A Dual Inheritance

by Joanna Hershon

  Hugh said, “Listen, you’re upset. I understand it’s emotional.”

  “I’m not emotional,” said Ed. “Listen, you know what? We don’t have to agree.” He picked up a toothpick, turned it over in his hands.

  “We never have,” said Hugh. He’d smiled. He’d tried to catch his friend’s eye, but Ed was looking at the maître d’, signaling for the check.

  Ed shrugged. “I just think, y’know, why force it?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  The maître d’ brought the check, and Ed slapped down his credit card.

  “Let me,” said Hugh. “You paid last time.”

  But Ed shook his head.

  Hugh nodded. “I hope we can chalk this up to another chapter of a lifelong argument.”

  “Look,” Ed had said, squinting out the window at the streets of Manhattan, where he so obviously belonged now. “We’re old friends,” he’d said, still not looking at Hugh. “And old friends?” He shook his head. “They usually grow apart.”

  Now he tried not to wake his wife as he moved the cloud of netting aside and climbed into bed. He tried not to shift, not to breathe. He could get a few hours’ sleep if he didn’t wake her. If he did wake her, they might get to talking, and when they talked at this late hour, neither one could go back to sleep. Sometimes it was nice—she’d make coffee with hot milk, maybe they’d fool around—and sometimes it was not. Sometimes she decided they needed to figure out their future straightaway in that one sleepless moment: when could they move, if maybe Hugh should go back to school, if maybe she could give in and have a baby after all, even if they stayed right where they were.

  “That you?” she murmured.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  Recently Helen had been talking in her sleep, and he often tried to engage her in conversation. Sometimes he told her about these nocturnal exchanges and always portrayed a funny scene, but, in fact, his motives were not as lighthearted as he described; he knew what he was really doing was trying to catch her in the middle of something—he wasn’t sure what, but in the grip of a secret life is what he’d begun to suspect.

  “Maybe it’s me,” he said, smoothing the blankets on top of her hip. “And maybe it isn’t.” He heard her quietly snoring again and was strangely disappointed.

  When he thought of Ed these days, as he was doing just then, it was usually because he craved his opinions, the very opinions against which he’d always fought. He knew he was thinking of Ed because of what he would say if he could see him now, in bed with Helen, after coming from Aisha. Leaving aside the impatience, the arrogance, and the aggressiveness—Ed was the most loyal guy he’d ever met. That Ed had essentially dumped him as a friend somehow didn’t disrupt this idea. Hugh still saw Ed as being loyal to his own beliefs, loyal to his feelings of disconnection, to the idea of friendship as being something true, something you feel or you don’t.

  When he’d told Helen about that awful lunch in New York, she’d seemed oddly relieved, as if she’d secretly been thinking that Hugh’s friendship with Ed had been doomed from the start. They’d even fought about it; when Hugh accused her of never having liked Ed, of even looking down on him, she’d grown furious—she’d even cried. Hugh ended up apologizing; they’d hardly spoken of Ed again.

  But now he pictured the Cantowitz arguing style of sitting up straighter and straighter, of posture improved by ire, and for some reason—at this late hour, at this very moment—picturing this friend who had written him off over a stupid political argument that hadn’t even been an argument strangely made him feel—if not exactly better—somehow more authentic. He’d valued the obvious differences between Ed and him and still frankly revered the idea that people could, in fact, come from wildly different worlds, completely disagree, and still remain true friends. The funny thing was that he knew this guiding principle separately rankled both Ed and Helen. He knew they each pegged him as a bit phony, too cerebral or worse.

  “Where were you?” Helen asked suddenly, and Hugh could tell that she was no longer sleeping.

  “The clinic,” he said, pulling her close.

  “Mmm,” she said, yawning. “What time is it?”

  “Around five.”

  “Hugh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Someone spit on me today.”

  “Someone spat at you?”

  “A woman. I didn’t have any money on me. I went into my purse to give her something, and when I couldn’t come up with something, she spit at my feet.”

  “Helen—”

  “I was angry, Hugh. I didn’t recognize myself. I wanted to spit back.”

