A Dual Inheritance

by Joanna Hershon

  “Yes,” said Jill. “Definitely.” Jill’s laugh was kind of loopy, and Ed had no trouble imagining her as an adored older sister, an excellent audience from the start.

  “Ed,” Mark said, clapping Ed on the back, “you’d better hope that chicken isn’t underdone, man.”

  “That was one time!” said Jill. “You’re so ungrateful,” she said, “and you smell, Mark, you really do.”

  She walked him to the door, where there was some mumbling and giggling before Mark was gone, and—nearly simultaneously—the record finished and Jim Morrison blessedly stopped singing. Ed closed his eyes, relishing the silence. When he opened them, Jill was standing in the doorway. “Long day?” she asked.

  He sat up straighter. “Is anyone else coming? I hope not. You are very distracting in that apron.”

  She smiled graciously. She was obviously used to compliments, had learned long ago how to properly accept them. “Mark seems like a hippie, but he’s only into free love for himself. He insisted on checking you out. I apologize if it was obvious.”

  “How did I do?”

  “Shit,” she said, “I forgot to set the timer. How long do you think you’ve been here?”

  “About an hour and a half,” he said.

  “You sure?”

  “Ninety-five percent.”

  “Good enough for me. Let me set it now and then I can put the rice on.”

  He followed Jill into the kitchen and watched her baste a chicken, set a timer, measure out cups of water, rice. Her movements were intermittently languid and erratic. Salt was overpoured. A pot’s lid went clattering to the floor. She struggled with a corkscrew and, when finally victorious, spilled some of the newly opened wine. Ed noticed, too, the silver art deco containers for coffee and sugar, dahlias overflowing from a bright-green vase. There were three framed black-and-white photographs on the wall next to the stove: a bridge Ed didn’t recognize, a set of train tracks, and something that looked like undulating sand, shot up close. The blacks of the images were so deeply black, and the whites had so many subtle changes, they almost looked iridescent. “Those are something,” Ed said. “Do they have a story?”

  “Oh, I guess so. I mean, I took them. The bridge is in Prague, which I really loved. The train tracks are in Germany, which—for obvious reasons—I did not love, but I couldn’t stop taking pictures of those tracks; I took way too many. Then I had to print all the negatives, and now I can’t bring myself to throw any of those prints away, no matter how lousy the shot.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “What does?”

  “That you want to hold on to them. Why not hold on?”

  “Well, first of all, there’s something obviously morbid about them, and second, they take up space.”

  “People keep things for far less valid reasons.”

  “Like what? What do you hold on to?”

  “Me?” He thought about the pieces of Helen’s note, collected, taped together, and sealed in a manila envelope three times their size. He thought of the yellowing receipts and cocktail napkins and books and books of matches; he thought of how the one photo he had of her was also of Hugh and him. “Oh, I don’t know. I’m just talking.”

  “You’re good at talking,” she said, “aren’t you?”

  He looked at Jill and tried to tell whether or not she was making fun of him. Her face was a beautiful blank. Her cheeks boasted nearly invisible fine white fuzz; he’d identified this—yet another of her more lovely and original aspects—when, bathed in the last of the setting sun, she’d opened the first bottle of Bordeaux. “I can shut up when I need to.”

  “I know,” she said softly. She refilled their wineglasses. And even though there was more work to be done, more basting and stirring near the hot stove, she took off her apron. She was wearing a silky navy dress with a splashy print. One strap fell off her shoulder; she let it stay there.

  He felt a tightening in his chest, but it wasn’t panic, not exactly. It was helplessness. He held himself back from her and, for a moment, resented that he had to.

  “Tell me about the last photograph.”

  “Oh, it’s just fabric from one of my dresses. I’m not sure why I took that one, but it’s my favorite.”

  “Mine, too.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded. “I thought maybe it was sand, that you’d taken it somewhere in the desert. These are really very good; ever think of being a professional photographer?”

  “Nope,” she said, without hesitation.

