A Dual Inheritance (59 page)

He shrugged. “Jury’s out.”

“Oh,” she replied, softening. “I’m sorry.”

They watched the rest of the presentation in appropriate silence. When it was over, and the migration inside toward dessert began, they both hung back. They watched the house and its golden light from the distance of the lawn.

“You want to know something?” he asked. “I’m pissed at your father.” He gave his twisted-up smile, slowly shaking his head. “I’m still angry at him.”

“But, Hugh …” She hesitated, because she of course understood how irrelevant this line of reasoning was. “It’s been so long.”

“Don’t I know it,” he said. He was staring up at the blank white sheet, as if waiting for another image to appear.

A door slam woke her up the next morning, and for a moment Rebecca’s stomach pitched. This was the same irrational moment she’d had for years now, in which she imagined that Vivi knew that Rebecca had—
oh yes, she had
—made a pass at her father. This type of dread popped up infrequently, so distanced was she from the original impulse, but each and every time it did, she felt an urge to throw up. As she fled to the bathroom, she suddenly realized that she’d slept late—light was blasting the floorboards—and by the time she splashed her face with cold water, the need to vomit (if not the fear) was thankfully gone. She rushed to pull herself together and marveled at how she’d managed to sleep late with so many people in the house. She was even a little hurt that no children had come to wake her.
Surprise!
Lukas and Sabine had been known to cry out in unison, well before seven
A.M
.

In the kitchen: the same wicker basket on the counter that she’d come to expect; the same slightly stale donuts and muffins.

“Oh, good, you’re up,” said Vivi, who was holding a pink-frosted donut.

“What time is it? You should have woken me.”

“Listen to this: My father screwed up. I knew I should have just had my assistant place the order, but he wanted to be useful and now there’s not enough. My mother is quietly fuming.”

“Not enough …”

Vivi started to laugh, and Rebecca was alarmed to see that her best friend, who had a career, three children, threw impromptu parties, and who—as a rule—did not sweat the small stuff, seemed atypically unhinged. “I asked him to order booze.” Vivi gestured for emphasis, and Rebecca was surprised the donut didn’t fly right out of her hand. “Wouldn’t you have thought I could trust him with that one?”

“I would have.” Rebecca nodded, poured the dregs of the coffee. “So, what can I do? Do you want me to call my dad? He can go buy booze somewhere. He’ll have plenty of room in the car.”

“It’s a Sunday! Liquor stores are closed!”

“No, they’re not. Not in New York. That law changed.”

“It did? Excellent! How did I miss that? Anyway …” She finally took a bite of the donut. “My dad’s on the way to the country club. His plan is to beg them to sell some of theirs. Although—”

“See? Okay, then.”

“He’s not exactly beloved there.”

“It’s going to be fine.”

Vivi took another bite of donut. “This is disgusting,” she said.

“Hand it over,” said Rebecca, who took a bite. Though she agreed, the sugar made her feel more settled.

“This was supposed to be a simple daytime brunch thingy,” Vivi moaned. “So casual, so—
whatever
. My stupid invitation was supposed to make this perfectly clear.”

“I liked the invitation.”

“Thank you. This day is not supposed to be a big deal.”

“I know.”

“I’m going to kill my father if there is nothing to drink at my simple, casual thingy.”

“Listen,” Rebecca said, “why don’t you go take a bath?”

“I can’t
take a bath
!”

“Why not?”

“I can’t take a bath.”

“Where are the kiddos?”

“Watching something—who knows what—with Brian. They’re all lying on our bed, eyes glued to the TV screen. Total clueless relaxation.”

“Cute.”

“Sure,” she said, starting to laugh. “Okay.”

“You finally got married,” said Rebecca.

Vivi nodded, her laughter trailing off. “I’m going to go take a bath.”

By the time everyone was dressed and the mimosas were flowing, Hugh was on the lawn and at his best: one or two drinks in and doing impressions for several of Vivi and Brian’s friends about his recent trip to the club. “Let’s just say they did not make it easy for me,” he said, swilling the remainder of his mimosa. “I said to the fellow,
I would like to purchase some alcohol; this isn’t exactly water from a stone
. He looked appalled.”

“How’d you convince them?” asked Marion Childs, the one friend of Vivi’s whom Rebecca truly (still) could not stand.

