A Dual Inheritance

by Joanna Hershon

  In silence, as Helen sat behind a typewriter, Hugh spoke of how the Shipley family friend had been gossiping at the very dining room table where Hugh had grown up learning about soup spoons and what it meant to be a traitor to one’s class and how to properly debone a fish. Hugh had not—surprise—been paying attention to the luncheon conversation, when suddenly, incredibly, he heard the name Helen Ordway: Helen Ordway whom he loved and who had not returned a letter or telephone call since the last night they’d spent together, the night of the Last Hurrah, which they had each taken special precaution to ensure they could not attend. While their classmates donned tulle and tuxedos, they’d reiterated their elaborate excuses to the only ones left in their respective dorms that night. Hugh had not gone on the bus with the rest of the boys from his school but had instead waited until they’d all gone, and he’d hired a taxi to take him to the very same campus, only when he arrived he’d bypassed the festive decorations and golden light and made his way through the graveyard and toward their hollow tree.

  The gossiping family friend asked Hugh’s father if he’d heard about a recent situation with Helen Ordway—as in the daughter of Guy and Virginia Ordway—as in can-you-imagine-if-the-papers-got-a-hold-of-that-story Ordways—and though Harvard-bound Hugh had nearly retched as this family friend carried on about no one knowing who the father was, or who had done this to poor Helen (who’d always seemed a touch off somehow, no?), and how Helen Ordway had refused to say—even after she was shipped away to heaven only knew where for the summer—Hugh had not retched, but he had left the table, and though he’d lacked the energy to punch a hole in the wall (what he imagined to be the proper response to such information), he began what became (at least to his father) a comical extended crying jag, which would last on and off well into the fall.

  Hugh told Helen in his mind and in that silence how he had cried in a house where men did not cry, where centuries passed and deaths abounded but men still shed no tears. Hugh told her how he’d written her letters not only that summer but also well into the fall of his freshman year, how he had telephoned her family and written so many letters, never receiving a single response. He asked her, within this silence—their silence—how she could be so cruel and if he was right to have finally begun to doubt the one thing—the one person—he’d known to be true.

  He recalled their final night and how she’d still dressed up as if she was going to the Last Hurrah, even though it was just the two of them, outside by the tree as usual. When he’d seen her coming toward him across the damp grass—teal silk, pale skin, dark sky—he remembered feeling badly that he hadn’t worn a tuxedo after all, that he should have done it for her. But as she came closer, removing her silver heels that had been sticking more deeply into the ground with each progressive step, it was clear she didn’t give a fig what he was wearing. She kissed him and grabbed a cigarette from the pocket of his scratchy flannel shirt. “You look like Grace Kelly,” he said.

  “I do not. Have you been waiting long?”

  “You look like a taller and slightly more peculiar Grace Kelly. It’s like you’re Grace Kelly’s more distinctive sister—you know, the one that Grace doesn’t want hanging around, because she makes Grace seem ordinary. That’s you. You make Grace Kelly seem ordinary.”

  She did a twirl, showing off her dress, her legs. She didn’t care for formal occasions or any of the debutante balls (including her own) to which they’d each been invited that year, but outside those contexts she enjoyed dressing up, and this, too, he loved about her. But in the months and years that followed, he’d wondered—and he wondered it in silence at the Peabody—if that night she’d already decided that it would be their last time and if she might not have been simply showing off.

  Without being able to converse with Case and view his footage and without any actual conversation with Helen, Hugh became increasingly aware that he had to break the silence. Charlie Case was off to a film festival in Italy—Hugh had seen it in the Crimson. He’d tried and failed to not take it personally that Case had shared exactly none of his good news with him, and his recent ability to not only function but also excel had fallen away once again. He’d tried to get back on track several times—once being the weekend after he’d met Ed Cantowitz, when he’d spent his days not only studying but also leaving his room for appropriate amounts of fresh air, if only because Ed kept coming by and, with that more than slightly foolish but also contagious restless energy, succeeded in dragging him out of doors—but once again he was flailing.

  Thanksgiving had been a recent disaster, one in which his brothers and their wives and children had opted to go to Bimini and both he and his father had drunk like they were in competition to reach oblivion, which resulted in insults lobbed back and forth between them, and by the time Aunt May and Uncle Peter had shown them the door, it was clear that neither father nor son had behaved acceptably. It all amounted to this: The longer he waited to speak to Helen, the worse off he became. He never wondered why she hadn’t broken the silence; he assumed it was up to him. With hindsight he would wonder about this and would see it as the embodiment of his callow youth, but now there was no hindsight.

  Now it was almost Christmas. He held a C- paper in his hands after retrieving it from his favorite professor. Now it was an unseasonably warm December day, when every student in his path seemed frantic with good cheer, and below the C- in watery black ink was: You can do better than this. Perhaps because his own father’s style of censure was more along the lines of sarcastic rage, nothing had the power to undo Hugh more effectively than gracious condemnation. His favorite professor was a gentleman, brilliant and evenhanded, and Hugh couldn’t feel more like an ass for handing in such a substandard (drunk) paper. He carried the C- as he paced the halls of the Peabody, only to find her right where he’d left her last week, when it had been raining and her hair was lank and the air humid and he’d watched her remove a lavender sweater and straighten out a white blouse with a rounded collar, which had reminded him of all of those evenings by the fat hollow tree and how—afterward—she had always pulled her skirts and blouses into place with quick, near-violent tugs.