  “Well,” he said, smiling—because he appreciated her self-knowledge, her unabashed confidence—“anyway, they’re very good.”

  “Thank you.”

  “When did you do all the traveling?”

  “After I graduated from high school. My grandparents took me. It was their gift. Jeremy had gone with them two years before I did.”

  “How terrific.”

  “I know,” said Jill. “I know. I always felt so bad that Mark never had his chance to go. I even go as far as to think maybe he’d be different.… I don’t know; they were both sick by the time Mark graduated. Anyway, it was wonderful. They spoiled me.”

  Ed shook his head. “You don’t seem spoiled.”

  “I don’t?”

  “No. You seem … impressive.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Even your apartment. This is a real home,” he said.

  “As opposed to a holding pen?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I do. Of course I do.”

  She sat down in one of the rattan chairs, looking briefly disoriented.

  “Jill?”

  “It was my grandparents’ place until they died. One after the other, my grandmother first. I was in my last year at Vassar, and before my grandfather died, I promised him I’d keep this place up beautifully, that even while I was in law school, I’d keep it just so. And he told me no—don’t worry about keeping it like anything. Just make it yours.”

  “I can’t imagine,” Ed said, and what he was thinking was how he couldn’t imagine having so much so early on—not only the European tour and charming inherited apartment but also having such kindness—from anyone aside from his mother. “I can’t imagine how much you must miss him.”

  “I do,” she said, rising to choose a wooden spoon from a drawer full of only wooden spoons. “Anyhow, I hate how most girls think of their homes as holding pens until married life. Even girls with their own money”—she paused to taste a simmering sauce—“like me.”

  They stood in the kitchen and Jill held his gaze, waiting—he supposed—to see what he’d say in reaction to her candor. He took her hand and held it, listening to the stove fan and faint sound of traffic. “No one’s like you,” he said, suddenly serious, even somber.

  “Aw,” she said, “you’re so sweet.”

  “Sweet?”

  “Sweet.”

  “You sound like you’re talking to a puppy or a kid.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “It’s not. I’m not ridiculous.”

  “I never said you—”

  “You are impressive. I am crazy about you. You are seriously goddamn impressive to me. Do you hear me?”

  “I hear you, but come on,” she insisted, “you said something sweet, did you not?”

  He swallowed his urge to continue this. He told himself to let it go.

  It was hot in this kitchen, he’d been on display for the deadbeat brother, and Jill hadn’t even reassured him of the kid’s approval. Why should he have been on display like that? The two of them chattering at the front door, so obviously about him?

  “Why do you like me?” he asked. Suicide.

  But, somehow, it wasn’t. She didn’t look uncomfortable. Instead, she put her arms around his neck as if they were about to start dancing or—it did occur to him—boxing. They were exactly the same height.

  “I’m not sure,” she said, looking at him dead-on. “Maybe it’s your appetite.”


  He held himself back from questioning this or from asking her for more. They were close enough that for one near painfully fine moment he could feel her long lashes brush against his cheek. When she kissed him and he realized that her initiative surprised him, he felt slightly stung at the realization and so continued holding back, until he realized that she was being—for the first time all week—utterly straightforward.

  “Oh,” he relented. “My God.” Then he pulled her to him, hard.

  Four months later he married Jill Solomon at her parents’ club in Scarsdale. He insisted on marrying her as soon as possible, and she was charmed by his insistence. She also had no interest in fighting her mother for a year over wedding plans. Ed maintained that any friend who showed up clad in a tux would automatically be made a groomsman, but there were no surprises. Ira Gersten made noise about flying in from Chicago, but evidently there was a Cubs game that needed his analysis; new pitcher, he’d solemnly explained. Ed’s groomsmen were Bechstein, Osheroff, and Rabb—the same hardworking and irritating men with whom he spent his days and nights. Plus Mark Solomon. Ed had asked Jill’s brother, who’d cleaned up for the event and, standing next to poor Marty Rabb, he looked like Peter Fonda at the Oscars.

