A Dual Inheritance (7 page)

“All the time,” she said, and she smiled. When Helen smiled it was always a surprise, because she looked so profoundly untroubled, no matter what was going on. Her smiling face was such a stark contrast to her unsmiling face, because (he’d finally figured out) her teeth were
slightly
too big for her mouth, and this often gave the impression that she was either deep in thought or about to cry.

They walked aimlessly until a bench appeared as if they had special-ordered it. He sat down first.

“What’s your concentration?” she asked.

“Anthropology,” he said, too quietly. She asked again and he repeated it. It sounded so stupid and somehow distinctly offensive that he could have a concentration, that he was a senior in college, a senior at Harvard like his father had been and his grandfather before him, a student just like everybody else. “Everything since being with you has felt like such a lie.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, and there was her smile again—misleading, he knew, he
knew
—but still she looked so completely fine: young and beautiful and fine. For a moment he wondered if the rumors had been nothing but that, and maybe she’d simply grown tired of him and moved right along to many others, never given him another thought.

“Sit down,” he said. “Please.”

“I’m cold,” she said. “I’m suddenly really cold. And I should be getting back to work.”

“What do you do here?”

She wrapped her long arms around herself, kept them there and shrugged. He wondered what was so familiar about her stance, why it made him want to say:
You remind me of someone
. Maybe it was that she reminded him of herself, her old self, which at this point felt like part of him, so often had he thought of her every gesture. “Secretary. My father got me the job,” she said. “Shocking, I know.”

“What part?”

“You know—of course he got me the job. Of course I’m a secretary—even though I can’t type—positioned in a place to meet so many of our brightest, most eligible young men. Everyone is really hoping the best for me, everyone’s just—you know—
hoping
! I think my father would settle for an old geezer professor at this point, he’s so nervous.” She was still smiling, but she no longer looked untroubled. “Hugh.” She shook her head. “What is it you want me to say?”

She let her arms drop. And, as soon as she did, he realized who she’d reminded him of: a child in Case’s footage. He couldn’t have been more than six. When his playmate was killed with arrows shot by the neighboring clan, he wrapped his arms around himself in the very same way that Helen had.

Hugh stood up and put out his cigarette. He took her by the shoulders. “I want you to tell me what happened.”

“Why?”

He didn’t take his hands from her shoulders and she didn’t shrug him off. Not until he started to yell, “Because I fucking need to know.”

She shook her head. “Don’t speak to me that way.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

“That’s for me to do,” she said darkly. She looked around as if she suddenly realized that they were in public and that she was not comfortable with being looked at, not comfortable with being talked about, although she was very much accustomed to both. “You knew,” she said.

“What do you mean I knew?”

“I mean you knew. You knew I was pregnant; you knew it was yours.”

“Well, I sure as hell didn’t know because you had the decency to tell
me. Do you want to know how I found out? I found out because Edith Billis was at my father’s table and she was drunk. Does that constitute knowing? Should I have believed her? And how was I—” He was yelling again and he stopped himself, lowering his voice. “How was I supposed to help you if you never answered my letters or my telephone calls? And don’t tell me you didn’t receive any letters or messages.”

“No,” she said, “I did.”

“Then … how?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It was stupid. I’m stupid. I have to get back now.”

“Helen,” he said, and he knew he had to ask right then or somehow he never would. “Did you have it?”

She bit her lip. “No.”

He opened and closed his hands. “Okay.” He felt less relieved than he thought he would.

“In France they call them
angel makers
. My friend got one done there. Isn’t that poetic?”

“No,” he said. A stray hair fell into her eyes and he was grateful for it, grateful to have a concrete lead on touching any part of her, to feel her fine straw-colored hair as he smoothed it away from her face, to smell her perfume, which she once told him was made from tobacco flowers.

“I wanted you to be worse off.”

“I feel terrible,” he whispered, moving closer.

“Good,” she whispered back.

Chapter Three

Winter

Ed knocked on Hugh’s door. He knocked until the knocking turned into banging, which turned into sloppy bashing until Hugh finally opened up. “Fucking Cantowitz.”

“Righto,” Ed said. “Get up and get dressed.”

“Because?”

