Harrison was staring at him. After a while he managed a curt nod. “Okay,” he said. He was trying to sound gruff. But he didn’t look gruff.
“Me, too,” said Ephraim suddenly.
“I just met you,” Harrison said. “I don’t know the first thing about you.”
For a moment, Ephraim did not respond. Then he sat up very straight in his chair and placed his hands on the long wooden table before him. “My name is Ephraim Solomon Western. I am the son of Stella Western and Salo Oppenheimer. On one side, I’m descended from Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, who was a court Jew in Stuttgart, Germany, in the 1730s. On the other side, I’m descended from a man whose name I don’t know, but I know what he cost in 1792, in South Carolina. I’d like us to be brothers. Well, we are brothers. But I’d like to know you as a brother.”
“We’re not starting off on the best of terms,” said Harrison, locating, again, some of his essential rancor. “What happened between our father and your mother caused great unhappiness in our family. It affected all of us. The marriage never recovered. Our mother never recovered. She fixed on this idea about having another child, which was a crazy thing to do. Crazy and desperate. Do you remember how disgusted we were?” he asked Lewyn. “And Sally, too—it was one of the very few times we were all in agreement about something. Not that we ever talked about it. We should have talked about it.”
“You’re right about that,” said Lewyn.
“I’m sorry, Phoebe,” said Harrison. “I wouldn’t want you to leave here associating the words ‘crazy’ and ‘desperate’ with your birth. But it was so unfair to you, bringing you into that.”
“No worries,” I shrugged. “Went right over my head at the time.”
“I’m sorry, too,” said Ephraim, as if he bore responsibility for any of it.
“Oh, I can get past it, I think,” said Harrison. “It’s not the biggest problem.”
Ephraim sighed. “Okay. What else?”
“You were admitted to Harvard and chose to go to Yale. It’s insupportable.”
For a long moment no one made a sound, and then Lewyn, of all people, started to laugh. He laughed at his brother Harrison, and then his brother Ephraim joined him and they were both laughing. Finally, even Harrison broke, that infamous Fox News sneer faltering into some weird approximation of a smile.
I looked at the three of them, absurdly different in spite of their common denominator, laughing, trying to laugh, finally together.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The Big Reveal
In which the 10th of September is observed, and also the 11th, and the last of the Oppenheimers leaves home
Nine months later, in early September, the following people made their way to Martha’s Vineyard: three about-to-be-thirty-six-year-old triplets and their eighteen-year-old college-bound sister （who was the exact same age as her siblings）， as well as an additional brother who hadn’t grown up with any of the others, and also Rochelle Steiner, who was about to get married on the same stretch of Chilmark beachfront she had once angrily vacated, promising herself that she would never, never, never associate herself with another person named Oppenheimer, no matter how common the name was.
Our mother did not make an easy adjustment to several of the ongoing developments in our growing, changing family, but at least she had a good long run at it. It took most of the spring to get her in the same room as Ephraim Western, the son of her late husband, but this was finally managed with my help and Lewyn’s, not to speak of an excellent bottle of Merlot. （Our mother would never forgive Stella Western, which was deeply connected to the fact that she would never forgive our father, who, sadly, in any case, was no longer alive to be never forgiven, so that was one reconciliation nobody was agitating for.） But above all other things, what Johanna wanted today was what she had always wanted, and that was the company and love of her children, and for the first time since the birth of her triplets thirty-six years before, those three, and the later fourth, had formed and seemed to be sustaining bonds that looked, to her, very much like love. To us, they felt like love. Also, to be blunt about it, we were all hanging out without her. All of us. Even the ones who had reliably disliked one another since birth.