He’d brought her home only once, when she was visiting the city to interview for a summer internship with UJA （an internship she would indeed be offered, in a letter that arrived one week after the accident）。 That introduction had gone well, despite the Bernsteins’ obvious lack of Our Crowdliness （and despite the fact that Selda Oppenheimer plainly harbored hopes of a Sachs, a Schiff, or even a Warburg for her only son）; Mandy was simply that delightful, that charming and powerfully kind, and that in love—pure, clear, and very obvious love—with Salo Oppenheimer. She loved his brain and his manners and his spindly body, tall and frail, devoid of musculature. She loved a goodness she saw in him, which Salo—quite honestly—had never pretended to see in himself. It was not precisely true that she made him wish to be a better man; it was more true that she made him wish he wished to be a better man. At the time, that felt like enough.
He hadn’t asked her to marry him. They weren’t engaged, though later he was deliberately vague on this issue, because he knew it would make a big difference to Mandy’s parents; the distance between “She was a wonderful girl, someone any guy would have been lucky to date” and “She was the love of my life, and I was on the point of proposing to her” felt vast, and our father opted （correctly） to let her parents believe whatever might help them bear the pain. That awful winter and spring, and for the next several years, he let the Bernsteins enfold him into their grief as Mandy’s intended: future fiancé, husband, and father of the children she would never have. Then he married Johanna Hirsch, their daughter’s Lawrence High schoolmate, and all contact abruptly ceased.
Mandy Bernstein had been Johanna’s Big Sister, not literally but within the local chapter of the B’nai B’rith Girls. This was a position she had taken seriously, leaving surprise gift baskets （bagels and cream cheese, chocolate-chip cookies） on the doorstep of the Hirsch home when she knew Johanna was studying for a test, and showing up to help out on Johanna’s service projects, like the roadside car wash to benefit the Hebrew nursing home recreation fund or the friendship letters to children in Israel. The “Sisters” had all been randomly assigned, but Johanna was ecstatic to find she’d been paired with the popular and pretty Mandy Bernstein. Mandy Bernstein! A person she would not have dared solicit for friendship in the halls of their teeming New Jersey high school, where a year’s difference in age meant everything, and perceived deficits in looks, wealth, and cool meant everything else.
Johanna was one of dozens of young women at the funeral that day, each and every one of them sincerely, personally in mourning. The identity of the young man with the bandaged wrist had been freely exchanged among them, and it would be fair to say that Salo Oppenheimer was the object of a certain romantic fascination. How must he feel? So young himself, and already responsible for the deaths of two others, just as young? How would he survive the loss of his own beloved Mandy, this glowing, clever （Ivy League!） girl, the jewel of her family, school, and town? Possibly, Johanna was not the only person in the jammed pews of Temple Beth Jacob wondering what kind of person it might ultimately take to draw this devastated Salo Oppenheimer from his eternal vortex of guilt and pain. Possibly she was not the only one imagining the great love and compassion necessary to bring Salo Oppenheimer back to life.
Our mother wasn’t remarkable like Mandy Bernstein. She was an ordinary girl from a family so average and undistinguished that she cringed at their inadequacies and then again at her own disloyalty. Her father was an accountant who worked for the famous Lawrenceville boarding school, a job he’d taken so that Johanna’s younger brother, our uncle Bobby, might possibly be granted admission （Lawrenceville was still several years away from coeducation, not that our grandfather had ever given a thought to opportunities, educational or otherwise, for his female children）。 Lawrenceville, and the opportunities it represented, were completely lost on our uncle Bobby, who was a committed anti-intellectual （which you could still be at Lawrenceville in the ’70s） and pot dealer （which you could not be, at least not if you were caught, as Bobby certainly was）。 After a disastrous freshman year he would transfer to Lawrence High where his sisters were already in situ, and there he would add scores of new clients to his thriving business. （In the long run, our uncle’s entrepreneurial instincts were by no means disadvantageous. By the early 1990s he was a real estate developer with a McMansion of his own in Point Pleasant. By then, he had retired from acquiring pot for other people, and one day would even—wonder of wonders!—send a child of his own to Lawrenceville.） Phil Hirsch, our grandfather, was certainly humiliated by the way things had turned out, but he still remained at the school until his retirement; his way, perhaps, of saving face.