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.