A Dual Inheritance (3 page)

His father was into a bottle of rye and barely acknowledged his presence. Forget about the fact that his father was drinking hard liquor after sunset on Erev Yom Kippur—that he drank
at all
was still a shock. Ed had been raised on the story of how, during Prohibition, his father’s uncle—a Brooklyn
rebbe
!—had been fond of making bathtub gin and how one fatal night he’d mixed the wrong proportions and
the rabbi died from drinking bad gin
. Ed had rarely seen his parents drink, aside from some Manischewitz on Friday nights and holidays, aside from a glass of sherry for his mother now and then, though he was starting to think that maybe his father had always drunk and had—before his mother’s death—simply done so in secret. The night after Ed’s mother was buried, after all of the mourners had gone home and the house was unbearably quiet, his father pulled a bottle of rye from below the sink and a glass from the cabinet above it. He sat down at the kitchen table, opened the bottle, and filled the glass exactly halfway. He betrayed no awareness that Ed was standing in the doorway, and his father drank from that glass as if the whole action—the retrieval of the glass, the exacting pour—was somehow inevitable.

Now Murray Cantowitz hid nothing. There was piss coating the rim of the toilet seat and coarse hairs in the sink.
Well
, Ed thought,
at least he’s shaving
. The amber-colored couch coughed up clouds of dust when he sat down on it, and when Ed rose to get a start on quietly cleaning, his father yelled, “What’re you doing?” as if he were tearing the place apart. “Leave it!” And so Ed headed out the door to a different shul from where he’d been bar mitzvahed, to the shul where most of the old embittered congregants had relocated, having refrained from asking his father one last time if he wanted to come along.

The night was chilly and clear, and as he became just another Jew walking toward the shul, he was stunned by how calm he felt, as if he were suddenly inside a recurring dream, where urgency was replaced by prescription. All he had to do was get from the street to the shul. All he had to do was say the kaddish. There was no reason to think any further than that; the dream didn’t allow for it. The sanctuary smelled like heavy breath, aftershave, and dense floral perfume. He opened a prayer book
and felt its crumbling binding, sticking shut for a few final moments by old dried glue. Such humble materials for such supposedly holy words, and as much as he tried to hold the book together, out came the paper bits from the binding, out onto his trousers and reminding him of hay, which was a strange association, but once the thought was there he couldn’t stop it and all the men in their jackets and
tallis
looked not like men but like horses, stooped and obedient. Enveloped in a not altogether bad smell of age and thoughtful hygiene and this blameless equine image, he let himself rock back and forth, and the keening familiar melody took hold of him and the Hebrew came without thought. Everything over the last four years had been about thought. He stayed inside the shul until the very last prayer. When he’d made his way through crowds of familiar faces—the bearded and the shaved, the powdered and the rouged—and their questions, so many questions, not only about Harvard but about his unfortunate father, after he’d been kissed and slapped on the back and when he was out the door and taking off his yarmulke, grateful to feel the air again, he saw Marla of the red sweater standing on the curb, evidently waiting for a ride. Without her red sweater she looked much more ordinary than he remembered and also, somehow, more appealing. He thought of saying hello, of asking what she was doing these days, if she still had that bicycle, but it was as if he’d turned into one of the horses he’d imagined while inside the shul. He watched in silence until saying hello became inconceivable, until a car pulled up and she looked both ways before getting in and taking off.

For years he’d dreamed of the much-heralded mystery and majesty of
shiksas
. But now that he was surrounded by Radcliffe girls on a daily basis—adorable ginger freckles, startled blue eyes—now that he was no more comfortable talking to them but
almost
accustomed to their extensive knowledge of not only tennis and Europe and oystering on private islands off the coast of Maine but also Aristotle and Freud and Keynesian economics, goddamn it all to hell, here he was in front of a synagogue, nostalgic about Marla and all of the others, the girls he hadn’t called.

In Harvard Yard, Ed not only caught up with Hugh but within minutes he was buying drinks at Cronin’s. “To make up for my accosting you,” Ed had insisted.

“You did kind of accost me.”

“Yes,” said Ed, “and I’d like to make up for it.”

“In that case I’ll have a whiskey as well.”

