“Ever seen these before?” said Sally.
Rochelle shook her head. “No. Never.”
“They’re beautiful.”
“Yes.”
No one spoke for another minute.
“Actually,” said Rochelle at last, “I think I love these. I think I would like to bring these to my apartment. I am going to throw out my table from Ikea, which I hate, which I have always hated. Why did I buy a table I hated?”
“It’s a mystery,” said Sally.
“And I am going to make this my kitchen table and chairs.”
“Bravo!” said Sally.
“Can I come visit this table and chairs?” I said.
Rochelle looked surprised. But she rallied. “Of course you can.”
And when everyone else had gone back to work, I stayed where I was, and asked something else.
“Can I bring my brother? Because he would really like to see you again.”
Rochelle must have been expecting it, if not at this exact moment, then at some point, ever since I’d loped into her office weeks earlier in my I’m-not-a-teenager getup. Possibly she had made up her mind about it then, and the door had been ajar ever since, waiting for the next thing to happen, which now it finally had. And she also had a nearly empty house, a filthy nearly empty house, and an industrial cleaning company booked for the week after the holiday, and a Realtor set to come in after that, and a brand-new （old） kitchen table and set of matching chairs, and also Sally Oppenheimer, who had once been her friend and who was still Sally Oppenheimer, but a stronger, more thoughtful version of Sally Oppenheimer, as she herself was a stronger, more thoughtful version of Rochelle Steiner, who had made some bad mistakes of her own.
But those were only some of the reasons she told me yes.
Chapter Thirty-Five
True Stories of Passing in America
In which assorted Oppenheimer siblings consider veritas in multiple contexts
On December 15, two events of some significance to our family took place, almost simultaneously.
The first—my admission to Roarke’s first coeducational class—would make my brother Harrison very happy and even, it would not be excessive to say, proud.
The second, not so much.
On the eighteenth, an unprecedented gathering of the Oppenheimer brothers—all of the Oppenheimer brothers—and myself, was convened at the Harvard Club, in a private room upstairs.
The choice of this location, like many things Harrison concerned himself with, had been settled after several rounds of negotiation, which was how grown-ups settled their differences in the civilized world. While everyone agreed a private home was vastly preferable to a public space, Harrison refused to go to Stella Western’s home, and Ephraim would not enter the house on the Esplanade without an invitation from Johanna, which was very much not forthcoming. For reasons that had grown only more volatile throughout that day and the two preceding days, no one wanted Ephraim to be seen entering Harrison Oppenheimer’s apartment building on Sutton Place. All of Sutton Place, indeed, had been inundated with press, and while most of it was concentrated on the building one block to the north of Harrison’s, that was not far enough away.
And so, the Harvard Club. In itself an ironic choice.
Eight days earlier the Yale Daily News had printed the story Ephraim had been working on for nearly a year. Within twelve hours the story was surging on Twitter, then AP picked it up and someone from Jake Tapper’s office called early the following morning. Ephraim was ready. His mother, too nervous to watch, decided it might be a good time to visit her brother in Los Angeles. For everyone else, the thing unraveled in an alternating stupor of revelation and disbelief, absolutely hilarious to many people, but also—even to some of those same people—deeply infuriating and inescapably sad.