The Latecomer, page 4
They went there one afternoon when Hermann and Selda were in Rye, to pick up some document from a drawer in Salo’s childhood bedroom. As they passed through the living room she happened to look up at the wall above the mantelpiece, and stopped. Then she took a step nearer. The bronze plate said … it actually said … Édouard Manet.
“Is that …?” She’d been about to say “real,” but she already knew it was real. She would never be on intimate terms with her in-laws, but she already knew they weren’t the kind of people who’d have the work of a famous painter copied for display in their living room.
“What?”
“No, nothing.”
And she followed him down a long corridor, still stunned.
It was just one more thing to fold into the ongoing enigma of her boyfriend’s parents. When she went to Salo’s office, as she sometimes did, Hermann came to greet her with a smile and a formal handshake. When the four of them met for dinner, always at a restaurant with hushed service and frightening silverware, Selda asked solicitously about her mother and father and brother and sister. But her own boyfriend, then fiancé, then husband, seemed to have nothing at all to say about his childhood, and the details he offered Johanna were mainly to do with the household staff. There had been a housekeeper named Etta who stayed overnight in the apartment, in the small maid’s room off the kitchen, making it possible for Salo’s parents to travel or go to Rye without him (something they had done a lot). There had been a nanny named Rosa who’d walked him to nursery school, and another named Miss James who took him on the crosstown bus to Collegiate and picked him up, at least until fourth grade. He ate dinner at the kitchen table, sometimes with his mother before she went out, sometimes only with Etta or Miss James, who put a great quantity of salt on everything she was served, which was offensive to Etta, who cooked. His bedroom, far down the corridor from the room where his parents slept, had a green plaid bedspread and curtains and a desk where he was supposed to do his homework and a beanbag chair he used instead. (He hardly needed to describe this to her, since it was all unchanged.) On the wall outside his room there had been a painting of a boy with a spoon which wasn’t there any longer. Actually, Salo told her, a lot of the paintings he’d grown up with were no longer there.
But he could barely remember a childhood conversation with his mother and father together, or an outing, let alone a family vacation, only the three of them together. Having produced him they seemed to have retreated to a respectful distance at the edges of his childhood, politely applauding and dutifully accompanying him through those formative years but opting to leave some parts of the business of parenting to people better suited, which in this case meant nobody. He wouldn’t fault them, and she was careful not to insist he do so. They had not withheld from him anything he’d actually wanted at the time, or anything he now missed having had. On the contrary, Hermann and Selda had driven to Maine each summer to visit him at Androscoggin, standing with the other parents to watch the canoe skills demonstration and the archery tournament, and they’d stood with him at Temple Emanu-El (another Hermann Oppenheimer, the grandfather of Salo’s grandfather, had been a founding member in 1845). And then there was the night those two had swept into Ithaca and packed Salo in ether and taken him away, back to New York, and never once said a thing to him about what he had done. They had even brought him to Lawrenceville for Mandy’s funeral and to Newark for Daniel’s, waiting in coffee shops while he did what he needed to do, what was the right thing to do, what they themselves would have expected if, God forbid, one of those other young people had been behind the wheel and their own son, their only child, was so suddenly gone.
He never talked about that either, but our mother waited, even so. She perfected the making of safe moments for his profound utterances, should they ever come.
Salo’s life at Wurttemberg was precisely what he had expected it to be. The limestone building on a corner near the Stock Exchange had been the shrewd purchase of his father’s grandfather at exactly the right moment, that moment being the fall of 1920, shortly after the Stock Exchange bombing. This Oppenheimer forebear declined the opportunity to build upward, insisting that the stubby little limestone corner remain a mushroom among redwoods. Inside, time slowed to a crawl: the quiet dignity of a rigorously private institution with stately reception and meeting rooms on the ground floor and elegant individual offices upstairs (some large, others very large). Floors were swept and woodwork made to glow by invisible nighttime cleaners, and every morning breakfast was arranged in chafing dishes in the dining room for the employees, as if they were all members of some titled family, gathering for kippered eggs and toast before dispersing to their busy days. The firm’s culture was somewhat suggestive of certain other institutions which had gone out of their way to make earlier generations of Oppenheimers as unwelcome as possible, and unlike other Jewish firms founded by equally adept and ambitious families Wurttemberg had been steered by a century of like-minded commodores with one eye on family wealth and another on the next generation. Unlike those firms, Wurttemberg resisted every one of the sinkholes that came along to bedevil the industry, among them leveraged buyouts, junk bonds, insider trading, “pumping and dumping,” and the occasional Ponzi scheme.
When Salo Oppenheimer assumed possession of one of the third-floor offices, he brought with him only that square gray painting his wife found so distasteful. The painting—its actual name was Dylan Study II—went on the wall opposite our father’s desk, where its stillness and depth would sustain him for many years. Johanna, making a rare visit at around this time, was relieved to see Dylan Study II in its new home, but the office as a whole looked a little dingy. She suggested a coat of paint. Maybe a brighter white? Or at least a pair of lamps from Bloomingdale’s? “It’s so dim in here.”