Ed suggested they share a ham sandwich. “I’m not the religious kind,” Ed announced, and, though Hugh nodded, it was clear he had no idea to what Ed was referring.

“I don’t really have any Jewish friends,” Hugh explained, lighting up another cigarette. He didn’t look uncomfortable, only direct.

“I don’t really have any Shipley friends.”

With his arm outstretched atop the booth, as if to claim a phantom girl, Hugh said, “You haven’t been missing much.” He was both plain-spoken and distracted. He was always looking around. Ed watched how his gaze followed the waitresses, the cooks in the kitchen, the salt and pepper on the table, and finally a pair of twin girls and their tense-looking dates who passed through the bustling doorway.

Ed finished his beer. “Would you look at them? They’re
identical
.”

“They’re not.”

“Of course they are. Imagine being one of those poor schmucks. Never knowing which one was yours.”

“You’d know.”

“You can’t tell me you’re able to see a difference.”

“Of course.”

“How?”

“Anyone can see they are different,” said Hugh. “One has a scar on her forehead, and the other one’s chin is more pronounced.”

“They look exactly the same.”

“You aren’t looking in the right way.” Though by all rights this was a condescending thing to say, Ed didn’t feel particularly condescended to. Hugh just seemed as though he really cared what Ed did or didn’t see.

“I’m an observant bastard, okay? Make no mistake about that. Listen,
who noticed that the girl from the library—my girl—is cross-eyed. Who saw that?”

“Oh, she’s
your
girl now?”

“Well, she’s not yours, that’s for sure.”

“What’s her name?”

“Oh, I have no idea,” Ed said, able now to laugh at himself, at how his ardor seemed suddenly comical.

When the ham sandwich arrived, Ed grabbed his half quickly. He was, as usual, hungrier than he’d realized. As he savored the salty ham, the slightly stale bread, he looked at the twins and their dates waiting for a table. What was Shipley talking about? He saw no pronounced chin, no scar. The only difference occurred when one lit a cigarette, when the fact that her sister had not lit a cigarette made them both that much more exciting because they had made different choices. Her smoking style bordered on theatrical, and Ed wondered if he might have seen her in a Harvard Drama Club production. He had become an avid theatergoer. At first it had been to impress Radcliffe girls, but sometimes he went alone if there was no one with whom he really wanted to watch and (inevitably, afterward) discuss. This semester he’d seen a steamy
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Little Foxes
, a terrific
Pajama Game
; he wanted to go to England and meet Harold Pinter and personally thank him for
The Caretaker
, which he’d recently seen at the Loeb. Though last week’s offering was melancholy nonsense. He’d taken a troublingly tall date to see a play by García Lorca. Everyone had been dressed up like leafless trees, and a screechy cello droned on for hours.

“I always wanted to be a twin,” said Hugh, who had moved on to a third whiskey. “Ever since I can remember.”

“Oh God, no, nothing worse—another Hugh Shipley?”

“It wouldn’t be another of me,” Hugh quietly insisted. He apparently had no interest in lightening up. Did he speak this way with everyone? “It would be the other part, the missing part. Don’t you ever feel like you’re, I don’t know, missing someone?” He looked up from the bright table lamp and squinted into comparative darkness.

“Yeah,” Ed said. “I miss my mother.” It was an absurdly weak thing
to say. He wasn’t sure why he’d said something so personal that it approached transgression, but he imagined it was because Hugh Shipley seemed to have forgotten Harvard’s unwritten rule about maintaining a modicum of sarcastic affectation, or at least until one was properly drunk. And he also sensed that Hugh had chosen to confide in him and he wanted to offer something in return.

Hugh nodded. “When did she die?”

“Four years now.”

“I’m sorry.”

Ed poured another sugar into his coffee, though he had no intention of drinking another sip. He nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, thanks.”

The twins and their dates were seated at the next table. It was difficult not to stare. They had the same auburn hair parted to the side, the same pearl earrings and cherry lipstick. If there was one girl, she would have been noticed solely for her solid good looks, but their twin-ness was even more striking than their prettiness. The smoker laughed and the other did not. Ed wondered if a joke had been made at the un-laughing un-smoking one’s expense, though neither of their dates was smiling.