“Because it’s already afternoon! Get moving!” He sat in the walnut chair with the wine-colored cushion where he always sat before morning classes, with a view of the miserable swollen sky. It hadn’t snowed all winter, and it was like the atmosphere was bloated and in need of relieving itself. As Hugh buttoned his shirt and struggled with the same moth-devoured navy cashmere sweater he wore at the start of every goddamn day, he mumbled to Ed about how he’d read all night long, how he hadn’t slept until the sun came up. “Do you know that the Nuer people in Africa, as studied by Evans-Pritchard in the beginning of the 1940s, barely spoke of their lineage?” he asked.

“No, Hugh,” Ed said flatly. “I did not know that.”

“Bet you can’t imagine a world where lineage was irrelevant.” He looked under his bed and came up with two socks—not matching, not clean. “For the Nuer,” he continued, while pulling on the socks and lacing
up a pair of tennis sneakers, “any divisions between men had nothing to do with lineage.”

Ed fought the urge to sigh. “Maybe he only meant that the divisions are so fucking obvious. Maybe it is like asking—okay—a
fish
to describe water. The distinction is so blatant it might not even seem worth mentioning.”

“This obsession of yours, this focus on our differences—it’s not inherent.”

“I would hardly call stating the obvious an obsession. And, incidentally, I’m not the one staying up all night reading articles about lineage. I’m not the one bringing it up.”

“Point taken.”

Ed picked up a tennis ball from the floor and began to toss it up and down. He wanted to bounce it off the opposite wall, but he knew that Henley, who lived on the other side of that wall, would make him pay. He knew everyone in Adams House now, and he knew that he confounded these people by wearing such consistently crisp clothing (he hadn’t come to Harvard to dress like a bum) and asking forthright questions about anything that popped into his head. He didn’t need to be bouncing balls off walls in addition to acting—so consistently—like himself. He’d once asked a dark-skinned fellow lounging in the common room if he was an Arab or a Greek or what, and when Shipley nearly gasped, with an expression that struck Ed as distinctly matronly, Ed didn’t understand what the great big deal was. He asked people whether they’d been baptized, whether they’d ever met a Jew. He didn’t see the point in pretending that everyone had sprung from these Ivy halls and that everyone came from Shipley-type homes; he’d read up on the statistics of admission and knew this wasn’t the case anymore.

And yet more often than not he’d felt as if he were on the set of a Hollywood picture, in which everyone was doing his part to evoke a certain collegiate fantasy, and part of that fantasy was erasing all pasts except the popular ones—the houses and lawns and clubs from which Harvard men had originally come and would indeed continue to come for centuries. The way he saw it,
he
was the one interested in human
behavior. As it turned out, the dark-skinned fellow was not an Arab nor a Greek but an Indian from Bombay, and they’d spoken at great lengths about the aftermath of the Raj, the disastrous creation of Pakistan, and how he had no interest in returning home, where he was supposed to take over his family’s textile empire.

“I know that when you talk about our different backgrounds you think you’re simply stating the obvious,” said Hugh now, “but do you ever think about the possibility that what is obvious to you may not be—I don’t know—exactly true? You know it’s very Marxist of you to focus on what tears a culture apart.”

“I haven’t had a goddamn cup of coffee yet today. Please,” said Ed, “go easy with the rhetoric. And I am, as you well know, no Marxist.”

“You shouldn’t come here without having had a full meal. Otherwise you remind me of—and I’m sorry to say it—a certain French military leader. A short one—also highly ambitious—”

“I’m sorry,” said Ed, “but I don’t see the de Gaulle comparison at all.”

“I’m talking about Napoleon, you imbecile.”

Ed half-threw, half-pelted, the tennis ball at Hugh, who caught it just in time.

“Eat first,” he said, tossing the ball back to Ed, while pulling on an overcoat. “At least drink some coffee. Seriously.”

“Interesting that Evans—what was his name?”

“Evans-Pritchard.”

“Right,” said Ed, rubbing his hands together as they finally made it outside, which was cold but not numbingly so. “
Evans-Pritchard
. Some name. Interesting that he was making these observations while over in Western Europe some pretty important decisions were being made based on the contrary.”

“I knew you were going to say that.”

“That’s because it is obvious. Anyone would say that.”

“Not really.”

