A Dual Inheritance

by Joanna Hershon

  “I’ve never met him, but you’re a pretty good mimic,” Ed admitted.

  “The man can still make me laugh even though I basically hate him.”

  “I don’t hate my father,” said Ed, not because it was true but because he could never imagine saying so, certainly not to Hugh Shipley, not to someone whose father didn’t understand what it meant to do any kind of work, not to mention the kind of backbreaking work that his father still did as a steamfitter, laying pipes in the ground, getting coated with dirt and unspecified grime, often narrowly escaping electrical fires because of what he called Depression cheapo wiring.

  “That’s good,” said Hugh. “I’m happy for you.” He tossed his cigarette and sat down on the bench.

  “Is your mother funny, too?”

  “My mother’s dead.”

  “Oh,” said Ed. “Oh.”

  “A long time ago,” said Hugh, as if Ed had asked. “I barely remember her.”

  The river and the sky were far off in the distance, and all that felt real was the bench where Hugh was seated and the stubble of grass underfoot. Ed sat down on the bench, too. He wanted to say something, if for no other reason than he was uncomfortable with silence. He hated to sit in silence with anyone. He hated hearing other people’s uncomfortable sounds—their toe-tapping, their throat-clearing, their quiet cracking-of-knuckles. He hated how driven he felt to make the silence stop, how a roar of discomfort filled his own head like a giant wave crashing to shore. Every few summers, his mother had prevailed and borrowed from the credit union so that they could go to Nantasket Beach, and that cold Atlantic once gave him the tossing of his life; he’d never forgotten the roar of it as the wave drew him up and over. The more he didn’t say to Hugh, the more he withheld words of kindness or humor or whatever the hell he was supposed to say, the more absurd it felt to be there, hearing that ocean’s roar. Why couldn’t he simply say I’m sorry, the way that Hugh had done earlier this evening? I’m sorry. Hugh had said it strong and clear, and here Ed was, unable to say a word. They were strangers, he thought. They’d remain so.

  But then whatever profound awkwardness he’d been feeling, whatever definitive wrongness, mysteriously tapered off and, like the halting of a violent storm, what was left felt akin to good fortune. As Saturday’s rising sun became a sudden and tremendous possibility, what remained was nothing more extraordinary than two grown motherless sons.

  What also remained was this: They were—despite sharing not a single interest or goal—going to be friends.

  I grabbed Hugh’s arm. I said, “Just keep walking.” I must have been out of my mind, okay? But that’s exactly what Hugh did.

  I felt this … grip … on my arm, and what do you know, it was Ed. I thought, My God, this fellow is in some kind of state.

  When they told this story many years later, both men said they could never remember how they’d gone from Ed’s tight grip to sitting in Cronin’s sharing a ham sandwich, but that wasn’t true, because Ed had always remembered. He’d followed Hugh; he’d dropped a squashed bottle cap, brushed grass off his trousers, and run after him. He never forgot.

  Chapter Two

  Fall

  As a freshman, Hugh Shipley had embarked on an English literature concentration, but after two years of earning decent marks despite rarely giving his best efforts, after forgoing much of Shakespeare and Virgil to play chess with a few quasi-bums in Davis Square, one of those quasi-bums, who hailed from Tennessee, gave him a seminal article about kinship theory during the autumn of his junior year, and although he’d read the article mainly out of an urge to be polite to someone who was masterful at chess and apparently—given his disheveled appearance and his refusal to discuss anything but chess—not much else, he’d reread the article just as soon as he was finished and immediately talked his way into an anthropology course, even though the deadline for enrollment had long passed.

