“But she knows all that,” I heard my aunt Debbie say, and I stopped right there on the step, breathing.
“Well, sure. She even met the woman once. A few years ago. Her first trip to New York City, ever in her life, can you imagine? I took her out to dinner at some steakhouse somewhere, before she went to see Wicked, and Phoebe was there for that. Unbelievably awkward. I mean, what do you talk about with somebody from the Florida panhandle? Yes, the buildings are tall. Yes, there are a lot of people, and they all walk very fast. And a twelve-year-old! Not such great conversationalists, either.”
“It’s like a New Yorker story,” Aunt Debbie laughed.
No, I thought, frozen on the third step. It’s just not.
“There wasn’t any other way. We had to be realistic. I was forty-seven that year. It was too much of a risk. I was nervous enough entrusting it to a twenty-three-year-old from Pensacola who’d already had two kids! We had only one, you know.”
My aunt laughed her snorting laugh. I thought: Wait, one what?
“I think we were both getting a little weepy about the thought of the older kids leaving. And you know, there it was, and we could afford it. So we said, you know, Why not? We might as well. And that was it.”
After which my aunt said something I couldn’t make out. And then nobody said anything, and after a moment I went on up the stairs with my cooling tea and my heavy backpack and my purloined letter from the American Folk Art Museum, past the birthday photos of my sister and brothers on the back porch in Chilmark, growing up through the years before I was born—the years before, apparently, Why not? We might as well—feeling exactly what any sentient person would be feeling, under the circumstances—in other words, very fucking confused.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Maybe a Connection After All
In which Lewyn Oppenheimer reveals the family configuration to be not fated, not natural, and also not fair Later that night, I brought the letter to my brother Lewyn, who lived in the basement of our house.
Lewyn, who was sadly the only one of my siblings I spoke with on anything like a regular basis, had returned to Brooklyn Heights when I was seven and installed himself across the landing in his old room. He was a total stranger, a depressed twenty-four-year-old who, for a long while, seldom left the house, and I tiptoed around him like my own private Boo Radley. Eventually, though, he emerged from his eddy and moved all the way down to the miniwarren of rooms in the basement, with its own small kitchen and separate entrance.
One thing that didn’t escape me, even when I was really young, was the fact that none of my triplet siblings seemed to enjoy the company （let alone value the counsel） of any of the others. Lewyn, for example, could barely tolerate being in the same room as Sally, and he actively loathed Harrison （who was, to be fair, not all that difficult to loathe）。 Harrison treated Lewyn with disdain and seemed to have forgotten Sally’s existence. Sally had taken herself away from all of us, and only appeared for family events of unassailable gravity—the funerals, mainly, of significant Hirsches and Oppenheimers. Obviously, I still lived with our mother, but apart from me only Harrison intentionally spent time with her. Once, I knew, there had been a semimandate that all three should gather on their birthday, but Johanna seemed less and less committed to enforcing this as the years passed and the three of them declined to soften toward one another in the slightest. Every time I climbed the staircase I had to watch the three of them grow up in those annual birthday photographs, but then the photographs ran out and that version of our family—Oppenheimer 1.0, I’d privately named it—had run out, too. Oppenheimer 2.0 consisted of me and our widowed mom in a huge empty house, those others far apart from one another in fixed orbits. Harrison lived on the Upper East Side but traveled constantly on his noxious mission to make the world awful. Sally was far away in Ithaca and Lewyn was downstairs. Of the three of them, only Lewyn seemed to regard me as an actual sister rather than, say, the subject of a documentary they had each happened to watch. It was all very regrettable and unfortunate, but weirdly I also understood that it had little if anything to do with me, personally. Like everything else of any note in our family, these rifts and obstructions seemed to have predated my arrival.