Chapter Nine
Ithaca Is Gorges
In which two of three Oppenheimer triplets leave home, and Sally Oppenheimer delights in the aloneness of it all Sally and Lewyn both ended up at Cornell, though certainly not out of any shared wish to continue their education, let alone their life journey, in each other’s company. Obviously, their father had attended Cornell, though he had never seemed all that gung-ho on the place, certainly not to the point of steering them in the direction of his alma mater. As far as they were aware, the most significant event linking the Oppenheimer family to Cornell University had taken place in the 1970s, when our grandparents had donated a dozen sixteenth-and seventeenth-century European paintings to the just-established Johnson Museum of Art. （This event, by purest coincidence, had narrowly preceded Salo’s own application for admission.） They were not aware of the fact that Salo had recently directed another tranche of his late parents’ collection—more waterlogged landscapes and red-cheeked burghers—to the selfsame institution. He did this, frankly, in hopes of attaining a similar result for his children. He also did it because he hated those paintings.
As before, it was not a gesture that went unnoticed. Cornell, like other institutions of its ilk and pedigree, was inclined to smile upon the children of its alumni, and if Lewyn’s and Sally’s test scores were not among the finest of those applying seniors in Walden’s class of 2000, then … well, test scores weren’t everything. Cornell even made an informal inquiry—to Walden’s principled team of college counselors—as to the inclinations of the third triplet, Harrison Oppenheimer, which seemed only right, but Harrison Oppenheimer, by then, had his sights set on a place neither of his parents had ever heard of, and where no Oppenheimer, nor anyone known to the Oppenheimers, nor indeed any graduate of the Walden School, had hitherto set foot. Accepted to that very much under-the-radar institution （and, more or less concurrently, to the somewhat less obscure Harvard University, where he would transfer in due course）， Harrison had spent the remainder of senior year in his bedroom with the door shut, furiously reading and waiting for the clock on his childhood to run out.
Sally did not fully process the reality of Ithaca’s location in central New York State, nor its true distance from New York City, until, in a painfully self-conscious enactment of the parental ritual, Salo and Johanna booked a van and driver to transport the new Cornellians and their boxes of bedding and dorm accoutrements upstate. Both kids were subdued, though Salo did manage a breakthrough of sorts when he attempted, in his tuneless voice, to teach them the school song, first in its parodic version:
High above Cayuga’s waters
There’s an awful smell
Twenty thousand sons of bitches
Call themselves Cornell …
“Ugh,” said Lewyn, who had long endured certain concerns about his own personal hygiene.
“Well, it’s better than the original,” said Salo.
Far above Cayuga’s waters,
With its waves of blue,
Stands our noble Alma Mater,
Glorious to view.
“I mean, who talks that way?”
“People in the 1800s?” Sally said with luxuriant sarcasm.
“What’s Cayuga again?” said her brother. “A gorge, right?”
“Jesus.” Sally rolled her eyes.
They had said good-bye to their brother a few hours earlier, from the doorway of the room the brothers had shared. Harrison, ensconced in the oversized lounge chair he read in, hadn’t gotten up. Either he wasn’t aware of the significance of the moment or he was declining to acknowledge it, but even Sally felt a brief pang. So this was it. Eighteen years, their entire lives: done.
Everyone stopped for the bathrooms at a Cracker Barrel in Binghamton, and Johanna loaded up on Olde Tyme candy for Lewyn’s and Sally’s future roommates, as if this were a summer camp visit and she wanted to make a good impression on the bunk. No one even attempted to stop her. They reached Ithaca just as a storm swept in off the lake. The freshman registration tent got pounded, and the ground underfoot gave up brown water at each squelching step. The rattle of rain drowned out all but the loudest shouting—Name? Your name? Can you spell it?—and Lewyn, in some confusion, put himself on the line for incoming hotel school students, which made for an awful moment when he was found not to exist. There were so many nervous people, students and parents, all wet and all agitated, nobody making eye contact. A friendly pair of girls in Big Red T-shirts handed Sally a packet and Johanna a red umbrella, which the two of them hunched beneath as they dashed to Balch Hall. Inside Sally’s packet: a Big Red T-shirt of her own and a folded ITHACA IS GORGES bumper sticker and a Cornell ’04 water bottle. She could feel them against her chest, and the dark water entering her sneakers and spattering her legs, and only then did she understand that she had now left Lewyn behind, as well, to find his own way in this strange new place, spinning away from him as she had spun away from Harrison, earlier that day: weightless and free.