“In Mali,” Hugh said, “twins are the only ones who are considered complete. The rest of us, we’re walking around as halves. We’re half people, all of us. No wonder we’re all about to be destroyed by nuclear bombs.”

“Goddamn right. I keep thinking I should follow every urge, every stupid idea in my head. Because who knows, right?”

“What is it that you want to do?”

“Oh hell, I don’t know. I’m just talking. It’s a goddamn unsettling thought that there are nuclear missiles off the coast of Florida. Can you argue with that? No news flash there. None at all. Where in Africa is Mali?”

“West.”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s where I’m headed.”

“No kidding?”

Hugh nodded. “I’m going to take pictures.”

“Well, I’m going to Wall Street,” Ed said, and he couldn’t stop his voice from sounding proud. “Different jungle.”

“I’d say so. Save yourself. Come to my jungle instead.”

“To Africa?”

“Sure. Why not? At least no one is sending nuclear bombs there.”

Ed laughed and drank the rest of his tepid sweet coffee. “What are you after? You want to be eaten by savages, like Rockefeller? You want to—what?”

“He wasn’t eaten by savages.”

“So they say. Let’s put it this way: Such a trip is not in my future.”

“No? What is?”

“I want to make some real dough.”

“Real dough?”

“Yes, indeed. Not a fashionable thing to say around here, I know. But I want to work hard and make money. Money like your oldest, richest Mr. Shipley made.”

He tried not to sound fanatical, he truly did, but when he imagined a day that he wouldn’t have to worry over how many times he could clean his dirty shirts before they fell apart, he tended to sound—he realized this—like an advertisement for the wonders of capitalism. He wanted the freedom to buy a new shirt if he was too goddamn lazy to take his to the cleaner’s. Cardboard strip around the starched front—a new shirt, nothing like it. All that cardboard. He loved tearing it apart like wrapping paper.

Ed asked, “Why shouldn’t I have certain pleasures in life if I’m willing to work harder than everyone else?”

“Why, indeed?” Hugh replied, but this time it was condescending. “But, just so you know, my family doesn’t have any real money anymore.”

“Believe me, your family has money.”

“No, I mean it. It’s all but dried up in our branch of the family. There was some kind of issue with the trusts. I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I mean I don’t care.”

“You might start to care when you get malaria in West Africa and need to be evacuated and flown back to this fine country, threat of nuclear missiles or not. You might care if you need to get a job.” He felt his neck tensing up, and he forced a smile.

Hugh nodded. “I understand.”

“No, you don’t. Not really.”

“Okay, I don’t. I don’t. You got me.”

“That’s right.”

“So will you give me a job then?” Hugh asked. “When I’m hard up and desperate?”

“You think it’s a joke?”

“I don’t think it’s a joke, but I know too many people who have plenty of money, and they’re wretched. They’re also incompetent. Talk to me when you know more people with money.”

“I will.”

“Just so you know,” said Hugh, sitting up straighter, “I hope you do.”

“What about Romulus and Remus?” Ed blurted. “They were twins. No love lost there.”

Hugh took his last bite of sandwich. He was the slowest eater that Ed had ever seen, with the exception of his aunt Lillian. He chewed every bit of that bite and finally, finally swallowed. “They were raised by wolves.”

“Many great men were.”

“Were you?”

“My mother—she was a peach. But my father has some wolflike tendencies, you bet.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, I don’t know—he never wanted to have children, so that probably has something to do with it.” Ed laughed, but he could tell he sounded strained. “He wanted my mother and he wanted to make her happy, but he’s made it clear, especially now that she’s gone, that being a father wasn’t what he was after. And where I’m from, children are everything. It’s all about
the children
. It’s just what they think about and
talk about and live for, and I think all that fuss—it really got him riled up. I only figured out that children were such a focus—who notices such a thing when you
are
one of those children?—since he would point it out so frequently, deriding this one and that one because they talked, they thought, they
bragged
, about their kids too much. God forbid someone bragged. It was like his cause, how people gave kids too much attention, and what was implied was that it sure as hell wasn’t going to be like that in our house.”