  Neither Connie Graff nor Jill’s brother Jeremy was in attendance.

  And Ed wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but, even though they hadn’t been invited, and even though the last he’d heard they were living in Bongo Bongo or wherever Hugh could play out his own do-gooder story and Helen could stay remote, wherever they could rebel against their class but have each other as a reminder of that class, he still found himself surprised and even briefly miserable when he looked beside him before saying his vows and he didn’t see Hugh Shipley, who—Ed didn’t care how many years he lived in the bush—would always look at ease in formal attire.

  His father sat in the front row, grousing about something—the rabbi? The room’s temperature? The first thing he said when Ed and Jill collected him at Penn Station was, “What makes you so lucky?” When Ed smiled and tried to hug him, he started coughing and complaining about New York City filth. Over the course of the next two days he’d gone on to complain about Ed’s future in-laws, how they were snobs (which they were), and generally whatever unpleasant thoughts happened to rise to the top of his forever-mysterious consciousness.

  As Ed stood now before Jill, as he took in her lace veil and long eyelashes, he had flashes of her miraculous body shrugging out of a wet one-piece bathing suit, a month prior, in Barbados (he’d surprised her with a weekend getaway), and how she’d let that wet suit fall to the floor. His mind rested on her tan narrow feet with their red-painted toenails and how those feet cradled his head as her eyes closed, as she lifted her hips up and up below him. As he half-listened to Jill’s brother Mark reading an unfamiliar poem about fire, as the rabbi chanted blessings in Hebrew before talking at some length about the meaning of home, he also tried not to think about how much he wished his mother were here, not in addition to but instead of his father.

  But then the rabbi pronounced them married and he kissed Jill Cantowitz. His bride. He smashed the wineglass to bits and found himself, finally, smiling.

  They danced their first dance. “Have you ever really listened to this song?” asked Jill.

  “Of course,” said Ed, kissing her.

  “The lyrics are actually a little creepy. Someone to watch over me? By the way,” said Jill, in his ear, “I hope you’re grateful I took your name.”

  Ed put pressure on her back, just as he’d been taught to years ago by a confident Dorchester girl whose name now sadly escaped him. “I am,” he said, “tremendously.”

  That December, during the heaviest snowstorm of the year, Jill went into labor, and by the time their daughter was measured and weighed, the sky was pale gray and eerily calm. She was a big baby, with a shock of black hair and round dark-blue eyes. When Ed held her for the first time, he thought he might faint from terror, but instead he told Jill how happy he was. “I want another one soon,” he whispered. “Don’t you?”

  “Very funny,” she said.

  “I’m wasn’t being funny.”

  “Shh,” she said, marveling over his shoulder and staring at their daughter. “Isn’t she pretty?” Jill was holding a glass of champagne. She had given birth not two hours before and yet she looked impossibly the same as before she’d been pregnant; not an ounce of extra softness remained. Her hair was pulled back with a wide white headband; she’d hastily applied some lipstick and powder for pictures, and the effect was oddly theatrical, as if she might be an unhinged dance teacher.

  “So pretty,” he said. “She looks like you.”

  “I don’t know about that. I see a bit of Cantowitz already. But she also kind of looks like a papoose. Did you call your father?” she asked Ed, and Ed said no, but he would in a minute.

  This conversation came and went for hours, until finally he walked down the hall to the pay phone.

  “Pop,” Ed said, “it’s a girl.”

  As Murray Cantowitz wept through various attempts at language, Ed fed the phone more quarters. Finally his father coughed into his voice, the one that Ed knew and expected. “You name her for your mother?”

  “Middle name,” Ed managed. He was unprepared enough for the strength of his own feelings, but for his father’s?

  “Not good enough,” his father said.