“I know. It’s always been like that, even before all those buildings went up.”
“There must be something we can do.”
No, he told her. “You concentrate on the house.”
The house, their new house, was in Brooklyn, a place where neither of them had ever considered living. Brooklyn in those years seemed much farther away from Manhattan than it later would, and represented a very different city. But at one of her work events Johanna met a magazine editor from People who understood the significance of our mother’s new last name. She also had a husband who was a young broker at Douglas Elliman, so low on the totem pole that he’d been assigned this Van Diemen’s Land of New York City. He called Johanna Oppenheimer the very next day and told her he had something he wanted to show her, in Brooklyn Heights.
Our mother had once watched a scary movie in which a Brooklyn Heights house actually contained the gateway to hell, and she felt a little spooked at the thought of looking out there, even if the Realtor promised it was spectacular, undervalued, and—the key to everything she thought about in those days—big enough for a family. She caught some heat from the driver of the taxi she hailed on Lexington, but an extra twenty persuaded him and he drove her, for the first time in her life, over the Brooklyn Bridge and through the cobbled streets of the Heights. The driver left her a few minutes’ walk away on Montague Terrace, unwilling to help her find the right number and so surly it was clear he thought she must be looking for something unlawful. (Drugs? Or a gun?) So our mother gave him his fare and the twenty and climbed out, already worried about how she was going to get home.
The agent was waiting for her down the block, and he came rushing to meet her, perhaps to make sure she didn’t flee. His name was Barton Zanes. He was twenty-five, tops, but already completely bald.
She took in the street, which was shabby. Once grand, she could see that, but in 1979 much diminished. “Where does that go?” she asked. There were very dubious people walking on a kind of footpath beside the house Zanes had led her to: a couple with their hands in each other’s back pockets, and a tall man with a rottweiler.
“It goes down to the Esplanade. On the waterfront. You know.”
Of course she didn’t know. She was a girl from suburban New Jersey who’d only just gotten used to the Upper East Side. As far as she was concerned, Brooklyn was where John Travolta went to the disco and Gene Hackman chased drug dealers, and where gangs on the subway roamed at will (not that she ever rode the subway in Manhattan, where gangs also roamed at will). And also, where blind priests guarded the entrance to hell: Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.
“It overlooks all of lower Manhattan. You see?” He was pointing after the rottweiler at a walkway above the open water. She didn’t even know what that water was. The Hudson? “Doesn’t your husband work in the Financial District? He can walk to work!”
“Walk?” she said, mystified. “How?”
“Over the bridge!” said Barton Zanes. He seemed delighted. “C’mon, let’s look. It’s completely insane.”
And it was, it was. Even she was breathless at the rooms, some of which had broad views of that spectacular water—New York Harbor!—and the buildings of Wall Street and the Fulton Fish Market and even the Statue of Liberty. The floors were dingy and scratched, but they were all there, inlay and parquet. The plaster walls were flaking and seemed in places to emit strands of something, waving in the air—horsehair, Zanes said helpfully, as if this were a good thing. (Horsehair? In the walls?) The great carved bannister wobbled. A few windows were cracked or patched with duct tape. Some of the bathroom tiles had crumbled to dust. There was a kitchen somebody had obviously started to renovate, but lost the will to proceed with after the appliances had been extracted. “So you can start over!” said Zanes. “Marble everywhere! A big commercial stove! Gourmet kitchen!”
“I’m not that great a cook,” our mother said, as if this had ever stopped anyone from ordering up a gourmet kitchen. “But, you know, I can sort of see a big table here.”
She could see more than that. She could hear her own children running up and down these staircases, flushing the less than modern toilets and bathing in the oversized claw-foot tubs. She could imagine playrooms and rooms for piling on a couch in front of the television. As she climbed the stairs to the attic rooms and descended to the basement, it seemed that the more rooms there were the more children she might have. She could see a different Salo in this house, as well: a father and husband, a man who felt able to take pleasure in life. That was what she wanted for him, and it might be possible here as it could never be possible in that dingy little apartment on Third. For the first time it struck her that staying in such a featureless and depressing place as their present apartment was somehow preventing her family from coming into being. If we lived here, she thought, our children would be here with us.
Of course, she didn’t tell Salo that. She told him that the house needed lots of work, but something about it felt right and he should come as quickly as possible to see it. Salo, lifelong New Yorker that he was, did not need to be told what he was looking at when he stood by the west-facing windows, but he was dumbstruck, nonetheless. It happened to be a late afternoon in November, and the sun was disappearing over New Jersey, trailing orange and pink along the water as a ferry headed home to Staten Island. Twenty-five-foot-wide single-family homes with twenty-foot ceilings (on the parlor floor, at least; the rest were a mere fourteen) and four fireplaces had already become both scarce and expensive in Manhattan. And not one of them actually overlooked … Manhattan.
He asked again what the price was, and when he heard it his heart leapt. Then he offered 75 percent, cash.
