A Dual Inheritance (41 page)

The shopping trip had a vaguely illicit feeling, and Rebecca had the sense this had something to do with Vivi’s father. As if they had to
gather everything not only before the ferryboat was leaving but before he could say no.

Rebecca offered to contribute money for the groceries, and Vivi’s mother shook her head. “I don’t think so, sweetheart,” she said quietly. “But thank you.”

It had been easy to get permission. Her father was in Asia for the month of November. Several years ago, he had spent a month in Japan. He’d met with Mr. Toyoda (still no word on why they changed the
d
to a
t
). All she remembered about his reports was that the all-important luncheon with Mr. Toyoda had been followed by an excellent lemon meringue pie, that Mr. Toyoda had been—even by Japanese standards—short and uninterested in talking about business, and that he’d had an excellent tan. Now her father was doing
something big
in China. She’d always had a hard time keeping his business dealings straight, and since she’d never spoken less to him than she had during the past few weeks, it was even harder still. The time difference made it almost impossible to remember when to call him, and each time he’d called her, she was never in the dorm. They’d managed to have one longer conversation, during which he relayed, apropos of nothing and strangely excitedly, that he didn’t believe in trust funds, because people who worked in banks were essentially stupid, and that he was going to put all the dealerships he owned—all that land, all of it—in her name. Eventually, he’d hastened to add. There were, of course, some kinks to work out.

Rebecca had not brought up the invitation to Anguilla.

She was experiencing, for the first time, an upside to her parents’ divorce.

Since the trip fell during her mother’s vacation time, Rebecca was able to avoid the gauntlet of her father’s decision-making. Before saying yes to anything, he always thought of every possible negative scenario and managed to ask more questions than her mother could even begin to imagine. She knew if she consulted with her father about this trip, he would come up with hypothetical, frightening Caribbean scenarios that, in the moment, Rebecca would deride as being absurd and then—after hearing them—would be unable to shake.

As for her mother, she’d happily taken Vivi’s parents’ phone number and promised to call them immediately. “No fair,” her mother had teased. “You’re going to Anguilla before me? David was planning to take me to Malliouhana in February.”

“Well,” said Rebecca, playing along, “I’ll do some reconnaissance for you.”

Within days, her mother had bought the round-trip ticket and FedEx’d two black one-piece bathing suits (the only kind Rebecca ever wore), a lavender sarong, a check for spending money, and an array of Clinique sunscreen.
Happy Thanksgiving and Bon Voyage!
said the note, in her mother’s stylish script.
I can’t imagine you’ll miss my marshmallow yams. P.S. I spoke with Vivi’s father on the phone. He and Dad were in the same class at Harvard and they were friends! I’m sure they’ll want to catch up, but (have no fear) I told him that Dad was away until December. How typical is it that I never once heard of him?!

Rebecca ran from the mailroom, across the athletic field, into the infirmary, and up the two flights of stairs to Vivi’s room, where, totally out of breath, she held out the note for Vivi to read.

“Yeah,” Vivi said, “I had a feeling.”

“You did not. You said you
doubted
they knew each other.”

“I know I did, but I was lying. I’m a little bit psychic and I thought we knew each other in a past life or something, but I guess this is the reason.”

“You believe in past lives?”

“I certainly do,” said Vivi. “
What?
Don’t look at me that way.”

Her mother and David took Rebecca’s trip as an opportunity to go to Palm Beach that Tuesday morning, opting out of Thanksgiving altogether, and Rebecca spent one night alone in the apartment (smoking!). Some of the art was missing. Her father had mentioned that the Picasso drawings were being reframed, that the Stella was being restored, but several other pieces were also gone. These pockets of space adorned with empty hooks inspired her to take some photographs. She knew that
by the time she developed the film these empty spaces wouldn’t be nearly as interesting to her, but she took a whole roll of film anyway. And while taking a taxi to JFK Airport at six o’clock in the morning on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, where Vivi and her parents were waiting to meet her, it was those empty spaces she continued to see whenever she closed her eyes.