“Quite a bit of tap-dancing,” he said. He started counting people.

“What are you doing?” Brian’s cousin asked.

“Almost everyone here is married,” Hugh said. “And I’m not.”

“Quelle horreur,”
said the dreaded Marion, clearly flirting. She was wearing the kind of dress that looked simple and almost tentlike but likely cost at least six hundred dollars. Her husband was a few yards away, speaking urgent Spanish into a cellphone. “Many of his clients are in Mexico City,” she explained. Rebecca couldn’t tell what Marion felt about this—pride? resentment? embarrassment?—though it was clear that she felt something.

Brian’s best friend, Joe, and his band set up. “Is this too loud?” the singer inquired into a microphone, but no one answered. “Is this too loud?” she repeated again, and this time everyone said yes.

“Be my date?” Hugh asked Rebecca, as they both watched more and more people arrive. “Just let me—you know—stay beside you. I’m not very popular with some of the guests,” he said. “As you might imagine.”

“And why would that be?” Rebecca asked. Hugh suddenly seemed … distasteful. The thought of him tap-dancing for alcohol at the club he so detested, the thought of how he’d screwed God only knew how many women during his marriage to Helen—the sun was too bright to contemplate all the reasons she felt as she did.

“Fine,” he said lightly. “Don’t be my date. I don’t deserve you anyway.”

“Glad you got that straight,” she said with a smile. And then she thought:
What the hell are we talking about?
She turned away from Hugh and Marion and the growing cluster of guests and was annoyed to feel that her face was flushed.

“Let me know when your dad shows up,” Hugh called out, but Rebecca only raised her hand in some vague acknowledgment that she would—
sure thing!
—let him know and also that she was walking away.

Her heels dug into the grass, and she tried not to trip as she walked by the croquet set, where Brian was cautioning a Lukas-led pack of kids not to go down to the water. She walked past them, past the slope of lilac bushes that obscured the generator where Vivi had—the summer after her graduation from high school—hid their jointly bought envelope of psychedelic mushrooms. Rebecca climbed the dilapidated stairs to the side entrance. In the corner of the railing, a spider was in the final stages of an elaborate web. And as she heard the sound of her father’s arrival—the too-loud voice proclaiming his own name—she had an urge to poke a finger through it.

Later, while Rebecca watched Hugh play the piano from the mossy shade of the side porch, she saw her father, too, right behind Hugh at the front of the crowd, gripping a lyric sheet with both hands. He kept his eyes trained on that piece of paper as if he was really
trying
. It was this kind of quotidian effort from him that never failed to interest her; he truly believed there was a right way to do every last thing. Though
she’d never seen Hugh play, she was unsurprised to learn that—though he avoided eye contact with his crowd and added unnecessary flourishes to every number—he was a natural piano man. She could imagine him living a parallel life in a small town somewhere—Ireland? Maine?—boozily gathering tips at the end of the night, going home with widows.

By the time she came in from the porch, the crowd had dwindled and her father was nowhere in sight.

“My wife left me for Obama,” declared Vivi’s cousin J.K., who was talking too loudly and drinking from a can of Budweiser.

“You just love saying that,” said Hugh.

“She loses her job, so I suggest she does a little campaigning and, what do you know? She has a knack, she loves it, so she hits the campaign trail. Do I object?”

“You do not,” said Hugh, in a way that made it clear that Hugh and J.K. were friends, that Hugh had, in fact, known much of this family tree, with all its gnarled and complicated branches, for most of his life.

“Goddamn Barry Obama,” said J.K., knocking back the rest of his beer. “At least the bastard won.”

“Rebecca, do you see this man here?” Hugh put his arm around J.K. “You have never seen a cuter kid than J.K. as a youngster.”

“Bet you can’t believe that,” said J.K., and because J.K. was a good thirty pounds overweight and sunburned and losing his hair, and because Rebecca knew that he’d been in and out of rehab for as long as she’d known Vivi, the moment was uncomfortable.

“Do you know what?” asked Hugh. “You two have something in common,” he said.

“What’s that?” asked Rebecca.

“You both came to see me in Dar,” he said. “You both needed a change of scene.”

Rebecca froze. She didn’t want him to talk about that trip, and certainly not like this.

“Those were some times,” said J.K., a bit creepily. “Those were some goddamn different times.”

