A Dual Inheritance

by Joanna Hershon

  She wanted to see everything. She thought if she could really look at it all and not turn away, if she was able to never flinch from the orphans and the crowds that mobbed them in the streets anywhere outside their home or the embassy or the hotel, then she might understand it somehow, and the severed goat head, the blood, the orphans, and the crowds—they would become a part of her, and maybe if they were a part of her, then she could somehow conquer the god that had created all of this misfortune. She imagined there had to be two gods. Because the other god had somehow—up until now—kept her not only safe but lucky. It’s not that she wasn’t grateful.

  But she knew that wasn’t how it worked. At least according to her father, there was no counting on God—her father had made that very clear when she’d made friends with some missionary kids in Dar es Salaam (Father Emile aside, he thought religion was a load of crap)—but, still: She couldn’t help wanting to believe. She wanted the suffering to be a part of her like blood, not separate like a view, like the view from this house—her house now—that overlooked the mountainside. The gates protected her, but they also did not. She was, as Maude often told her, a clever girl.

  “Mommy?” Genevieve called out, as the window banged. The room was pitch dark and her mother was gone.

  Mwen genyen match la.

  That’s what the boy said when she’d handed him the five gourdes. When she’d reached through the gate and he’d grabbed it. Mwen genyen. Match la. His eyes were bright and his fingers were filthy.

  I won the game.

  No, you didn’t, she wanted to say. Look at you.

  And now, as the wind rattled the broken window that she knew Arvede would end up fixing, she heard someone else’s voice; whose? Hers. It said: You can’t just pay them off. And also: You can’t just let them in.

  Chapter Twelve

  New York City, 1982–1983

  Ten years later, Ed, Hy, Steve, and Marty were still equal partners.

  The financial system was changing, and CBOR–Ordway Keller had to either be at the forefront of change or perish. End of story, thought Ed. The. End. The future was not about retail and the individual investor but about complex conglomerates. But for all of his meticulous research, for all of his powers of persuasion, none of his partners was entirely convinced. They were all wealthy men now, each of them argued. Why topple this improbably strong, once-scrappy boat? This boat that had managed to sail—without ever (more or less) hitting a squall—all without one official captain? They had remained an egalitarian firm, had maintained their open floor plan. Hy often told Ed that—although they’d more than made it through the grim years of the early 1970s—they should always limit financial risk and never put net worth on the line. Which, Ed argued, was at best too conservative and, more accurately, a total failure of imagination.

  When employees complained several times about not being able to follow Ed’s increasingly complicated and risky trading positions, Ed tried and finally failed to remain calm. You can’t follow my positions well enough to sell them to our clients? he yelled. Take a night class, okay? That isn’t my problem.

  Despite the warnings from his partners, despite their firm belief that what he was after was nearly always too risky and hopelessly complex, he continued to seek out the highest of all high-profile conglomerates, many of whom he knew from his earliest days while working for Guy Ordway and whom he’d carefully cultivated over the years. He began to sit down these top men, one by one, poised to underwrite a new venture. Through polite brunches in Greenwich and drinks at the Racquet Club, he maneuvered.

  And Jill was this close to making partner.

  The Cantowitz family did not see one another terribly often.

  One autumn weekend, Jill and Ed headed out of town for separate meetings, and Solange—the Cantowitzes’ workweek live-in from Haiti—along with Solange’s vast extended family, hosted Rebecca, now almost ten, in Brooklyn. On Sunday night, after Ed and Jill made a point to come home and have sex before venturing over the FDR and the pitted BQE (you’d think New York was a Third World country, they agreed), they arrived at Solange’s run-down Victorian, which would—Ed noted—look great with a new coat of paint. He’d send over their painter; Jill repeatedly told him that he insulted people by making such gestures, but he’d been poor once, too, and was more than willing to take that chance.

  Solange answered the door and Jill nearly jumped into Solange’s arms. She could be so unexpectedly affectionate. “How did she do?” Ed asked.

  “Mr. Cantowitz,” said Solange, “she an angel.”

  They followed Solange to the basement, where a pack of children was navigating boxes and broken toys, in the throes of what looked like a fairly organized soccer game.

  Rebecca called out, “Hi, Mom! Hi, Daddy!” She was dribbling. She was also wearing a see-through synthetic pink dress; her hair had been elaborately styled and she was wearing bright lipstick.

  “Hi, honey!” cried Jill. Then she whispered, “She looks like a hooker.”

  “A very athletic, very happy hooker,” Ed whispered back.

  They stayed for coconut cake—it was Solange’s cousin Antoine’s birthday—then they made the trip home to their classic six on Park. It seemed awfully quiet in the car.

  “Rebecca was happier in that house,” Ed said later in their dark bedroom, while lightly scratching Jill’s back.

  “Solange and her family are from the Caribbean,” Jill said. “Don’t you know they are a naturally happier people?”

  “I’m serious,” said Ed.

  “So am I.”