Mr. Shipley had notably thick wheat-colored hair that reminded her immediately of Stephan and Josh and dozens of other boys she knew. He was deeply tanned, his face was engraved with complicated lines (especially around his light blue eyes), and he wore nothing like the semi-hippie exotic garments that Rebecca had imagined but rather a pair of khaki pants and a white linen shirt that her mother might describe as
way past acceptably shabby
. Mrs. Shipley, too, looked more ordinary than Rebecca had expected. She wore a denim skirt and a light-green V-neck sweater, but then, on closer inspection, Rebecca noticed a variety of necklaces laden with charms and lockets (even what looked like a tooth), as if there was a lifetime of stories lying right above her heart.

Vivi’s parents each shook her hand, and Mrs. Shipley started to giggle and couldn’t stop.

“But you’re so much prettier than your father,” said Mrs. Shipley, finally getting ahold of herself and suppressing her giggling fit.

“Agreed,” said Mr. Shipley, looking away, smiling, and then right back at Rebecca. His eyebrows were flecked with gray, although his thick longish hair was not. “Good God.”

Rebecca listened to the Cure on Vivi’s headphones during takeoff. And when Vivi reached out for Rebecca’s hand, because Vivi knew, without having to be told, just how fearful Rebecca was about flying, and when, before landing, Rebecca finally brought herself to look out the window and gazed at the turquoise water and toy-sized palm trees down below, she thought:
I did the right thing
.

The “villa” was built into a cliff, overlooking a beach shared with just a few other villas, and it was halfway through being renovated. The girls
were assigned twin beds on the lower level, where the floors were crappy linoleum and needed a thorough cleaning, but outside the creaky sliding door lay the cement patio, the pool, and (down steep, narrow stone steps) the powdery sand beach, protected by a rocky cove. On the upper level, Aunt Kitty’s work was in evidence. The master bedroom, one guest room, and a living room were done up in a style that Mr. Shipley (
for Christ’s sake please call me Hugh
) derided as
Generic World Traveler
and that Rebecca couldn’t help recognizing as strikingly similar to Vivi’s room at school. The living room opened out onto a dramatic deck, where they would soon be eating.

While Mr. Shipley set off to dive into the sea, Mrs. Shipley asked the girls to set the table. She washed lettuce and chopped vegetables and toasted pine nuts quickly and efficiently. She arranged the salads in little bowls, doused the greens with oil and vinegar, and tossed it all together with her newly washed hands before sipping from a glass of wine. Mr. Shipley padded through the kitchen, soaking wet, wrapped in a towel. He swiped a carrot from one of the bowls, then another.

“Are you still appalled by staying here?” asked Mrs. Shipley, looking him over.

“Not at the moment,” he said. “Are we eating?”

“We are,” said Vivi. “So put some clothes on, Papa. For God’s sake,” she teased, “we have a guest.”

It was the first time Rebecca had ever drunk wine with a meal, besides Manischewitz at Passover, and it was certainly the first time she’d drunk any alcohol while the sun was shining. After they’d eaten on the veranda overlooking the beach, Mrs. Shipley produced a pack of cigarettes and Vivi took one from her mother’s pack. Mr. Shipley lit his wife’s and then his daughter’s cigarettes, before lighting his own.

“Would you like one?” offered Mrs. Shipley. And then, seeing Rebecca’s hesitation, “Don’t worry. We won’t tell.”

And so Rebecca took the cigarette, and Mr. Shipley offered up a light with his silver Zippo, and, as the sun bounced off the sea in a wine-buzzed glaze of gilded blue, it was impossible not to smile. She knew that smoking caused cancer and, at the very least, wreaked havoc on your complexion
over time, but here was Mrs. Shipley and she had some wrinkles, sure, but she was also seemingly unscathed. She was—Rebecca realized only now—really beautiful. At first she’d seemed kind of wan, but Rebecca noticed she wasn’t wearing even a stitch of makeup, and Rebecca wasn’t used to seeing older women—aside from some of her teachers—go without. Also, she didn’t dye her hair. It was part silver and part blond, and it hung in that same childlike silky way that she imagined Vivi’s would without her cornrows. Mrs. Shipley extended her long arm off the balcony and let the cigarette burn away between her fingers. Then she closed her eyes and turned her face to the sun. Rebecca loved how Mrs. Shipley didn’t say anything like
We know we should quit
or
I’m terrible
. There was no point in qualifying bad habits (Rebecca planned to quit smoking at twenty-one); if she was going to smoke, she was going to enjoy it.