“Yeah, well, I’m going to leave you two to take a stroll down memory lane,” Rebecca said, backing away, wondering where everyone was. “Gonna leave you to it.”

When she retreated to the side porch again and saw that most of the party had migrated down to the dock, she wanted to go upstairs to her room and lay her head down. Maybe she’d take a peek at her cellphone. She was about to give in and do just that, when Hugh came outside and they nearly collided. She backed up—shot back, actually—and he said, “I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. “For what, exactly?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he tried to hug her.

She didn’t really want him to, but she also didn’t want to make more of something by refusing a simple hug. Did she have to be so rigid? She saw he realized he’d made her uneasy with his reference to her visit, that he’d been careless with her most secret and awful memory. And so she let him.

He was familiar—his tallness, his potent earthy tobacco scent, his calloused hands missing two fingers at her back—and not at all unpleasant. But then she realized that he wasn’t letting go, and … “Hugh,” she said, gently at first, but when he still didn’t release her, she felt her heart start racing. Where were they? Could anyone see them? Probably not—they were hidden from the lawn, to one side of the door—but she broke out in a sweat, had a sense of being trapped, and did not know what else she felt besides the fact of him pressing into her, and she could not breathe and she wrested herself free, crying out
“Hugh,”
in a hushed angry way that, if anything, created the very scene that she would have done anything—really and truly anything—to avoid.

“Excuse me,” uttered Helen, who was of course of course of course standing on the threshold, holding the screen door away from her body.

And, in that awful moment, Rebecca thought her mind might shut down from the noodle-y piano riffs that would not stop their loop.

“Hugh, what are you doing?” Helen demanded. She stepped out onto the side porch, letting the screen door slam behind her. Though Rebecca knew that—after a terrible struggle—Helen had quit smoking
years ago, she immediately smelled cigarette smoke and was flooded with sympathy. Something must have set Helen off today, something bad enough to break her will.

“I—” Hugh looked off balance, Rebecca noticed, as if he might literally fall down. “I was giving Rebecca a hug,” Hugh said. Even to Rebecca’s ears he sounded guilty, as if this was a familiar scenario and he was simply saying his lines.

“You were giving Rebecca a hug.”

“Helen, he hugged me,” Rebecca confirmed. She tried her best to toss this off, to laugh even.

“Why?” Helen asked bluntly, although it obviously didn’t matter why. Her face looked as if she’d cast off a previously imperceptible mask of inhibition.
“Why?”

Rebecca stared at the screen door, watched it blur and unblur and blur again.

“I’m sorry,” Helen stumbled, “but did you need a hug, Rebecca? From the looks of it, you were struggling to break free.”

Without any warning, Vivi opened the screen door and stepped onto the porch. She immediately asked, “What’s wrong?”

“Really,” said Rebecca quickly, ignoring Vivi for the moment, “I think he saw that I was upset about something—I’ve had a strange week—and, look, he’s had a lot to drink and it’s an emotional day—an emotional
weekend
—and—”

“Rebecca,” said Helen, who was biting her lower lip and clasping her hands together. “Did he hit on you?”

“Mom!” Vivi cried.

“Christ, Helen,” hissed Hugh.

Helen’s eyes were steely—many stages past shock. “Just
 … did he?
”

“No,” answered Rebecca, as clearly as she possibly could. “Absolutely not.”

“Why would you ask her that?” cried Vivi, astonished, who looked too beautiful in her silky dress of all her favorite underwater colors to be stressed and seized by this embarrassing situation. She came to her father’s
side.
“Mom,”
she whispered with hushed force, before eventually breaking into yelling. “I know you’re divorced, I know you have your own opinions, but what is wrong with you?
What are you even saying?
Papa isn’t like that. He hasn’t—”

“Yes, he is. Shit,” blurted Helen.
“Shit.”
She avoided looking at any of them. “I really don’t want to have this conversation now.”

“Then leave,” said Vivi cruelly. “Stop yourself now and get out of here.”

“I just—I have to—” For a moment Helen looked back nervously at the living room—miraculously free of guests—and, when she faced them again, Rebecca thought she might fall apart. Instead, she seemed to revive. “I know this is your day, sweetheart. And I wish more than anything that this was not happening, but I came outside to look for you. I came to say goodbye, and what I saw—”