And yet, the decision to send this one of the four into such an artificial abyss: it had been so … random, hadn’t it? Because wasn’t this one just as entitled to life?
Johanna picked up the invoice. She wasn’t crying now.
The goal of Dr. Lorenz Pritchard’s interventions had been to circumvent whatever wasn’t working, naturally, in her own body. This they had done. The promise of Horizon Cryobank of Torrington, Connecticut, was to circumvent the essential unfairness of human reproduction: that there was, yes, a horizon for women, beyond which they simply could not conceive children, but no such horizon for men. Salo, if he wished, could continue to father sons and daughters and to make new families with new women until the day he died in his bed many decades from now, surrounded by progeny.
She, on the other hand, would never be able to have another child.
Unless. Unless.
Here, in her hand: one tiny gesture of redress for all that inequality. If it all worked, of course, as advertised. And if she really wanted it.
She thought of the babies her tall and sullen teenagers had once been: default dependent, wild for her attention. She thought of the years she had been charged with the important work of keeping them alive and safe, years in which no one, herself included, had ever once questioned her purpose or worth. She thought of the wet, toothless smiles, the little arms enfolding her neck and squeezing tight, the reading of bedtime books, the planning of activities, the listening to scales being indifferently practiced on musical instruments, the checking of homework, the discovery of nature, and culture, the making—and remaking—of every choice, past and future, that she had ever made. She thought of how her husband sometimes referred to their family—or at least to himself and the children—as “the last of the Oppenheimers,” as if he were solely authorized to make that pronouncement, as if he had been the one longing them into existence and presiding almost entirely over their daily lives and being the parent who was actually there and not communing with modern art in some warehouse in Coney Island or Sheepshead Bay.
As if she had not faithfully paid this very bill, once every year since 1981, for a purpose she had never really understood. Or at least not until now.
Dr. Lorenz Pritchard was still in the same office suite on Fifth Avenue. He welcomed her back, asked for photographs of the kids, and listened to her explain why she had come in. He did her the courtesy of not looking surprised, or ever once asking: Are you absolutely certain?
Yes, it was possible, he told her. Very possible, though this time there would have to be a Gestational Carrier; only one outright miracle per family, that was his rule! She’d be okay with a Gestational Carrier, he assumed?
The Johanna Oppenheimer in his consulting room was a far cry from the Johanna Oppenheimer of two decades earlier.
Yes, she was perfectly okay with a Gestational Carrier.
The following morning our mother made the unprecedented request that Salo stay home from work. She told him what she knew, and then she told him what she wanted. She also had forms from the gestational surrogacy agency, ready for his signature, and he signed them. Of course he did. And that was how the person who really could be called “the last of the Oppenheimers,” her hour come round at last, began slouching toward Brooklyn Heights, to be born.
Johanna and Solomon Oppenheimer
with Harrison, Lewyn, and Sally Oppenheimer
joyfully announce the birth of
PHOEBE ELIZABETH OPPENHEIMER
June 20th, 2000
8 pounds, 2 ounces, 22 inches
Thanks to our wonderful “team” at the office of Dr. Lorenz Pritchard
and of course our fabulous Gestational Carrier, Tammy Sue Blanding
PART TWO
The Triplets
2000–2001