  “No, you’re not,” he said, kissing her neck.

  “Okay,” she said, sitting up. “For God’s sake, of course I’m not.” She flipped on her reading light. “Listen. You need to listen to me, please. I do not want to have another child.”

  Ed turned on his reading light, and the room was shockingly bright. “I just don’t understand,” he said, launching them into this, their most consistent fight: How Could You Not Want to Give Her a Sibling? The consistency of their positions was almost comforting. They could argue for hours. “You love your brothers,” said Ed, as if this was a new insight. “You love Mark more than you love your parents.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Well, isn’t it true?”

  “Do you want a boy?”

  Funnily enough, she’d never asked this before, and he couldn’t help being impressed with her new line of questioning.

  “Is that why you are so insistent?” She could tell he was impressed and she relaxed against the headboard, looked up at the ceiling. “If you want a boy,” she said with striking serenity, “just admit it, and this will all go a whole lot easier.”

  He couldn’t help but laugh. “Who are you? The Godfather? What are you talking about? Jill, I just want another baby. A sibling.”

  She crossed her arms and shook her head.

  “Do you know what I did in Switzerland this weekend?” he asked, while looking up at the ceiling. “Do I want to know?”

  “Stop it. Do you?”

  “Sure. What did you do in Switzerland this weekend?”

  “I had dinner with a billionaire at his house.”

  “Nice?”

  “There was a tiger—a real live tiger—roaming around the property, like a guard dog.”

  “That’s completely bizarre.”

  “It was, it really was. And that’s how I spent my Saturday night. Away from you. Away from Rebecca. And I do sometimes have to wonder, Jill—I mean, I do sometimes wonder exactly how it is we’re spending our time. How we’re spending our lives. In the big picture. Because Rebecca’s going to be a teenager before we know it, and—”

  “So did it work? Did the tiger intimidate you? Why else would someone do something so crazy?”

  Ed shook his head. He wasn’t giving up, but for at least a few minutes he’d try to let it go. “I felt sorry for the guy.”

  “Maybe that’s the point of the tiger—to lower the gues
ts’ defenses.” She faced him, lying sideways, her head propped up by her hand. “Were your defenses lowered?”

  He shook his head while fingering her nightgown strap, sliding it off her shoulder, then back up again.

  She looked at him and was about to say something. Then she changed her mind.

  “What?”

  “I just would have assumed, with the way you dote on Rebecca, that she’s more than enough for you.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “But you’re implying it.”

  “Exactly who is going to be here to take care of this sibling?”

  “Well.” He sat up. “You, at first.”

  “Aha. Me. I don’t know if you noticed, honey, but I’m working to make partner. And I’m very very close.”

  “And then Solange. Solange will. She told me she will.”

  “What do you mean she told you? You asked her?”

  “I asked her hypothetically.”

  “Hypothetically.”

  “Hypothetically.”

  “Good night,” said Jill. She flipped off the light and arranged herself in a tight little ball, the way she seemed to do only when she was furious. On other nights she sprawled out, leaving him very little space.

  “Jill,” he said. “Jill, please.”

  She sat up; then she looked at him piercingly. He realized it had been a good long while since he’d had that kind of attention from her. “I want you to listen to me,” she said, and he could see her tawny chest rise and fall. “I do not believe that the sun rises and sets with you.”

  “I—”

  “Do you hear me? That was your mother, Ed. Your mother was a selfless woman. And that is not me.”

  He was too stunned by her control, by her heavy breathing, to say much of anything.

  “Do you understand?” she asked. “Does that shock you?”

  Whether it was her message or her sheer intensity he couldn’t parse out, but he kissed her and she didn’t stop him.

  And then one day, not long after Rebecca turned ten, Jill announced that she’d had her tubes tied, and Ed was so angry that he insisted on taking Rebecca to Disney World for the long Presidents Day weekend without Jill, who relented far too easily as far as Ed was concerned. “You get to go on a special trip with Daddy,” she exclaimed, and Jill’s secretary booked her a separate ticket so quickly to visit her brother Mark, now living in Madrid, that Ed was convinced his wife had already planned that trip to Spain, even before Ed’s Big Disney Revenge.

  He instructed his secretary to organize the most over-the-top itinerary possible. So when they arrived at the Polynesian Village and Rebecca didn’t beam like those kids in the advertisements, and when, in fact, she noted that everything was smaller than she expected, Ed suggested they head to the Tambu Lounge, where they spent more time than most families having their own special cocktail hour, ordering drinks that arrived in hollowed-out pineapples.

  “Did you know,” Ed said, sucking down his big fat alcoholic drink through a straw, “that John Lennon officially broke up the Beatles right here?”

  Rebecca shook her head.

  “It’s true. He came here with his son, just like I’m here with you. And he signed the paperwork.”

  “How do you know that, Daddy? Do you even own any Beatles albums?”

  “Oh, y’know, I read it somewhere.”