  “Oh, Helen,” he said. “Oh, no.”

  A mosquito dove into his ear and—defeating all previous attempts at quiet—Hugh slapped furiously before bounding out of bed for the badminton racket, purchased for this specific purpose. From China, my friend, the Hindu had said. Superior choice for killing mozzies.

  “It’s dead,” said Hugh. “I got him.”

  “I hate it here,” she said. “I really do.” She put her ankle over his. “You’re the only person I know.”

  Chapter Nine

  New York City, 1970

  Armed with two summers at Ordway Keller and an MBA from Harvard Business school, Ed (with no small amount of fear and exhilaration) turned down a more permanent offer from Guy Ordway himself, and—with the conviction that too much history haunted both Ordway Keller’s stodgy protocols and his own unpleasant memories—took up with three other upstarts, three other men equally lacking in heritage but who’d convinced him to join a brand-new securities firm; they had scraped together enough money (primarily from fathers-in-law) to pay for a seat on the exchange.

  Hy Bechstein was incontrovertibly fat and had paranoid fits, but his knowledge of companies was exhaustive. Ed couldn’t figure out how he’d acquired so much information, and, if Hy had any net worth whatsoever (he didn’t; they’d each disclosed their bank statements at the start), Ed would have assumed he’d hired a pack of spies. It was as if he personally went to every targeted factory and boardroom daily; he had a nose for opportunity. It had been Hy’s idea to buy the black-and-white marble notebook from the office supply near the A train and have each partner record his business at the end of the trading day. When Steve Osheroff (handsome, from Larchmont, nothing exceptional upstairs) had laughed wryly at this idea (Steve was the only one among them who could actually pull off wry), Hy stood his ground with such conviction and such an impassioned speech about fairness that Ed and Marty Rabb (stutterer, number cruncher) were awed into rare silence.

  There was a frenetic quality to each day in their Broad Street office, which suited Ed, an urgency that put him at ease. The days were so intense that he’d even given up coffee for two years now, as he’d often drunk untold amounts and had become so jittery by the end of the day that once he got into a screaming fight on the subway with a putz who refused a pregnant woman a seat. In their office, even the details of lunch were treated with serious consideration, and there was an open competition over who could a) buy it cheaper (or better—bring it from home), b) get it over faster and waste less time on eating, or c) book more lunches out with potential clients and get better tables at top restaurants—La Grenouille, Chambord, 21. Who won lunch? was decided with an afternoon Cert. Marty was addicted to them, went through rolls at a time, and each day at four o’clock he peeled one individually out of its gold-wrapped tube and placed it on the winner’s desk. Each day’s lunch had to produce a winner; failure to reach consensus was not tolerated.

  “When articles are written about Cantowitz, Bechstein, Osheroff, and Rabb,” said Steve, while rolling a Cert around in his mouth, “they’ll talk about the importance of healthy competition.”

  “When books are written,” said Ed, “because you’d better believe they will be, they’ll just say we were four Jews obsessed with money and food.”

  “That’s fine by me,” said Hy.

  “M-m-me, too,” said Ma
rty.

  Ever loyal to his first great idea, Ed became the resident expert in following all things automotive, and his first substantial record in the black-and-white marble ledger was getting the Boston Mutual Funds to invest in auto-aftermarket securities. He’d convinced them with his well-honed used-car theory and with his hard-earned statistics about automotive parts. Ed convinced them that these many manufacturers were compelling—even necessary—securities investments. There were, in fact, more than 150 million cars on the road these days.

  I don’t see that number dwindling anytime soon, Ed had said, leaning back in his chair, after at least a full hour of leaning forward. Do you?