Not surprisingly, his parents were vocally opposed. Where would they shop for groceries in Brooklyn? Some kosher market in Williamsburg or Crown Heights? Where would they find doctors and dentists? What about a gym and a video store and a salon? Salo and Johanna should stay in that nice new building on the Upper East Side, and, when the time came, they could move to Park or Fifth or even the West Side, if they really wanted to go crazy and anti-establishment. There were some parts of the West Side that were just lovely. But Brooklyn? Why not The Bronx. Why not Staten Island!
“It’s absurdly inexpensive,” he told them.
“Well, there’s a reason for that,” his father said.
“It’s going to be gorgeous once we’ve fixed it up.”
“I think this idea that you’re going to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to work is very bizarre,” said his mother. “Who walks across a bridge?”
“Lots of people.”
“If you’re in the middle of the bridge and someone tries to rob you, who can help?”
The same no one who’d rush to help you on Park Avenue, Salo thought.
And, our grandmother added, this time to Johanna, and in a studiously offhand way so as not to make a thing of it, if the two of them had children one day, only think how long it would take to cart them into the city every morning to Brearley or Collegiate, and then back to Brooklyn again!
But there was a school nearby, very nearby, in fact, called Walden. And if that school did, oddly, refer to itself as an “educational collective” and was the kind of place where children apparently learned from drum-beating teachers, well, that was all right with her, not that she said this to her mother-in-law. Already—more than once—she had walked dreamily around its periphery, peering through the iron gate at the multicolored playground full of shouting girls and boys. Yes, their children could go to Walden. If, that is, they were ever born.
3
Fertility and Its Discontents
In which a rosary is said for the Oppenheimers, with remarkable results
Our mother also had a job, though not, of course, for the money. She worked three days a week as a program director for the American Society of Magazine Editors, a position made available to her through the intervention of Wurttemberg’s legal counsel, whose sister was executive assistant to ASME’s director. The actual job application and hiring had consisted of a lunch at Smith & Wollensky (at which she’d been so afraid to order anything off that expensive menu that she’d ended up with an onion soup and a waiter who looked at her with open hostility); after that she was basically handed the annual internship program and told that she was in charge. Johanna liked reading the application essays of students from the Midwestern state schools, who seemed starstruck by the prospect of interning at Progressive Grocer or Scientific American, and the Ivy League girls (women) who she suspected would drop out of the program if they didn’t get assigned to Vogue, Mademoiselle, or Glamour. They were only a few years younger than she was, but they were all so focused! In fact, they made her wonder if the rest of her generation wasn’t rushing past her into some promised, post-coeducation future she hadn’t been told about. In June, when the young people arrived in New York for their orientation, she was the one to greet them in the lobby of their NYU dormitory, offering ASME T-shirts and maps of the city with the restaurant for their welcome dinner circled in red. Waiting for them at her little table, handing them their keys, she watched them approach, already in their Professional-Summer-in-New-York-City clothes, and felt the force of their ambition. The only thing she wanted as much as these college students wanted to work in magazines was to be pregnant.
Then, during her second ASME summer, not one but two young interns (Seventeen and Reader’s Digest) came weeping to her with unexpected and very unwanted pregnancies, and Johanna Oppenheimer walked directly into the office of the sister of Wurttemberg’s legal counsel and quit. After that, fertility and its discontents would be her only employment.
How she came to despise the use of the word “journey” to describe this, the grating, grueling, sometimes boring, always excruciating business of trying and failing to become pregnant. It was not supposed to be a thing at all! It was supposed to just happen in the way it had always happened, something along the lines of open legs, insert penis, bring forth offspring. That was how it had worked for her sister, and even for the thoroughly unremarkable person Bobby had finally married and impregnated (though not, as it happened, in that order). But not for Johanna and Salo Oppenheimer. For the first year, Salo wasn’t even aware of the fact that his wife was actively trying to become pregnant, and she somehow persuaded herself that this made it not count as a year of failure. Then one afternoon she asked him, as if the notion had just occurred to her, whether the two of them were not ready for the next step. And he had said: “Next step to where?”
It wasn’t that he was holding back. He wasn’t holding back. He wasn’t even afraid. It was just that the idea of it, of a pregnancy that might, in due course, turn into a baby and thence into a child, or “person,” was so utterly beyond his ken that he could not immediately understand what she was talking about. He was so not there with her in her longing, so not bitterly disappointed each month when it didn’t happen. He wasn’t a step behind, vaguely believing that it would all work out eventually. It wasn’t an acknowledged issue between them, something he’d made his feelings clear about and asked her to concede to. No. It simply wasn’t there at all. It was as if the entire notion of procreation would have to be fully reinvented for the sole edification of Salo Oppenheimer.
If she could have moved ahead without his help or even knowledge, she’d have done it in an instant, but the first thing you gave up when you dragged yourself, finally, to the famous infertility doctor you’ve read about in New York magazine was the privilege of keeping a secret from your husband.
