“And this was the crappy thing.”
“Yes. Highly crappy.”
“You must have been very unhappy,” I said, whereupon Sally burst into tears.
I sat, watching her, my hand on her wrist. There were others in the café, scattered about at the tables, mainly with open books. A few looked over, but saw that the weeping woman with her face in her hands wasn’t alone, and went back to whatever they were doing.
“We all had an awful fight. Lewyn, apparently, had told Harrison I was a lesbian, and Harrison just announced it to everyone.”
“Bastard!” I said, horrified. “Both of them.”
“Yes. And then Dad actually told me it was okay, but I was so furious at everyone, and so embarrassed. That’s when I told him I knew about Stella. It was the last night of his life, and I basically left him with: you’re a terrible father. And that was our nineteenth birthday, all of us screaming and stomping off. You were crying, too,” she recalled. “For what it’s worth.”
“Well, at least I got to participate in one important family event.”
Sally sighed. “And that was that. Because the next day, as we all know, Dad got on a plane and died, and we were all, just, frozen right where we were. Where we still are, I guess.”
I took my sister’s hand, and thought: Yes. But not for much longer.
Chapter Thirty
A Bit of a Bastard
In which Harrison Oppenheimer explains what negotiation is for
I want it on record that I declined my brother’s invitation to join him inside the Fox News affiliate on Forty-Eighth Street. I found Harrison’s car and driver parked outside and got into the back to wait for him there, but then, succumbing to temptation （and the luxury of the limo’s waiting television）， I tuned in to watch him do his thing.
The topic at hand was a class-action lawsuit alleging discrimination by college admissions officers, specifically at Harvard. The effort, mounted by Asian applicants, had been predictably co-opted by groups far more concerned with keeping Black and brown people out than with letting Asian people （one member of the panel actually used the word “Oriental”） in, and the only other person of color at the table—apart from Harrison’s eternally present friend, Eli Absalom Stone—could do little more than beat back increasingly personal assaults. Harrison himself asked an attorney named Shaunta Owens whether she was aware that the average SAT score of accepted African American applicants in her own UPenn class （1983） had been a full hundred points lower than that of white applicants, and when she answered yes he plowed on unforgivingly. “And are you not deeply chagrined by this fact? How do you expect your own accomplishments to be fairly viewed through the scrim of obvious pandering to political correctness? When somebody looks at you and sees entitlement on the basis of ethnicity—”
“Someone like yourself,” interjected Shaunta Owens, whom Fox was identifying as “Commentator.”
“Someone like any person capable of understanding that when you let a person of statistical inferiority in over a person of statistical superiority you are insulting them, insulting the person who has been declined in their favor, and insulting the integrity of the entire process. I feel insulted on your behalf, and I’m amazed you do not.”
“I’m certainly insulted by your tone,” said Shaunta Owens. She looked, to me, as if she was ready to overturn the table.
“If I may,” said Eli Absalom Stone, who was seated between my brother and this person, Shaunta Owens. “Throughout my life as a scholar and writer, I have considered myself to be far more burdened by the perception of unearned advantages given to me because of my ethnicity than by my ethnicity itself. Before I applied for anything—college admission, or a scholarship, or a job—I went to some lengths to avoid any personal uncertainty about my accomplishments by ensuring that my credentials were not only on par with the statistical averages of their successful applicants, but actually with their upper strata.”