  He spent much of his day organizing a travel schedule for himself, as he was more or less constantly visiting dealerships and factories, and this suited him fine; he liked traveling. Having been particularly affected by Albert Finney’s roadside blonde in Two for the Road, he liked the fantasy of meeting women in transit (a fantasy that had, sadly, remained just that). Also, he liked having excuses to indulge his cravings for Ring Dings and Wise potato chips each time he stopped for gas. He wasn’t crazy about being at home. His apartment was a boxy one-bedroom far east on 74th Street, with more or less zero personal touches besides a framed Mondrian poster from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts gift shop, acquired during his first year in business school. He’d taken a date to the exhibition and—in a fit of excitement about both Mondrian and the date—bought the poster with every intention of giving it to her, but the relationship had fizzled by the time he’d picked it up at the framer’s.

  He was the only bachelor in the firm. The others all had wives and children and mortgages, while Ed’s only responsibility was to look in on his father now and then, to make sure he was still washing, eating, breathing. He followed enough companies in or near Boston that he could usually check in on him during one of these trips, and it never failed to amaze him how much the neighborhood had transformed. Ed could always tell when the high school was about to let out for the day, as the vendors along Blue Hill Avenue would suddenly rush to take their goods from the sidewalk stalls, head inside, and lower their metal grates. Once or twice Ed saw what happened if they didn’t take this precaution: overturned fruit carts, clothing thrown into the street. The avenue belonged to these furious kids now, and to be an old Jewish man living in Dorchester these days was to fully embrace one’s obstinacy. To hear his father (boastfully) tell it, groups of black youths, with knives in their pockets, dared him only to look at them wrong.

  But as much as his father was apparently hated, he had also (and only God knew how) managed to ingratiate himself to Mrs. Darrence, the black woman whom Ed employed to clean his father’s apartment. It wasn’t uncommon for Ed to stop by on a weekday afternoon and find his father and Mrs. Darrence watching a game show on television. Once, Ed found Mrs. Darrence’s kid there, too, jabbing his adolescent fist toward the TV in what had to have been the most informal boxing instruction Ed had ever seen. His father harshly criticized the boy over the noise of the game show, but neither Mrs. Darrence nor the boy seemed offended. Ed became accustomed to his father’s maid looking him over with undisguised disapproval, sucking in on her teeth if Ed—during one of his many stabs at conversation—raised his own voice to his own father in his own childhood home.

  Ed of course wondered if Mrs. Darrence was getting more money from his father or if his father might even be involved with her. Ed sometimes walked into a room of angrily raised voices, but the content always proved to be the unforgivable shortcomings of others. Often others they’d seen at the supermarket. Or on the television. Ed had never heard such shouting. Despite the fact that her paycheck came from Ed, Mrs. Darrence did not hide her belief that Ed was an ungrateful ass.

  He liked bringing people together and he realized he was good at it, focusing more and more on deal-making, beginning with his connections from those summers at Ordway Keller and calling them up—What are you working on?—sticking his nose in a few western corporations, and eventually investing in companies whose need for capital was critical. He got a thrill from being the touchstone for so many moving targets; sometimes he imagined the meetings were movie shoots and he was the director. Not that he wasn’t preoccupied by the numbers but, just as seriously, he considered the chemistry of the players: who was insecure, who was bombastic, who needed Ed’s lighter touch to set the deal in motion and bring the story to life.

  Since deal-making sometimes involved dinners with wives and since Ed didn’t have a wife or steady girlfriend, he often brought the best-looking date he could find to accompany him during these evenings, earning him what seemed to be a combination of some resentment and more than a little respect. Usually it was right before dessert that the wife to his right or left leaned in and charmingly inquired why he wasn’t married. Usually the wife in question was flirting or he told himself she was; either way, this question always made him feel as if he was a catch and that the state of his bachelorhood was troubling to someone other than himself—not that he would ever admit that this aspect of his life wasn’t exactly by design.

  Since his first summer in New York, when Helen Ordway stripped him of every shred of confidence in his impulses and his judgment, Ed took out girl after girl, but never for long enough to find out what any of them was really like. He came to see his subsequent parade of dates like the reams of paper that covered his desk on any given day, even Saturdays, even Sundays, now that the nation, too, was having a fit of insecurity and stocks were truly sliding. Ed was coming to see that girls were like numbers, and numbers didn’t lie, but they also never represented the whole picture. It was the numbers he pursued harder now, taking the time to visit the companies, going past the statistics to meet the people behind them, investigating the complexities of what made a company undervalued or overvalued, and never taking any one person’s word. But with girls he stayed on the surface, hardly putting in the time. By the time one girl was reapplying lipstick beside him in a banquette, he was looking in her compact to see who might be reflected from one table over. Onward and upward, Hy liked to say. Boy, do you have the life.