  Hugh Shipley then took a whole lot of NoDoz and wrote a paper about the incest taboo, which earned him the attention of the department head, resulting in a swift switch of concentrations. He upped his NoDoz intake, gave up whiskey for beer (more nutrients), and wrote both “Cherchez la Vache,” about the single-minded obsession that the African Nuer tribe have with their cows, and “Fatness Comes Second,” a detailed analysis of human size variation. He’d found himself staying up reading more than what was assigned, thinking about classes long after the professor had stopped speaking. He had finally—at age twenty-one—felt ready to begin his education, but it was only when he’d thanked the Southern quasi-bum for the excellent reading recommendation that he knew he’d found his true teacher.

  For the quasi-bum was not a bum at all but a graduate student named Charlie Case, who—besides the two hours a day that were wholly dedicated to chess—spent his waking hours in a basement office at the Peabody Museum, editing reels of footage and writing proposals, who had—incredibly!—made an epic journey to New Guinea in order to shoot, vérité style, one tribe and their endless war. He’d been the leader of this expedition, the one who introduced Michael Rockefeller to New Guinea, where Rockefeller had returned that fall and disappeared mysteriously after capsizing a canoe. Hugh—bearing a famous last name and being a budding photographer—could not help but identify with Michael Rockefeller, which, of course, he had never admitted to anyone.

  Over the winter and spring of his junior year, Hugh turned up regularly at the graduate student’s messy office with sandwiches and Cokes, with offers to help in any way he could.

  “Why do you want to help?” asked Charlie, whose beard always seemed accidental.

  The one time Hugh had asked Charlie Case point blank what he really thought happened to the young Rockefeller, if he thought he’d drowned or been killed by natives or, as some purported, become absorbed into a local tribe, Case only said something about Rockefeller’s eyes, how he couldn’t get them out of his head, these eyes that were so inquisitive, always asking something of whatever or whoever happened to be in front of him. Charlie Case said that he wished everyone had a bit more of that quality and, goddamn it, didn’t Hugh wish that, too?

  Remind me, said Charlie Case. Why do you want to help?

  He had started out wanting to ingratiate himself so that he might hear about Charlie’s travels. He supposed, at first, he’d been after little more than some good old-fashioned exotic storytelling, as it always seemed improbable that these anthropology professors—the same ones who had chalk dust on their blazers, who walked their dogs and presumably (at least the better-off ones) lived in any one of the fine houses on Brattle or Larchwood or Oxford—made their way to such primitive societies, usually for at least one year. He’d heard tales of certain professors drinking hallucinogenic tea, disrobing, and speaking in tongues. In short, he’d been curious. What, he also wondered, was visual anthropology besides a relatively new field that—he had to admit, and forget about explaining it to his father—sounded awfully vague? But the footage (not a naked hallucinating professor to be seen) consumed him more than any book ever could, and by last spring he’d finally found what his father had long condemned him for lacking: a sense of purpose.

  Never mind the fact that his father mocked his budding interests (hanging what appeared to be an effigy made of burlap, straw, and velvet from Hugh’s bedroom ceiling as a welcome-home gag was one particularly unfunny moment in which his father’s estimation of valuing other cultures was on ridiculous display, though Hugh had been impressed by his ingenuity—whom had he paid to sew such a thing?). Because of this footage, which depicted (among countless other images lodged in Hugh’s brain) a naked man so focused on weaving that Hugh could feel the fabric with his own uncalloused fingers, because of his acquaintance with a similarly focused Charlie Case, he was able to study in a new way. The masses of reading assignments, which he’d previously had trouble completing no matter what the course, were no longer so forbidding. It was as if seeing all of Case’s footage had unlocked some part of his mind and he began to be
able to picture everything that he read, and when he could picture something—be it a tribal costume or a philosophical argument—it turned out he was able to engage. And engage he finally did. With this newfound love of analyzing centralized government and marriage and the way that women linked society together all across the world regardless of whether they wore rings through their dark noses or around their snow-white fingers, with his developing urge to analyze life’s basic structures—structures to which he’d never previously given a thought—there emerged a curious freedom. He wasn’t entirely sure what he felt while watching dark naked children rub clay around their eyes so that they might resemble birds or while watching people play out their lives under a belief system in which ghosts exist without a trace of kitsch but instead are more real—hyperreal—than anything, but he couldn’t deny he was energized. He was also no longer consumed primarily with the blank expanse of the day—the hours and hours after waking and how he had to fill them. He no longer devoted the majority of those hours to thinking about Helen and wondering what had happened to her.