  And now there she was at a desk, the last place he’d ever thought to picture her. There were her long and bony fingers, blessedly naked of rings, the telephone chatter he strained to hear, the evidently poor typing skills and two small apples on her desk, half eaten.

  And maybe it was because Cantowitz would not let up about his distractedness (Wake up! Ed would say, Come back!, clapping his hands in front of Hugh’s face, midway through conversations), or perhaps it was because the previous Friday, after taking a very beautiful girl out on what had seemed like a perfectly fine evening, she’d told him that one day he’d regret his rude behavior, but this time when he saw Helen, he approached her.

  “Care to take a break?” he said.

  He didn’t know what he’d expected. He hadn’t thought that far ahead. But when she called out, “Oh dear God,” he knew it hadn’t been that.

  “Sorry,” he said reflexively. He thought his heart might actually give out right then, before he was able to say a goddamn thing.

  She looked at him as if she not only couldn’t believe her eyes but didn’t particularly like what she saw.

  “What?” he said. “What is it?”

  She leaned back in her chair and didn’t blink.

  “It’s nice to see you” came out of his mouth as if he were a parrot, albeit one who’d been raised in well-bred captivity. To make things worse, he added, “How’s your family?”

  “My family?” she asked.

  There were three other women working in the room, all obviously watching, though none of them had given up the pretense of working, so the room looked like an even worse version of one of those Broadway musicals his late mother had apparently enjoyed so much and his childless, dear aunt May had insisted on taking him to when he was an ungrateful boy prone to saying things like, “Why don’t they just say what they want to sa
y instead of singing a whole song about it first?” She’d taken him to the 21 Club for a hamburger and “shown him off” to the maître d’, who seemed like a nice man stuck with a shitty job and who always asked him if he liked baseball or football and, when Hugh replied, “Neither,” had laughed too loud.

  “Yes,” he said, “your family. How are they?”

  She abruptly threw the half-eaten apples into the wastepaper basket. “I could use a cigarette,” she said, and with an expressionless and perhaps slightly queenly nod to the others, she hurried Hugh out the door. “What are you doing here?” she asked, whispering, as they shuffled down the corridor like a couple of spies.

  “What do you think?” he said. “I’m a student here, Helen.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, of course.”

  “What did you think this whole time? Did you think I’d found you or something? That I’ve been coming on the train weekly from New Haven or—I don’t know—New Jersey?”

  “What whole time?”

  “The whole time we’ve been … communicating.”

  They burst out the door into a suddenly windy day. She pulled the cuffs of her sleeves down as low as they’d go. Her arms were always too long for any of her sweaters. He remembered that.

  “Um,” she said, and bit her lip.

  He handed her a cigarette. A bell rang far off in the distance, and he briefly wondered what time it was; he looked at the tiny white scar on her upper lip, the hollow at the base of her neck where a small ruby had once been suspended on a thin gold chain. That spot was now empty; it looked like the most naked flesh he’d ever seen, and the sight of it made him so dizzy with wanting that he thought he was going to grab her and he was afraid no matter how he tried otherwise that he would do it—whenever he did it, because he knew he would do it; he couldn’t not do it—too hard. He cupped her outstretched hand, protected her cigarette as if it were the last cigarette, as if nothing could be more precious to him than this particular cigarette as he struck at his lighter with his thumb. People passed; people talked. His mouth went dry. As the flame struggled and ultimately singed the tobacco and paper, he kept his hand in place. It could not have felt more intimate if he had made his way under her gray skirt, if he had waged war with her merry widow, pulled her panties aside, and slid his finger right up inside of her.

  After she exhaled, after she removed a stray bit of tobacco from her lower lip, she said, “How do you mean we’ve been communicating?”

  “I’ve come here every week is what I mean. You’ve been staring right back at me.”

  “I have not.”

  “Helen—”

  “I have not been staring at you. This is the first time I’ve seen you in a very very very very long time. Hugh.”

  He realized he hadn’t lit a cigarette for himself yet, and the relief a new cigarette afforded him was considerable. “Ha,” he said, lighting up.

  “Ha.”

  She looked up at him and she said, “I haven’t seen you.”

  He nodded, and then he nodded harder until she said, “Okay?”

  What could he do? He nodded again. He went over it in his mind a few times, how she had been so suspiciously focused on her work, how, when she removed her lavender sweater, it had seemed practiced, as if she’d been doing it just for him. He supposed it was possible he’d been standing far enough to the side of the door.

  That he might have, in fact, done an excellent job of hiding.

  He looked up at a faraway airplane flying in and out of clouds and wondered where it was going. “Do you ever feel relieved when the sun isn’t out?”

  “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.”