Our father lived in torment. We understand this now. We also understand that he tried, for a time, to do what he thought was right—he wasn’t Hermann Oppenheimer and Stella wasn’t “Miss Martin from the office”—but also that this right thing was untenable. Twice a year, then more often. He always took her to dinner in staid and well-lit places, and he sat as far away from her as he could, because he was afraid of what might happen. This was the person he’d run into at that strange art fair, he reminded our mother when he came home after their dinners. This was the old friend from college, he said, leaving out the detail of what he had done to her all those years ago. It was exhausting to pretend not to feel what he felt every moment they were together and every moment they were not together. He couldn’t bear the thought of hurting her any more than he already had. He engaged in diversionary tactics: introductions to potential investors, meetings with curators, notably at the Museum of American Folk Art, who were already planning a major show for Darger （of course）。 He went back to the Outsider Art Fair with her each year. He even brought our mother out to dinner with Stella one January night when the kids were in eighth grade or ninth—Stella couldn’t remember the year and none of us ever asked our mother—the three of them at Aquavit under the waterfall, carefully eating arctic char and talking about this woman’s life in California and the movies she’d made and her current documentary subject, a strange and obscure artist from San Francisco who turned people into buildings.
“What a hard way to live,” Johanna told Salo in the cab, going home. “Good for her.”
It was the last kind thing she would ever say about Stella Western.
Salo, naturally, would have simply handed her the money for her film, but he knew she would never take it, not with their history, which was always between them even if they never spoke of it. The least our father could offer was access to the pictures themselves, to study them, to film them whenever she wanted, a few times to bring in experts to examine them. He had gone back to see Sandro Barth on the last day of that first Outsider Art Fair, intending only to buy one or two of the human buildings, but the Berkeley dealer was anxious to move on, perhaps to other corners of the Outsider market, perhaps to something a little more conventional. By the time their meeting ended later that evening （at one point it moved to the Gotham Bar and Grill）， Salo Oppenheimer had purchased the contents of that corner booth two floors above the Henry Darger exhibit, and everything would be delivered a few days later to the warehouse in Red Hook: those strange buildings-as-people and the schematics for Rizzoli’s mythic city and the illustrated poems addressed to his dead mother and even the hand-drawn signs the artist had constructed to hang outside his apartment on that one day per year he allowed the public inside. All of it, comprising the entirety of the extant work of the very obscure （and likely to remain so） Achilles Rizzoli, would spend the next decade in an upstairs room of that former sugar refinery on Coffey Street, behind a closed door. And then it disappeared.
Chapter Seven
Warrior Girls
In which Sally Oppenheimer learns something new
Sally was the first of them to find out, and, for a long time, the only one who knew.
She was a newly minted teenager then, and not thinking about our father much, if at all, just as she wasn’t thinking about our mother or our parents’ marriage, all of which made her a very ordinary thirteen-year-old and, in that respect at least, entirely like her brothers.
Besides, she had other things on her mind.
Fifth grade had been the year of backyard Truth or Dare—a surprising number of Walden kids lived in brownstones, with backyards—and sixth grade had seen the first couples, breaking up and making up in the school corridors, sometimes with the help of intermediaries. By seventh grade there was open speculation about who had gone well beyond kissing, and one particular couple （granted, the boy was a ninth grader） was widely believed to have gone all the way. No boys seemed unduly interested in Sally, which was just as well since Sally was terrified one would be. Three years earlier, she had been so horribly captivated by one of her Pinecliffe counselors, a sweet girl from Shaker Heights who attended Northwestern, that she’d informed her parents she wouldn’t be returning to camp. After this, there had been a fallow period during which Sally just about persuaded herself that the counselor was an aberration, but then Lewyn mentioned that a girl from a popular TV show was actually in the Walden class behind them, and this had proved horribly true. It was obvious that Lewyn himself had a pathetic crush on this person, which only made things more stomach churning, and Sally did her best to defang her feelings by loudly and frequently making fun of her brother. It didn’t help. The girl was so pretty, with long hair parted along a razor-straight line and falling nearly to her waist, and long legs toned from years of ballet. （According to Sassy magazine, she had first been spotted at the School of American Ballet by another girl’s mom, who worked in casting.） Now, Sally saw this girl constantly: in every Walden corridor, in the middle school cafeteria, even in combined gym class, which was excruciating. She saw her in the mornings, on the sidewalk in front of Walden, with her mother. She even saw her one Saturday in Bloomingdale’s as Johanna force-marched her around the second floor, desperately trying to bond. （The girl, by contrast, was with a couple of friends, carrying armloads of stuff to the dressing rooms.） Of course, Sally never once spoke to her. She didn’t want to speak to her. But she didn’t want Lewyn to speak to her, either.