  That springtime of his junior year he had been on some sort of full-fledged upswing, where the very weather seemed to support his plans and his mood, and this stirring feeling lasted throughout the summer, when he had worked (vowing it would be the very last time) at the yacht club on Fishers Island, where his ancestors had been founding members and where his two older half brothers still raced their boat. He vowed not to work at the club ever again—not because he didn’t love sailing or even many of his cousins and crewmates (if not exactly his own brothers), but he knew it was a disgrace to belong to a club with discriminatory policies against Negroes. Jews, too, of course. Likely Catholics—who knew what the actual bylaws said? If he wasn’t going to board a bus and march down South anytime soon, he could at least—for Christ’s sake—forgo his favorite goddamn sport. Even if it was the only sport that he was not only good at but also actually loved. Even if he would miss how being a good sailor was about instincts and decision-making more than about any physical advantages that he also just so happened to possess. He would sail again, he told himself. He would sail not as sport but to get to where he needed to go.

  He had gone so far as to arrange a meeting with the club president (an elderly distant cousin) to explain his feelings on the matter of discrimination, and, after a hand-folding pause, the president/cousin replied in a disturbingly kind voice, “I’m glad you have told me your feelings on this matter, Hugh.”

  “You are?”

  “Of course. My door is always open. You know your family plays an important part in the history here.”

  “To be honest, sir, I don’t care about my family’s important history as much as I care about what is going on right here and right now.”

  “Yes,” said the president, “I see.”

  “You see?”

  “I do. Are you sure I can’t get you something to drink?”

  “I’m sure,” said Hugh, desperately craving a beer. “Thank you.”

  “You know,” he said, as he stood up and fixed himself a finger of gin on ice, “man is tribal.”

  “Yes, sir. That I know. Anthropology happens to be my concentration.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you’re a Harvard man, too, just like your father. So you are the last person I need to explain this to, I’m sure.” He looked Hugh in the eye and smiled. “We are tribal by nature.” He wouldn’t quit smiling. “And this, Hugh, is our tribe.” He took a slow sip of his gin. If this man were a different kind of person, he would have shrugged his shoulders sheepishly. But he was not that kind of person, and, for this, Hugh was glad.

  “It’s hardly that simple,” Hugh tried.

  “Young man, this is our home. We have a right to choose who enters our home.”

  “But it isn’t a home,” said Hugh.

  “Look,” he said, with only the slightest hint of impatience, gesturing out the open window toward the blue sky and sea and rolling green hills and the freshwater ponds and hydrangea bushes and that slight breeze, which would soon carry the official whiff of gin at precisely five o’clock. “If you think that changing some policy is going to alter the essentially tribal nature of society, forgive me, but you need to reexamine your expectations.”

  This club president—who was in fact Hugh’s grandmother’s second cousin, a man named Tribby Eaton, a man Hugh had loved and admired as a child, who had once given him a bowl of peanuts and a Coke after he’d lost a sunfish race—was not stooped nor was he bent; he had a full head of white hair and the shoulders and hands of a man who knew how to sail under inclement weather and return a killer serve. “This is where you come from,” he said, and again his voice was kind.

  In Hugh’s mind he was raising his own voice, telling the old man to go stuff it, to stuff the traditions and the island and all of his justifications, that all of those justifications came not from pride but from fear. But as Tribby Eaton showed him the door, Hugh couldn’t help noting that the older man looked sad. And when Hugh told him that he wished to revoke his membership, there was none of the victorious feeling he’d anticipated. None of the moral clarity he enjoyed when he played out the scenario either before or after this moment (as he would go on to recount it more than a few times over the years). But the point had been made and it was he who had made it, and that meant more than anything else. Didn’t it?