  As he smoked a cigar outside New York Hospital with Hy, Ed couldn’t stop thinking of Jill in pain. She’d refused the drugs, maintaining she could do without them. She yelled: Please stop fucking asking me if I want the fucking drugs. And when he stopped asking? You motherfucker, she’d screamed and screamed. You have no idea. She kept saying that: You have no idea. She also looked gorgeous. He knew he was supposed to say that no matter what, but he was so awed by her strength and … and … grandeur as she pushed, and her breasts were huge and her dark eyes were glittery and he remembered what a physical force she could be, before she’d stopped being remotely in the mood to sleep with him, which had happened fairly soon after conceiving.

  You motherfucker.

  Ed knew it was childbirth and that—God bless—it was certainly not unusual for her to swear like a sailor, but he also knew—even if it was just for that moment—she’d looked at him and she’d meant it.

  “Congratulations,” said Hy. Bastard had tears in his eyes.

  Ed wanted to talk about his daughter’s perfect eyebrows, how she had a tiny auburn patch in her shiny black hair, how her hands were the most elegant he’d ever seen, complete with long pink nails.

  He wanted to say her name: Rebecca Dorota Cantowitz.

  He wanted to ask Hy how to be a father, because all he could think, all he’d been able to think for months now, was: Don’t fuck up, don’t fuck up, don’t fuck up.

  What Ed talked about was the weather. What a goddamn glorious day. Have you ever seen a storm like that. Would you look at that pearl of a sky.

  Chapter Eleven

  Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 1982

  The house in Haiti never felt like theirs. Her father called it excessive; her mother called it beautiful. Her parents drank before dinner.

  Look at this veranda, said her mother. Look at this shade of yellow.

  Helen, was what her father replied. As if to say, Stop.

  Oh, come on, her mother said teasingly, it’s not as if it isn’t falling apart. You can always take comfort in that.

  It’s just a bit much, her father concluded, with a shake of his head.

  When else will I get to live in a gingerbread house perched on top of a hill?

  You come from a house like this, her father said.

  Not like this, her mother said.

  Yes, her father said, like this.

  As for Genevieve, she was almost eleven and she loved the pool. She loved the feeling of being underwater so long that her eyes stung and her fingers pruned, and Maude would bring her a cloth and press her eyes tight and h
old her so close, warming her up like a baby. She loved telling Maude to close her eyes and cracking an imaginary egg over her fuzzy cocoa hair. She loved the quiet that came with this daily afternoon treat: Genevieve and Maude and a fluffy white towel. She was so lucky, such a lucky girl. She couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t acutely aware of her own good fortune and when this knowledge didn’t feel—just a little bit—like a sinking stone.

  Here was the bad part about swimming: Their house and pool were on top of a hill, and past their house—deep in the pine forest—there was also a public water pump. Most days while Genevieve was having her swim—no matter how Maude and her mother tried to time it—a group of kids dressed in rags, really poor, a few her age and older, too, would walk up their hill, balancing buckets on heads, and they would rap at the iron gate with sticks. They would rap at the gate and call out—tifi! tifi!—which she knew meant girl; four boys, one girl, rapping and rapping until she had no choice but to come up for air. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part wasn’t that they looked angry—angry with her—and that they didn’t have shoes, or that she had the feeling she was doing something she shouldn’t be doing by swimming, by even breathing. No, the worst was seeing Maude yell at them. Ale! Ale! Maude shouted, and, when they wouldn’t go away, she rapped right back at them with the stick she always carried with her in case of tarantulas and rats. Sometimes she grazed their knuckles and Genevieve cried “Stop!” but Maude just ignored her and yelled until those kids ran off, and then Genevieve didn’t want to snuggle with Maude in the towel.

  And then one day Maude went to check on the bleaching sheets, and Genevieve was not to jump into the pool until Maude came back. She sat on the edge of the chaise longue, waiting with her towel in her one-piece yellow bathing suit that had come from Grandmother at Christmas. And though she knew her mother was within earshot, having lunch with Madame Richelieu on the veranda, and she knew that not only Maude but Arvede in the kitchen and William in the garden knew she was right there by the pool, she felt not only alone but invisible. As if her pale white skin had been, each day, growing paler and paler and leading up to this moment, right now, when she was no more than a ghost.