Chapter 3
Eleven years ago
A Question: Eve
August. Upper West Side. The air hangs heavy with a primeval, humid fog.
This pew has been the Olsen pew for a hundred years.
The original patriarch lived here on the Upper West Side with his modest scaffolding empire and his upright little family.
They were not a stylish family because they were too busy going to church and abiding by prohibition.
The business fell to the heirs, who managed well enough, and then it fell to their heirs, Eve’s grandfather’s generation, and that was when it all went to hell.
Eve’s grandfather was a profligate spender, a debauchee, a man about town.
His siblings exited the family business and made their own money elsewhere, but Eve’s grandfather slowly and steadily drove the scaffolding business into the ground—which is not where you’re meant to put scaffolding.
He was married five times, always to a younger and more doe-eyed actress, singer, dancer.
Phillip watched his father become the laughingstock of the family.
While Phillip’s cousins went to the Hamptons, to the Cape, to the Caribbean for the summer, he stayed in his same apartment full of lost grandeur and sweat.
Eve never met her grandfather; he died when Phillip was in college.
But she feels as though she knows her grandfather through the imprint he has left on Phillip.
She thinks of this line of men, the good and the bad, as the source of her father’s seriousness, his fragility, his intensity.
The reason he works so hard. The reason he is so easily offended, as if any social gaffe could derail them at any moment.
He sees himself as a self-made man, which is not true: Though his father had nothing left to leave him, Phillip still had a network of uncles at law firms and banks to give him the lucky break of his choosing.
But he has none of the ease of old money.
While Eve’s cousins sneak into hotel bars and do yearlong stints in Paris and upstate rehab clinics, Eve and Julian go to school and go to church.
They will not ruin what their father has clawed back.
In a generation’s time, when the other Olsens have squandered what they have, Eve and Julian will be the two great-great-grandchildren left standing. This has never been up for debate.
The service opens with a hymn. For the joy of human love, brother, sister, parent, child. Et cetera. They pray. Then the reverend begins his sermon, which he calls “The Price of Knowledge.”
“My friends,” he says—and then he tells the story of Adam and Eve.
This is of particular interest to Eve, for obvious reasons.
While it makes sense to Eve that her parents would have given her the name of a biblical woman, it does not make sense that they chose one so badly behaved.
It speaks to a fuck-the-man edginess Eve has never known her parents to possess.
As far as she’s concerned, her parents both came out of the womb dressed for Wimbledon.
The reverend goes on: When Satan appears, he approaches not Adam but Eve. Some interpretations claim this is because women are weaker. But who among us would turn to our wives, daughters, colleagues, friends, and think them weak?
Eve glances at her father, whose hands are clasped. His thumb rubs the links of his watch.
No—Satan came to Eve because Eve was willing to ask questions. What is the price of consciousness?
Those among us with children, the reverend says, may know how it feels to watch a young person—so confident, so undaunted—lose that innocence. But when we lose our childlike innocence, what do we gain? Ah. That’s the question.
Every day, we are faced with decisions. Not just of right and wrong, moral and amoral, but decisions to lean in or turn away.
Do we ignore suffering? Or do we seek to understand it?
Do we prioritize comfortable ignorance? Or do we venture into the wilderness—that uncomfortable place where we question the status quo?
There is beauty in childlike innocence, as there is beauty in all stages of life.
But it does not do to yearn for the garden.
There is much—very much—to be grateful for in our knowledge of good and evil.
And now that we have the knowledge, we must use it.
As Eve before us, we must be curious. We must be curious how best to be—and how best to love each other.
Do not move through the world like a child, assuming love will last no matter the circumstances.
You must remain kind. You must tend to your love as you would tend to your home. It is where you live.
Let us pray.
When the service ends, Eve waits for her parents to go to the fellowship hall for coffee before she wends her way to the front of the church. She reaches the reverend, who smiles at her.
“Eve Olsen,” he says. “How fitting. What can I do for you?”
“How can you say the Bible treats Adam and Eve equally? Isn’t the pain of childbirth women’s punishment for Eve being disobedient?”
“Ah,” he says. “You’ve found something I’ve been grappling with, too.”
“How am I supposed to buy into something that seems to pretty fundamentally claim women are worse?”
“Well, I’d disagree with your premise, and we could go into that. But maybe the real question is—do you want to buy into it?”
“You don’t care if I don’t?”
He smiles. “Coffee calls. Walk with me.”
“You really don’t care if I don’t think the Bible is accurate?”
“I care in that I’m curious. I like to hear how young people make meaningful decisions. But I don’t plan to convince you one way or another.”
“Why would God put the tree there if they weren’t supposed to eat it?”
“That’s a good question. Maybe they were.”
“That’s pretty sneaky and vindictive. You know, like entrapment.”
“Well, when you put it that way.”
“Do you think there’s such a thing as too much knowledge?”
He hums softly, a single note. “No, as long as the knowledge is accompanied by equal wisdom. But knowledge without wisdom is dangerous.”
