was one of the habits—some might call them affectations—he had picked up during his Rhodes years.) “Eli’s here. We’re dropping him at his apartment.”
Eli had been waylaid on the sidewalk. He was signing a book for a man and his teenaged son.
“Okay,” I said.
I had met Eli before, of course. It was hard not to meet Eli when seeing Harrison. Eli lived a few blocks from my brother, in another elegant Sutton Place building, and though his primary affiliation was with a policy and education think tank based in DC, the two of them were mainly engaged in the common pursuit of writing books and “instigating change” together. Not the kind of change my own classmates were always going on about, either.
“Hello, Eli,” I said when he joined us.
“Little Phoebe! My word. How old are you now?”
I told him. Seventeen. “And please don’t ask me where I’m going to college. It’s all anyone wants to know.”
“It’s a glorious time! Don’t suffer. Delight in your choices and opportunities.”
“By which you mean,” I said, “my privilege?”
“There is nothing wrong with privilege. The suffering of others is no reason not to make the most of your own life. Should you stay home and rend your garments because somebody in Calcutta can’t take the SAT?”
I glanced at Harrison. He was smiling, looking out at Sixth Avenue as it passed.
“Go to college, become educated, and create opportunities for people in Calcutta. This is called progress.”
“Oh,” I said with what I hoped was evident sarcasm.