A Dual Inheritance (31 page)

Four months later he married Jill Solomon at her parents’ club in Scarsdale. He insisted on marrying her as soon as possible, and she was charmed by his insistence. She also had no interest in fighting her mother for a year over wedding plans. Ed maintained that any friend who showed up clad in a tux would automatically be made a groomsman, but there were no surprises. Ira Gersten made noise about flying in from Chicago, but evidently there was a Cubs game that needed his analysis;
new pitcher
, he’d solemnly explained. Ed’s groomsmen were Bechstein, Osheroff, and Rabb—the same hardworking and irritating men with whom he spent his days and nights. Plus Mark Solomon. Ed had asked Jill’s brother, who’d cleaned up for the event and, standing next to poor Marty Rabb, he looked like Peter Fonda at the Oscars.

Neither Connie Graff nor Jill’s brother Jeremy was in attendance.

And Ed wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but, even though they hadn’t been invited, and even though the last he’d heard they were living in
Bongo Bongo
or wherever Hugh could play out his own do-gooder story and Helen could stay remote, wherever they could rebel against their class but have each other as a reminder of that class, he still found himself surprised and even briefly miserable when he looked beside him
before saying his vows and he didn’t see Hugh Shipley, who—Ed didn’t care how many years he lived in the bush—would always look at ease in formal attire.

His father sat in the front row, grousing about something—the rabbi? The room’s temperature? The first thing he said when Ed and Jill collected him at Penn Station was, “What makes you so lucky?” When Ed smiled and tried to hug him, he started coughing and complaining about New York City filth. Over the course of the next two days he’d gone on to complain about Ed’s future in-laws, how they were snobs (which they were), and generally whatever unpleasant thoughts happened to rise to the top of his forever-mysterious consciousness.

As Ed stood now before Jill, as he took in her lace veil and long eyelashes, he had flashes of her miraculous body shrugging out of a wet one-piece bathing suit, a month prior, in Barbados (he’d surprised her with a weekend getaway), and how she’d let that wet suit fall to the floor. His mind rested on her tan narrow feet with their red-painted toenails and how those feet cradled his head as her eyes closed, as she lifted her hips up and up below him. As he half-listened to Jill’s brother Mark reading an unfamiliar poem about fire, as the rabbi chanted blessings in Hebrew before talking at some length about the meaning of home, he also tried not to think about how much he wished his mother were here, not
in addition to
but
instead of
his father.

But then the rabbi pronounced them married and he kissed Jill Cantowitz. His bride. He smashed the wineglass to bits and found himself, finally, smiling.

They danced their first dance. “Have you ever really listened to this song?” asked Jill.

“Of course,” said Ed, kissing her.

“The lyrics are actually a little creepy.
Someone to watch over me?
By the way,” said Jill, in his ear, “I hope you’re grateful I took your name.”

Ed put pressure on her back, just as he’d been taught to years ago by a confident Dorchester girl whose name now sadly escaped him. “I am,” he said, “tremendously.”

That December, during the heaviest snowstorm of the year, Jill went into labor, and by the time their daughter was measured and weighed, the sky was pale gray and eerily calm. She was a big baby, with a shock of black hair and round dark-blue eyes. When Ed held her for the first time, he thought he might faint from terror, but instead he told Jill how happy he was. “I want another one soon,” he whispered. “Don’t you?”

“Very funny,” she said.

“I’m wasn’t being funny.”

“Shh,” she said, marveling over his shoulder and staring at their daughter. “Isn’t she pretty?” Jill was holding a glass of champagne. She had given birth not two hours before and yet she looked impossibly the same as before she’d been pregnant; not an ounce of extra softness remained. Her hair was pulled back with a wide white headband; she’d hastily applied some lipstick and powder for pictures, and the effect was oddly theatrical, as if she might be an unhinged dance teacher.

“So pretty,” he said. “She looks like you.”

“I don’t know about that. I see a bit of Cantowitz already. But she also kind of looks like a papoose. Did you call your father?” she asked Ed, and Ed said no, but he would in a minute.

This conversation came and went for hours, until finally he walked down the hall to the pay phone.

“Pop,” Ed said, “it’s a girl.”

As Murray Cantowitz wept through various attempts at language, Ed fed the phone more quarters. Finally his father coughed into his voice, the one that Ed knew and expected. “You name her for your mother?”

“Middle name,” Ed managed. He was unprepared enough for the strength of his own feelings, but for his
father’s
?

“Not good enough,” his father said.

As he smoked a cigar outside New York Hospital with Hy, Ed couldn’t stop thinking of Jill in pain. She’d refused the drugs, maintaining she
could do without them. She yelled:
Please stop fucking asking me if I want the fucking drugs
. And when he stopped asking?
You motherfucker
, she’d screamed and screamed.
You have no idea
. She kept saying that:
You have no idea
. She also looked gorgeous. He knew he was supposed to say that no matter what, but he was so awed by her strength and … and … 
grandeur
as she pushed, and her breasts were huge and her dark eyes were glittery and he remembered what a physical force she could be, before she’d stopped being remotely in the mood to sleep with him, which had happened fairly soon after conceiving.

You motherfucker
.

Ed knew it was childbirth and that—God bless—it was certainly not unusual for her to swear like a sailor, but he also knew—even if it was just for that moment—she’d looked at him and she’d meant it.

“Congratulations,” said Hy. Bastard had tears in his eyes.