“Like if I had the science to engineer a superweapon and didn’t have the wisdom to not deploy it all over everyone.”
“Exactly,” he says. “When we seek knowledge, we also must accept responsibility. Not just for how to use the knowledge, but for how the knowledge might change us.”
“Like if you figured out your dad was cheating on your mom.”
The reverend’s eyebrows lift. “Yes,” he says. “Something like that could be difficult knowledge to bear.”
Someone bumps Eve as they near the coffee urns, and she has to duck out of the way.
It’s one of her mom’s friends, or, more accurately, a woman her mom doesn’t like but who is active in the same circles.
The reverend is waylaid by an elderly couple who always sit at the very front, so Eve gives up her interrogation and goes outside, where she sits on the stone steps in the shade.
It has gotten even hotter. The sky hangs gray and low. Rain. Any minute now.
When her parents appear, Phillip walks past her without looking down. She assumes he didn’t see her. A minute later, her mom, Cecilia, appears, hurrying after Phillip. She does look down at Eve—and she says, “Can’t you just be nice?”
Eve blinks. Nice, she thinks. Is she nice? It’s such a severe criticism from a parent—much worse than being called bratty or ungrateful.
Julian comes next. He helps Eve to her feet and says, “Oh, boy, this is a bad one.”
“What did I do?”
“You said something to Reverend Palmer.”
“I was just asking questions. It was literally a sermon about asking questions. He’s not mad at me.”
“Look, I don’t know. Let’s just go home, okay?”
“What the fuck, though,” Eve says.
Julian lifts his arms above his head. They walk the long way—east to the park, then along the uneven stones. It’s so humid, Eve feels like she’s underwater. Even the pigeons are panting.
“He’s mad at me because I made some point about a dad cheating on a mom,” Eve says.
“You think Dad’s cheating on Mom?”
“I was literally just using a random example,” Eve says. Then: “I don’t know. I wouldn’t put it past him.”
“Come on. They’re not that bad.”
“Would you want their marriage?”
“Tempting,” Julian says. This is sarcasm. “I still don’t think either of them would have an affair.”
“Then why’s he so mad?”
“Because he’s Dad.”
It would not be until Eve met Shannon’s family that she understood the difference between Dad and a dad. As in—this is not what all dads are like.
“Don’t worry,” Julian says. “He’ll forgive you the next time you get an A on a test.”
“And get mad again the next time I offend him.”
“Thankfully,” Julian says, “there are plenty of tests.”
When Eve and Julian get home, Julian goes straight to his room. Eve hesitates at the entrance to the kitchen, where she can hear the clattering of dishes. She considers going upstairs, but she wants to get this over with. She goes into the kitchen.
Cecilia is filling two mugs with hot water from the kettle. Phillip is reading the paper at the table. Neither of them looks at her.
“Hey,” Eve says. “Everything okay?”
“Fine,” Cecilia says. Phillip says nothing.
“I was just worried that maybe I said something wrong?”
“Let’s move on,” Cecilia says. Phillip says nothing.
“So . . . we’re all okay?”
“I think it would be for the best if we all got along,” Cecilia says. And Phillip says: nothing.
“Dad?”
He flips the page. He does not look at her.
“Phillip.”
He flips the page again.
At dinner that night, Phillip does not speak to her a single time. She asks Cecilia and Julian if they see how ridiculous this is. Julian lifts his hands placatingly, almost in prayer. Cecilia says, “Can you please just stop?” And it’s clear that Eve is the one who is meant to stop.
Eve’s father doesn’t speak to her for two weeks.
That was the last time Eve went to church. After that Sunday, she stops showing up. Phillip can’t tell her she must attend because that would require words, and Cecilia can’t force her because that might make the attack of silence obvious to the public. So Eve never goes back.
The shame of it, though, is that she doesn’t blame the church, or the reverend, or the contents of his sermon. She likes his measured way of speaking, his gentle intellectualism. Like the faith of so many children, Eve’s is collateral damage, ceded to piss off her parents.
When Phillip finally acknowledges her, it’s in the morning. He asks if she’ll be home after school; someone needs to let the window guy in.
“No,” Eve says, “I have dance.”
“Oh,” Phillip says. “Well. Julian, then.” And then he leaves for work.
That’s it.
Eve eats the rest of her cereal and stares at the clock ticking above the pantry.
If she’s angry at her dad, she is equally angry at her mom, who chose to marry him.
She wonders if she will ever marry someone.
Perhaps no. She thinks of the reverend’s warning to remain curious and kind.
Whatever her parents’ marriage is, it’s neither curious nor kind.
Maybe it will be fucked forever. Maybe this is just what men do to women they say they love.
Maybe, if Eve falls in love with some guy, she will let him walk all over her.
Maybe she hasn’t learned any other way. Maybe the happiest version of Eve’s life, she thinks, is the one where she never lets herself love anybody at all.