  “That’s kind of depressing, don’t you think? Imagining John Lennon doing that?”

  “I guess,” Ed admitted. “Though there’s a saying: All great things must come to an end.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that one. Anyhow, now he’s dead.” Rebecca was sitting perfectly straight. “I still can’t believe that man shot him.”

  “I know, honey. It’s awful,” he said. What the hell was he doing—bringing up John Lennon not twenty-four hours into her first trip to Disney World?

  Her expression was deadpan. It often was. When Rebecca was a baby, they’d worried about that poker face, her infrequent smiles and cooing, but when she hit toddlerhood and Manhattan’s private-school entrance exams for four-year-olds, she answered every single question correctly, and it was clear that all that time she had simply been watching. “Little Buddha,” Jill’s brother Mark called her, which Ed knew was meant kindly but which he still found profoundly irritating.

  She’d inquired, not infrequently, when she was three years old: Daddy, if there are seven days in a week, when do the days end? And then, with that furrowed delicate brow: When is the end of days?

  “You okay, honey?” he tentatively asked now.

  “Yeah. I was just thinking, my favorite fruit is now pineapple.”

  “Pineapples are good,” said Ed; his sense of relief at the conversation’s downright jaunty turn was intense.

  “You don’t eat enough fruit,” she said.

  “I eat fruit. I eat plenty of fruit. Which one is your second favorite?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Probably an apple.”

  “But you can get an apple all the time. Apples are boring.”

  “Plenty of places an apple is special,” she said. “Plenty of places people are so poor there’s nothing to eat.”

  “Well,” said her father, “that’s true.” He realized he felt ashamed and that she had, more than anyone—more than even his father ever had—the capacity to shame him. “But, sweetie,” he said quietly, “we’re at Disney World. I kind of thought that we could talk about stuff that wasn’t … y’know … so real.”

  “Okay.” She nodded, then sat up even straighter and, assuming a pose that looked eerily like Jill’s, she said, “But you know what? I don’t really want a brother or sister.”

  Ed sucked too hard on the straw and the cold liquor pierced his head. “How can you not want a brother or sister?”

  He was hoping, of course, that she would say something like, I don’t want to share you with anyone, but instead she looked at him with quiet frustration and said, “I don’t know, I just don’t.”

  “Well, would you like another virgin lapu lapu?”

  She shook her head, then: “You’d better make up with Mom.”

  “I know,” said Ed.

  “Her work is very important.”

  “Very,” said Ed. This is what I get, he thought, for sending her to that school.

  Jill had been more flexible about (or less interested in) the details of Rebecca’s education, but Ed had felt strongly that they should send Rebecca to the best school in the city: a single-sex environment, a tradition of academic excellence, staffed with faculty that would challenge and ultimately mold Rebecca into the kind of Radcliffe girl who had so intimidated him when he arrived at Harvard as a freshman. But now that his daughter was—at ten years old—well on the way to becoming that girl, Ed was a little afraid of his daughter’s self-possession and had the distinct feeling that the school’s philosophy actually boiled down to a staunchly feminist version of noblesse oblige.

  Rebecca had her picture taken with dopey Minnie Mouse and conceited Snow White and self-righteous Cinderella, filling her head with all kinds of beautiful bullshit; Ed got buzzed and bloated on lapu lapus and piña coladas, and by the time they were back home he was less angry than sad and he apologized to Jill, who seemed awfully restored by her quickie trip to Madrid. She was clad in her white terry robe and, due to her post-flight skin regimen, her face was a mask of alien green.

  “Give Mom her present,” said Rebecca.

  Jill opened up the chocolate-covered coconut patties that Ed had remembered she’d told him about—how she’d loved them as a kid, how they’d been a once-a-year special treat when the Solomon family vacationed in Miami. Ed and Rebecca had searched at five separate stores. “Wow,” Jill said, upon seeing the candy box. “Thanks, you two. Did you have a great time?”

  “We did,” said Ed. “Didn’t we?”

  Rebecca nodded, still watching Jill. They both were.

  Jill smiled as if
something smelled bad. “What?”

  Ed tried to keep it light. “I think we’re both just wondering if you recognize the significance of your gift.”

  “Of course I do. I ate these as a kid. It’s so sweet of you. But I ate so much in Madrid—I’ve never eaten so much meat—that right now I also need these like I need a hole in my head.”

  “That’s a terrible thing to say,” Ed shot back. He felt his throat constrict and his face go hot; his back begin to sweat, and he thought he might actually cry. He knew he was being overly sensitive and that her humor had always been on the dark side, but that expression? A hole in my head? In response to his attempt to fulfill one of her childhood desires? “How can you say that?”

  “What?” said Jill. “I really do appreciate the thought.”

  “Funny way of expressing it.”

  “All I’m saying is that they’re fattening. That’s all I’m saying.”

  He swallowed, hard. “Right.”

  “Ed,” said Jill. “Please don’t do this. We’re all home, together. Thank you for the candy.”