“What do you think of this one?” he asked our mother.
She was sitting on the Jennifer convertible, looking at the new painting with a certain dismay. It was large, a mustard color with a thin vertical greenish stripe on the left edge and a crosshatch of lines at the top. It clashed horribly with the sofa, which was a light blue flower print, and with the shag rug, which was also blue, but a different blue.
“What is it supposed to be?” she asked.
“His home. He lives in Los Angeles.”
“And those are … streets?”
So that—the sharing of it, with her, the woman he already assumed he was going to marry—was obviously not going to happen. But then again, our father wasn’t sure he wanted to share it. It relieved him not to share it.
One thing Salo really did like about Johanna was the fact that she didn’t care much about the acquisition in general. Our mother had never been a shopper and she didn’t start then; she wore jeans and Fair Isle sweaters, tall brown Frye boots on her feet, and for dressy occasions there were a couple of wrap dresses that made her already small waist nearly disappear. She had no wish to experience the downtown clubs, CBGB, already legendary for its iconoclastic bands （and filth）， or later the game-changing Palladium and Studio 54. She seemed happy at home with a book or watching one of the new cable channels, Cinemax or Home Box Office, or going out with her Skidmore friends who were beginning to drift south to Manhattan. She gamely went along when there was a museum he wanted to visit, but he waited until she was back in Saratoga to do what he had begun to think of as his real investigations. She did not seem to have a comparable interest, let alone passion; or rather, he understood that the chief interest of her life was himself: his comfort, his entertainment, his absolution. Salo had not asked for this, but suddenly he had it, and he could not seem to make himself feel anything about it. Sometimes he wondered who he might have become if his Jeep hadn’t hit that rock and sent the four of them tumbling through space, but he could never quite see this theoretical version of himself. That person was as much a stranger to himself as the actual person, the tumbling person, he knew himself to be.
Sometimes, our mother made him think of Mandy Bernstein: her relentless focus on him, the force of her unqualified love. He understood that she thought of him as a good man, a man beaten down by the undeserved tragedy in his personal rearview mirror, but always on the edge of some beautiful redemption. Our father couldn’t bring himself to disappoint her, to tell her how wrong she was. He would not destroy another nice young woman who was so ill-advisedly determined to love him, and it was that, more than anything else, more than love for her or optimism about a life with her, that made him propose one night at Maxwell’s Plum under one of the ersatz Tiffany lamps, with a ring that had once belonged to his father’s mother. It was too big for Johanna—the size, not the stone—but she was happy with it. Wildly happy. She would also have been happy with a small wedding, just their families and the few friends they’d each kept from college, but they ended up with a big ceremony at the Harmonie Club, and plenty of Wurttemberg clients in attendance. His parents paid for everything.
By then, of course, our mother had a firmer grasp of what she was dealing with in regard to the Oppenheimers, their considerable wealth in particular. She had met his parents, the all but silent Hermann and the terrifying Selda （her expression so frozen Johanna truly did not know whether she was being singled out for special disapprobation or was merely a tiny part of a disapproved-of world）， but mainly in restaurants, which delayed her complete awareness. Objectively she recognized that the Oppenheimers were people of means, far more so than her own family, but she had grown up in proximity to only one version of American wealth—the one represented by the students of the Lawrenceville school—and Salo’s parents were obviously not that. Also, Salo himself was indifferent to any display of wealth, unlike other boys she’d known （and dated） who had far less money but who seemed to require the most expensive version of anything in order to feel good about themselves. Our father, when they met, lived mainly in those elderly chinos and sweaters, sometimes over a T-shirt from his old school, Collegiate. He didn’t make any great change in his wardrobe even after he’d begun to work at Wurttemberg, and it was only when his own father spoke to him that he suited up to the appropriate degree. （Johanna helped him pick out a briefcase so he’d stop transporting his papers in a Big Brown Bag from Bloomingdale’s.） She was not yet enough of a New Yorker to recognize the significance of some of Salo’s touchstones: Collegiate, the weekend house on the shore in Rye, the summer camp long associated with Jewish families of a certain financial stratum, and above all the Oppenheimer apartment on Fifth Avenue, in a 1915 limestone co-op that had once been resolutely off-limits to Jewish people, no matter how much money they had. This mansion in the sky took up fully half （the better half） of a high floor, so its long line of rooms all overlooked the great carpet of trees in the center of Manhattan. There, the sofas were certainly not from Jennifer Convertibles and the chairs were certainly not from Habitat, and the paintings on the beautiful walls, which were certainly not Sheetrock, had little bronze nameplates and discreet lights overhead.