Then, suddenly, there he was: the savior himself! He was dangling from a slender cable high above the enormous stage, lit in brightest light with only a bit of the moon, dull behind clouds, in competition for the eye, and the rest of the world of the play and the rest of the real world suddenly still.
Christ stayed with the Nephites （or Lamanites, Lewyn wasn’t sure） for three days, then left to return to the story he already knew: the tomb in Jerusalem with its stone rolled aside. Then, the end of the pageant became a metanarrative about the golden plates: containing this very story, buried right here on the crest of the Hill Cumorah. The music soared and the voices of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir rolled over the audience as that same Joseph Smith Lewyn had seen hours earlier, talking to a pretty girl in a BYU Rugby shirt, became a tiny action figure up there on the stage. Behind him, the first faithful took their places, radiant with belief.
Rochelle, on his right, was rolling and unrolling her program between her hands. Mark’s eyes were shut in furious prayer. Then Lewyn looked past them down the long row of people: all glowing, many in tears, reaching for one another. Everywhere around him families embraced, scrums of bodies pressed together in celebration, and he was mystified. When, in our own family, had we ever held one another this way? When had any one of us, apart from our mother, reached out with love, and when had any of the rest of us not pulled back? The faintest hint of affection, the palest expression of warmth, was enough to make each Oppenheimer triplet recoil; this Lewyn understood, with deep sadness, for the very first time in his life, as the waves of applause and the shining faces and the powerful evidence of roiling human love surged all around him. Was it God, after all? Not one of his own relatives believed that the God of Abraham and Sarah and Moses knew them personally or took any special interest in their welfare, or imagined they would someday enter a Jewish paradise and embrace as a family, for all eternity. Embrace? As a family? For all eternity? How had we been made so differently from these people? Lewyn wondered, with dismay. Were we even capable of feeling what they felt? These thousands, weeping and cheering and swaying in their unfathomable ecstasy, had crossed some great divide from the place he was and had always been to some other place where people were at peace with one another and themselves, and at that moment, and for many years to come, he would have done nearly anything to be there with them.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Summer Lovers
In which Sally Oppenheimer discovers her brother’s snakeliness,
and contemplates the entire baffling mosh pit of adult life
Sally was at the kitchen table on East Seneca with half a glass of lemonade in front of her and our mother on the phone. The house, empty on a late Friday afternoon in July because Harriet had gone up to Rochester to see a friend, was very still, though overhead a desultory fan circled, moving the warm air around. She was drumming her fingers on the tabletop, the now-worthless “brown furniture” table once given pride of place in the Greene dining room. It had recently been treated with some homemade wood paste of Harriet’s, and was glowing. Over the past couple of months, Sally had acquainted herself with every piece of furniture in the house （covered and uncovered） by means of this special concoction. It wasn’t about banishing dirt, either; it was about resurrection.
“I told you I had an internship,” Sally said when Johanna stopped talking. Our mother was on an island off the coast of Massachusetts, and she wanted to know why Sally wasn’t there, too.
“That was months ago. If you’re that interested in antiques, I’m sure we could have found you something in Edgartown. Are you?”
“What?” Sally asked. She wasn’t not listening. But she wasn’t completely listening, either.
“Interested in antiques.”
“My tastes are developing,” Sally said. “I mean, I’m being educated. It’s what happens here in college.”
“You’re studying … furniture?”
“No, of course not. I’m just interested. I still haven’t decided on a major. Has Lewyn?” she asked, hoping to change the subject.