  But he knew that Hy didn’t mean it. Ed knew that Hy’s idea of a great time was to stop at the nursery off the parkway and buy plants for his half-acre backyard in White Plains, where his beloved wife, Franny, let his two chubby girls draw with crayons on the walls. “I tell her—go on and let them. They’ll be artistic!” said Hy. “Because we won’t live in this house forever, am I right? I tell them that soon enough we’ll buy another house. And before we leave? We’ll repaint!”

  Though lately even Hy’s confidence was wearing thin. Wall Street was suffering, firms were reporting losses due to paperwork confusion, and Cantowitz, Bechstein, Osheroff, and Rabb (though doing respectably) were not exempt from danger, as they were dependent on a clearinghouse to process their paperwork and their clearinghouse wasn’t able to keep up with their needs. Apparently their little firm represented a disproportionate amount of business for their overloaded clearing broker, and Ed took it upon himself to meet with the head of the company, an old blowhard named McKay, whom he despised on sight and who treated Ed—over the course of a tense dinner—as if CBOR’s huge volume of activity was somehow suspicious, too aggressive, as if their very rapid rise was in itself an affront. And when Ed had the nerve to explain that the clearinghouse was stuck in the past and to say, One day you will thank me for saying this: Invest NOW in the technology you so sorely need to keep up with the present, and you will own the future, McKay asked for the check, nearly grabbing the waiter’s arm, he was in such a big hurry to leave. So we need our paperwork processed regularly, explained Ed. Is this really too much to ask?

  When, by the following month, their clearinghouse dumped them as clients, and when Ed’s personality was cited as the deciding factor, he spent one brutal and completely sleepless night in the office (leaving only to eat an enormous diner breakfast at six A.M., watching the street come to life beyond the smudged wind
ow) and greeted Hy, Steve, and Marty as they came through the door, demanding they hear him out before making any calls.

  “We can have our own processing facilities,” he blurted out. “We can do it in-house and save boatloads.”

  “W-w-where,” demanded Marty.

  “I ran the numbers. I’ve been over it all night. This is a good thing.”

  “A good thing,” repeated Steve. “Pardon me, but a good thing, my ass. And you’re ignoring Marty’s excellent question,” said Steve. “Where, Ed? Where indeed?”

  “We’ll need a bigger office,” Ed said, as if it were perfectly obvious. “You didn’t think we’d stay here forever, did you?”

  “I didn’t think we’d be dumped by our clearinghouse due to your personality. Did you?”

  “Come on,” said Ed, “the clearinghouses are hopeless. You gotta trust me.”

  Hy cleared his throat. Up until that moment, he’d been scarily silent. “We’ll bring in an expert,” he finally said. “We’ll double our daily business. Say goodbye to your home lives. Marty will be in charge.”

  “Thank you,” said Ed. “Thank you, Hy.”

  “The justice department is raising questions about the whole … overarching … fixed-rate fucking system,” said Hy. “The SEC will soon be up our ass anyway, we’re already under attack, and now this?” He loosened his tie. “I’m not speaking to you unless I have to.”

  Ed was watching coverage of protests in D.C. when the phone rang one evening, and soon after answering he knew that the fever pitch of the teeming crowds plus the phone’s somehow particularly urgent ring would always be sealed in his memory. The governor of Ohio said something equating the protesting students with brown shirts and communists and vigilantes, and the networks were playing it again and again, and when Ed finally picked up—“Hello?”—there was Guy Ordway’s voice, deep and immediately recognizable, even though Ed hadn’t—up until that day—ever heard it over the telephone. His first awful thought was that something had happened to Helen. “Sir?” he asked foolishly. “Is everything all right?”