“Tell me,” said Mr. Shipley, squinting into the expanse of the sea, “where do you usually spend Thanksgiving?”

“Well,” said Rebecca. She took a drag of her cigarette, which bought her a little time. “It’s different now, since my parents are divorced. We used to have a big dinner at three o’clock in our apartment in Manhattan, with mostly my mother’s family. Then we’d all go to the movies. It was fun,” she admitted.

“How about your father’s family? I met your grandfather, you know.”

“You
did
?”

Mr. Shipley nodded. “In fact, I spent an afternoon at his house in Dorchester. He doesn’t live there anymore, does he?”

Rebecca nodded. “He does,” she said, softly. And suddenly she felt exposed, as if this were a bad dream and they all were, in fact, eating in Dorchester with her grandpa Murray and she was solely responsible for each step of the ill-conceived meal. “He won’t leave.”

“I liked him,” said Mr. Shipley.

“You couldn’t have,” she said, rallying. “Nobody does.”

“He was a rough character, I’ll give you that, but at least he
had
character.

It was only a brief visit, and, believe me, I know he had his shortcomings. And of course he wasn’t easy on your father.”

“No,” Rebecca agreed.

Not one of her friends had met her grandfather. She had no other family on her father’s side—the older generation had all died off, and her father didn’t stay in touch with his second cousins. Grandpa Murray didn’t like to travel, and she had the feeling that this was a relief to her father. And here was Vivi’s father saying he’d not only met him but he’d
liked
him? She pictured that dangerous neighborhood, that old house, which smelled of unwashed clothes, and how she was allowed to watch more TV there than anywhere else. Her father and her grandfather were always yelling at each other; had Mr. Shipley seen that?

And, as if Mr. Shipley understood how off-kilter this revelation had made her feel, he changed the subject entirely. “You’ve been to the Hamptons, I imagine?”

“Rebecca was supposed to go there for Thanksgiving,” said Vivi, as if
this
was, in fact, the real coincidence here. “Her mother’s boyfriend has a house.”

“Is it true,” asked Mr. Shipley, “that houses there are selling at an extraordinary rate?”

“I guess,” Rebecca said. “I mean, I don’t really know.”

“People just buying houses and tearing them down …” He shook his head. “
Gut renovations
they’re calling them. It’s almost violent, isn’t it?”

Rebecca took a sip of wine. “Like gutting a fish,” she almost whispered.

“Do you know what happened to my father’s house in Boston? Some perfectly well-behaved couple bought the old place—very good house, built in 1806 or something like this—and I’ll be damned if not one week after the closing they didn’t bring on the house-sucking machines. You know which machines I mean; they literally suck the life out of the house.”

“Surely not
literally
,” said Mrs. Shipley.

He ignored her. “Five dumpsters full at the end of the day.” He poured himself the last of the third bottle of wine. He had, Rebecca noticed, consumed most of that bottle on his own. “They suck
everything
out. Really and truly. Vivs, what’s that movie we watched in the hotel that time?”

“The Japanese one?”

“The one in the mall.”

“Dawn of the Dead.”

“Well, these gut renovations—I tell you, they remind me of those flesh-eating zombies—”

“Oh, please,” said Mrs. Shipley. “You are not comparing renovating a home to flesh-eating zombies. Hugh, even for you—”

“Denying the fact that there aren’t enough places to live,” said Mr. Shipley, leaning forward, with his elbows on the table. “Denying the house and the house’s own history? It is—I’m sorry, Helen—but it’s hard not to see this as a nihilistic turn. Just a touch, you know? Something so empty …” He trailed off, and right as Rebecca thought he’d finished, he offered, “Those so bent on acquisition don’t even examine what they are acquiring.”

Rebecca realized that her head was in her hand and that she would be perfectly happy to skip the beach if it meant Mr. Shipley would keep talking.

“You know that phrase
Don’t get me started?
” said Mrs. Shipley. “My husband never bothers with it. Have you noticed this yet?”

Mr. Shipley had seemed to become genuinely agitated during his rant—sweat was now noticeable at the temples of his craggy handsome face—and Rebecca worried that Mrs. Shipley’s comment might put him over the edge. But, to Rebecca’s surprise, he merely wiped his brow with the batik napkin and said, “Who’s coming swimming?”