“Forgive me, but it seems more than a little irrelevant, given the historical context of our time, that some Brit
in the 1940s
took down notes
on an African tribe about how
they don’t care about lineage
. Well, bully for them, right? And don’t you think they’re busy worrying over more-pressing concerns, such as where to kill or gather their next meal? Maybe this lineage obsession emerges when there are moments to think about something other than the most basic survival. When I’m hungry—like now—I don’t give a shit about lineage, either. Hey—notice something different?” Ed stopped suddenly, standing up straight.

“What are you doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“With your head. What are you doing with your head?”

“Gesturing. I am gesturing with my head. Toward my new car. Christ, can’t you just notice? With your profound powers of observation? Here—get in.” Ed opened the passenger door proudly and made his way around to the driver’s seat.

“We’re going to be late,” said Hugh, skimming his hands along the radio dial, the glove compartment; he flipped open the ashtray.

“Late to where?”

“Ah,” said Hugh. “To class?”

“You’re such an ass. It’s Sunday,” Ed said. He turned the key in the ignition. “Boy, do I love that sound.”

The car was a 1958 dark-green Ford Thunderbird convertible, the jewel for which he’d saved during those deadly hours working for his father. He’d studied the Kelley Blue Book all throughout his time at Harvard, as if it were the one constant in an ever-evolving stream of canonical classics, and though GM seemed to be a better value, it was the dark-green Ford Thunderbird that he loved. The previous owner of the Thunderbird had been stylishly shady—a travel agent with a vague Irish brogue, in a great big rush to sell. The car was a good-looking vision, and Ed—neither for the first nor the last time—had been snowed by good looks. As it turned out, the green Thunderbird had defective gears that allowed for forward motion only.

“Now, as much as I appreciate your new car and as much as you’ve
surprised and impressed me by sinking your savings into a thing of completely impractical beauty,
you are going to get us killed
,” shouted Hugh, in order to be heard over the considerable wind.

The sun began a valiant fight with New England and her doleful skies. Light shot through the clouds, and Ed called out, “Jesus, it’s cold! Don’t you want to know where we’re going?”

Hugh lit his cigarette, annoyed by all the wind. He finally exhaled a good cough of smoke. “Thanks to you—evidently—I know tomorrow is Monday. That’s about enough knowledge for me.”

“No kidding?”

Hugh nodded. “What.”

“I can’t imagine being woken up—especially on a weekend—and merrily going along with what somebody told me to do.”

Ahead of them, a little girl waved madly through a station wagon rear window, and they both waved back immediately and without fanfare.

“But you’re not
somebody
,” he said. “You’ve gotten me out of bed for weeks. You’ve personally ensured my not flunking out.”

“I haven’t,” Ed clarified. “I’ve only made sure you were already up, while on my way to class. It’s not a big deal.”

“Fine. But I appreciate it, is what I’m saying. I do appreciate it.”

Ed kept his eye on the road. “It’s not a big deal.”

“Why can’t I just say thanks? I have to pretend you haven’t done me a few favors?”

“I’m just saying forget it. Let’s talk about something much better. Who’s the girl?”

“What girl?”

“I saw you talking with a girl maybe two weeks ago. You haven’t mentioned it, so I’m curious. I was rushing to a class and I saw you across the Yard. You were sitting on a bench. Tall girl? Good-looking? At least from what I could see.”

Hugh threw his cigarette into the wind. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m trying to think. Could it have been Flossie King?”

“Not Flossie.”

“I don’t know,” Hugh said, as if he were thinking it through. “I can’t think of who that would be.”

As Ed drove the highway, as the buildings grew squatter and uglier, he thought about how—when he had seen Hugh with this girl—he hadn’t, in fact, been in any kind of rush. It had been a strangely empty twenty minutes or so, when he was trying to decide if he was hungry enough to buy a roast beef sandwich before shutting himself in the library for the night. He was putting off studying, putting off eating, and all the while he had a twitchy feeling, but he couldn’t decide—even when he asked himself—what it was that he really wanted to do. In short, he was momentarily stuck, and when he saw Shipley he’d felt briefly relieved, for he now knew what he would be doing for the next gradient of time, and he knew it would shift his mood. He could say hello to Shipley and get swept up in some pointless argument, which would—especially if a few drinks were involved—break into incredulity at least once on both of their parts, which only heightened the stakes of the argument.