“Maybe,” Salo said.
“Are you sick?” He could tell she didn’t want him to be sick. She did not want to drive a sick person three hours back to Amsterdam, and he was pretty sure she didn’t want to spend the night with a sick person in Krefeld, either.
“Oh no,” he said, trying to sound cheery. The whole time, he never took his eyes off the painting.
“Well, so you like modern art after all,” she observed.
“I like that,” he confirmed. “I don’t know what it is.”
She walked up to it and looked at the card. “Untitled. That’s helpful. He’s an American.” She tried to sound out his name, but couldn’t get closer than “tomb-ley” or “twom-ble.” “Oh look, he used house paint and wax crayon. Not quite your Flemish landscapes.”
No, our father agreed.
“Do you want to see the rest of the exhibit?”
He didn’t, he said, but she should go back. He wanted her to leave him alone with the painting. He wanted the world to leave him alone with the painting.
Basically, he found a way to stay until the Kunstmuseen closed that evening, after which he and Margot （who’d been very disappointed by those movie stills） endured the long drive back to Amsterdam and parted in Dam Square, never to meet again. Our father had recognized that he knew nothing about anything. He had not the first understanding of what he had seen, or where the thing he had seen had come from, or what other paintings by other artists were already in conversation with this one, or what any of this had to teach him. Also, he had no idea when he might live in a place where he might put such an object on his wall and look at it, every morning, every night. Also, he would not, for a few years yet, be in control of the money held in trust for him, and he would not begin drawing a salary from Wurttemberg until after finishing college. But he knew, as he had never known anything before, that he would somehow, at some time, own that painting.
Back at Cornell in the fall, he unenrolled from his fraternity, not because the men were in any way insensitive but because he found that he couldn’t stand to enter those rooms and not see Danny Abraham, a person he’d considered almost unbearably kind. Someone told him the girl who’d been Daniel’s date that terrible day had left Cornell. Salo could not remember her at all. He could not even picture her face; he was not sure he had even turned his head when the two of them, Daniel and the girl, climbed into the back seat of the Jeep, or if he’d ever been told her name. He didn’t ask where she’d gone; he felt only relief that he would not have to meet her in some classroom or cafeteria. For the rest of his time in college he wanted to not make any friends and not make any waves; he wanted only to complete his degree without fucking up another thing. He knew enough not to shift his major from economics to anything else, let alone art. Art was an established tradition within the Oppenheimer family, and that was enough to justify an early-morning survey course, and one on the Modernists, and one on Pollock and his circle. Art was also an acknowledged part of the apparatus of wealth, indeed, a not unuseful vector for acquiring wealth. （Selda and our grandfather, Hermann, were not sentimental and they were not stupid: the seventeen Old Master paintings that remained in the Fifth Avenue apartment after Boy with a Spoon and the others departed had been earmarked by Sotheby’s as having the greatest value and/or potential appreciation.） Salo did not need to have any of this explained to him. If he wanted to own and live in the world of paintings once the business of the workday was done, that was his right, indeed our family tradition! But he would continue to study economics and after graduation he would, without complaint, step into the place prepared for him by his father and the fathers before them—the Broad Street offices of Wurttemberg Holdings—there to serve the business of being an Oppenheimer for the rest of his professional life.
When he turned twenty-one, two months before leaving college, he was given access to his trust, and within days he had enlisted the help of the Marlborough gallery to make the purchase from Galleria Sperone in Turin （for an amount that would forever strike him as absurd）。 Four months later the crate arrived, and when the movers pried it open and went away, he nearly ran after them, terrified to be left in charge of this object and stunned that they—that anyone—actually trusted him to be its caretaker. Even in such an uninspired setting, it had lost not the tiniest fragment of its power.