Ed wanted to talk about his daughter’s perfect eyebrows, how she had a tiny auburn patch in her shiny black hair, how her hands were the most elegant he’d ever seen, complete with long pink nails.

He wanted to say her name:
Rebecca Dorota Cantowitz
.

He wanted to ask Hy how to be a father, because all he could think, all he’d been able to think for months now, was:
Don’t fuck up, don’t fuck up, don’t fuck up
.

What Ed talked about was the weather.
What a goddamn glorious day. Have you ever seen a storm like that. Would you look at that pearl of a sky
.

Chapter Eleven

Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 1982

The house in Haiti never felt like theirs. Her father called it excessive; her mother called it beautiful. Her parents drank before dinner.

Look at this veranda
, said her mother.
Look at this shade of yellow
.

Helen
, was what her father replied. As if to say,
Stop
.

Oh, come on
, her mother said teasingly,
it’s not as if it isn’t falling apart. You can always take comfort in that
.

It’s just a bit much
, her father concluded, with a shake of his head.

When else will I get to live in a gingerbread house perched on top of a hill?

You come from a house like this
, her father said.

Not like this
, her mother said.

Yes
, her father said,
like this
.

As for Genevieve, she was almost eleven and she loved the pool. She loved the feeling of being underwater so long that her eyes stung and her fingers pruned, and Maude would bring her a cloth and press her eyes tight and hold her so close, warming her up like a baby. She loved telling Maude to close her eyes and cracking an imaginary egg over her fuzzy cocoa hair. She loved the quiet that came with this daily afternoon treat: Genevieve and Maude and a fluffy white towel. She was so lucky, such a lucky girl. She couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t acutely
aware of her own good fortune and when this knowledge didn’t feel—just a little bit—like a sinking stone.

Here was the bad part about swimming: Their house and pool were on top of a hill, and past their house—deep in the pine forest—there was also a public water pump. Most days while Genevieve was having her swim—no matter how Maude and her mother tried to time it—a group of kids dressed in rags, really poor, a few her age and older, too, would walk up their hill, balancing buckets on heads, and they would rap at the iron gate with sticks. They would rap at the gate and call out—
tifi! tifi!
—which she knew meant
girl;
four boys, one girl, rapping and rapping until she had no choice but to come up for air. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part wasn’t that they looked angry—angry with
her
—and that they didn’t have shoes, or that she had the feeling she was doing something she shouldn’t be doing by swimming, by even breathing. No, the worst was seeing Maude yell at them.
Ale! Ale!
Maude shouted, and, when they wouldn’t go away, she rapped right back at them with the stick she always carried with her in case of tarantulas and rats. Sometimes she grazed their knuckles and Genevieve cried “Stop!” but Maude just ignored her and yelled until those kids ran off, and then Genevieve didn’t want to snuggle with Maude in the towel.

And then one day Maude went to check on the bleaching sheets, and Genevieve was not to jump into the pool until Maude came back. She sat on the edge of the chaise longue, waiting with her towel in her one-piece yellow bathing suit that had come from Grandmother at Christmas. And though she knew her mother was within earshot, having lunch with Madame Richelieu on the veranda, and she knew that not only Maude but Arvede in the kitchen and William in the garden knew she was right there by the pool, she felt not only alone but invisible. As if her pale white skin had been, each day, growing paler and paler and leading up to this moment, right now, when she was no more than a ghost.

When her tormentors arrived this time, she didn’t hide or scream. She drew her towel around her and stood up. She’d practiced the line in her head each night before sleep:
“Kisa ou vie?” What do you want?
But as she approached the gate, they didn’t stop banging and she said nothing,
ran up the stairs to the veranda, and approached her mother and Madame Richelieu.

“Bunny,” said her mother, not quite smiling, taking a sip of white wine.

“May I have five gourdes?”

Her mother laughed lightly. “What do you need?”

“Nothing. I just want to copy the palm trees on the bill.”

“Oh, good,” said her mother, “you’re drawing again,” as she searched the pockets of her white cotton pants. “Simone, did you know that Genevieve’s an artist?”

“
Oui?
Oh, I have one,” said Madame Richelieu, handing over the crumpled bill.
“Mais, ma chère,”
she said cautiously, “I give you ze gourdes, you show me ze drawing.
Oui?
”

“Oui, bien sur,”
and
“Merci, Madame,”
said Genevieve, darting off before they had any more to say.

She stood between the house and a fat banana palm, and for a moment she could see all of them but they couldn’t see her. The kids weren’t rapping with their sticks and yelling anymore. Instead, they were laughing and chanting something she didn’t understand to the meanest-looking boy, who wore a cutoff T-shirt that said
FLORIDA IS FOR LOVERS
. But the boy didn’t look mean right then. He looked embarrassed or maybe even happy. The youngest boy was picking his nose; the one girl—weighed down by big boobs, though she looked not much older than Genevieve—was hunched over and biting her nails. When she stepped out from behind the palm fronds, their rapping and yelling started up once more. The boy looked mean again, and he called out the loudest. Genevieve’s face burned as she approached. Rotten fish and pigeon beans, iodine; a sick, sweet hint of warm Coca-Cola. There it was: the smell. That smell would stay lodged in the mysterious part of the brain that was forever linked with fear and desire. She would forget the T-shirt and the girl’s frighteningly large breasts, but she would never forget that smell, present only in the one moment it took to thrust five gourdes through an iron gate.