  So he was feeling really good about his decision to never return to the yacht club, feeling good and highly principled, when he’d returned to the Peabody the first week in September of his senior year with a glazed donut and a bottle of Coke, only to find Case’s office vacant. As he held on to his intended gifts, he also tried holding on to his burgeoning sense of hope and purpose, and he’d run through the halls in search of Case, or at least some voice of authority who might explain Case’s whereabouts. And as he jogged by the offices on the fourth floor, where he had never been, as he began to sweat through his shirt and started to panic about panicking—he saw Helen.

  She was sitting behind a desk and talking on the telephone.

  He would not have been more shocked if he’d wandered into a burlesque show in the middle of the day and she’d been the main attraction. There was Helen for the first time in almost four years, and instead of walking straight in to the office and demanding an explanation for her past actions or throwing her over his shoulder and carrying her away or asking what she was doing in the Peabody Museum, apparently employed, he’d continued to run, and as he ran, he felt it all disintegrate. All of those notions about the world conspiring to support him and the weather matching his mood and all that crap—they were gone. But they weren’t just gone—it was as if someone had ripped a rosy poufy opera scrim from his intractably gray brain. It was as if, when he sat down on a bench in the Yard and (as if trying to conceal some kind of evidence) wolfed the jelly donut and the Coke he’d brought for Case, everything went dark. There was Helen and he couldn’t even bring himself to speak to her.

  She’d acted so focused on her task, as if she were terrified to look past the ink ribbon on her typewriter. She had seen him; he felt sure of it. They had seen each other.

  And he continued to peer into that office on the fourth floor during the subsequent trips he had made to the Peabody. Though he concealed himself behind a column, he was certain that she saw him, sure that she was participating in the same elaborate charade. He told himself he was going back to the Peabody to learn more about Charlie Case, although he’d learned very quickly that Case was hardly missing—he had simply gone to Hollywood to speak to producers about perhaps taking a more commercial direction with the film (and hadn’t thought to let Hugh know).

  But of course he’d really gone to see Helen. He was convinced she knew exactly when he was coming and that she even dressed up in her best clothes, wore her hair loose for him. There she was and there she continued to be: tall and blond, those delicate lips still delicate, and t
hat long nose still bisecting her face in always-surprising asymmetry. There she was behind her desk—long neck, long limbs—still Helen. After all this time and after all he knew or thought he knew, his physical response to her was pitifully unchanged.

  Over the next month, every Thursday afternoon, he was certain they spoke without speaking. He’d stand outside her office door and she’d pretend she didn’t see him. In his mind it was a tentative silent conversation—you look the same, so do you; you seem well, so do you. But as she pretended to type, he began to silently speak about how he’d only found out about her pregnancy through a family friend after they had graduated from their respective boarding schools (boarding school being a WASP euphemism for prison, they’d both agreed, laughing, out in the woods behind her school’s gymnasium, Fats Domino on the loudspeaker muffled in the distance, their breath and cigarette smoke mixing in the near-frigid air).

  In the quiet of the Peabody, Hugh silently spoke of that cold spring night when they’d finally talked, after circling each other for years. How their gloved hands had fumbled with cigarettes, how she’d taken him to the inside of a fat hollow tree, how they had urgently come to that tree again and again and nobody had caught them. How they had always kept their relationship a secret, without asking each other why. Right there in the Peabody, on what he remembered as his fifth visit, Hugh silently said (and, he was sure, Helen silently agreed) that they had kept it secret to ensure it remained untainted by the exclusive society from which they were both inadvertently descended. They’d kept their alliance secret to protect it from all the loathsome rules and expectations that had so plagued the two of them before they’d found each other. They were two tall kids who’d always liked hiding anyhow, but now they had each other. They had their tree.