The Heirs

by Susan Rieger

  Anne was changing in other ways as well. She had taken up rigorous exercising again, something she hadn’t done since she was pregnant. She had gotten prettier as she grew older, hitting her peak in her late forties and early fifties. She’s better-looking than I am these days, he thought. He wondered if she knew what he was planning. He wondered if she was making plans of her own. He had a spasm of panic.

  His new surgical schedule left him free two afternoons a week to stake out the Lincoln Plaza Theater. The second week he ran into Eleanor going into Road to Perdition, the new Mendes. She showed surprise seeing him.

  “I’ve cut back at the hospital,” he said. “I wanted to do other things. Going to movies was one of them.”

  When the movie ended, Jim asked Eleanor if she’d like a cup of coffee. She agreed, no boys or husband to rush home to, and they walked up Columbus to Starbucks. They sat in the window at a high counter. They had to turn to look at each other, a choice both avoided. Jim started sweating. Eleanor shifted in her seat. He had no small talk. He plunged.

  “I bought the ‘Stoker-Shelley Memorial Wing’ plaque,” he said. “I was the one.”

  “I’m sorry, what?” Eleanor said.

  “The plaque outside the oncology wing. You must have seen it,” he said.

  Eleanor shook her head. “No,” she said.

  She’s not giving anything away, Jim thought. That’s Eleanor.

  “Will you marry me?” he asked, still looking straight ahead.

  Eleanor turned to look at him, incredulity in her face. “No,” she said.

  “Will you see me regularly, then?” he asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “Why not?” he asked. “We’re free finally to be together.”

  “What are you talking about?” she said.

  “It’s our time, now.”

  “That was so long ago. I’m not that girl anymore.”

  “You are. I see her in you.”

  “Please stop,” she said. “That was eons ago. I got over you.”

  “How could you get over me? We were so much in love.” Jim could hear the note of wounded grievance in his voice. He coughed to clear it.

  “What can I say?” she said. “That was then.”

  “Is there someone else?” he said. “Are you seeing Carlo Benedetti?”

  “Please stop this, Jim,” she said. “You’re plowing ancient history.”

  “Why did you come to my wedding?” Jim asked.

  Eleanor took in a deep breath. “I didn’t want to; Rupert did. He wanted to meet the Lehmans.”

  “Why did you send the fish server in your parents’ pattern?” he asked.

  “It was on your registry,” she said. “It was your pattern, yours and Anne’s.” She moved her chair back a bit.

  “You weren’t at all curious to see me?”

  “No. I hadn’t thought about you for years. I had a long, good marriage. Rupert was the right man for me. I was very lucky.”

  “Why was he right?” he asked. He could hear his voice becoming accusatory. He didn’t care.

  Eleanor looked out the window, then back at him. She couldn’t tell if she was more astonished or annoyed by his suit. She weighed her answer. The conversation had gone on too long. “Rupert would never have given me up.”

  Jim flinched, as if he’d been slapped. He felt double-crossed, swindled.

  “He was the right man for another woman too.” He spoke without thinking. He had seen the Post article.

  Eleanor stood up. “Don’t do this,” she said. “Don’t make yourself pitiful.” She turned and walked out of the shop.

  Jim kept his seat, staring out the window, hating himself. It’s over, finally, he thought. His relief was as great as his humiliation. His mouth was dry, sticky, sour. This is what gall tastes like. He got up heavily. He felt he’d aged five years in five minutes. A stranger meeting him for the first time would think he was at least seventy. He had an air of collapse about him. He glimpsed his reflection in the window. I look drowned, he thought. He could smell his sweat. I have the stink of defeat. Out on the street, he walked up Columbus until he found a bar. He bought a pack of cigarettes and ordered gin on the rocks. He sat for two hours smoking and drinking. After his sixth gin, he lurched out of the bar. The M11 bus was lumbering down the avenue. He thought about throwing himself in front of it and ruining the driver’s life. He stepped off the curb, then stepped back again. What if I don’t die? What if I become a quadriplegic? He caught a cab home. Anne was out, at the Y, building muscle. He drank half a bottle of bourbon and passed out.

  The next morning he slept in until noon. Feeling hungover, he called his office to cancel appointments. At dinnertime Anne asked him if he wanted anything. He didn’t. She saw an empty bottle of bourbon by his bed. The next day he slept in again. It was ten thirty a.m. when he went into the kitchen. Anne was there. He had hoped she would be gone. He wasn’t ready to face her. He was visibly hungover, less from bourbon than from a Halcion-Xanax-Oxycontin cocktail.

  “Why aren’t you at work?” he asked. “How can Fischbach manage without you?” He reached for a playful note, but his unhappiness choked it. Anne had left research fifteen years ago and had gone to work for the dean of the medical school, first as an assistant dean, then an associate dean, then vice dean. She knew how to make herself useful. She was on her third dean. They all loved her.

  “I want to talk to you,” she said. She looked at his drawn face and wondered if she should pick another time. There’s no good time, she thought.

  “That sounds serious,” he said, wrenching his mouth into a smile.

  “Yes,” she said. “Please sit down.” Jim took the chair at the corner of the table, so he wouldn’t have to look directly at her.

  “I want a separation,” Anne said.

  He looked at her, then away, afraid that he might cry. “I don’t,” he said, turning back to her, “but I’ll do whatever you want.”

  “I’ll move out,” she said. “It’s a trial. For now. We’ll see.”

  “I should be the one to move out,” he said.

  “No, I need to clear my head. I need a change. I’ll borrow or sublet something.” She nodded at him, grateful that he hadn’t made a scene. She couldn’t have taken another lie. “My brother has a pied-à-terre. I can probably stay there. It isn’t too hideous.”

  “I hope you decide to stick with me,” Jim said. “When are you going?”

  “This weekend. I’ll talk to Nathan first.”

  Jim nodded. “I think I’ll go back to bed,” he said. “I’m not feeling well.” Passing her chair, he wanted to touch her hair; he resisted, not wanting to anger her. He stopped at the doorway.

  “You’ve been wonderful,” he said. “I wasn’t.”

  Rupert was a virgin when he met Vera. He had survived his English schools with mostly trifling abuse, including the self-inflicted variety. The one violent exception exacted violent revenge.

  An orphanage is a first-rate training ground for fending off assaults. Rupert preferred to ward off attackers with words, but he was willing to use fists and knees and even makeshift weapons if they were needed. He made his reputation his first week at Longleat, spewing vicious insults that boys who grew up in respectable homes blanched at. He thought nothing of calling a sixth-former a cunt, leaving the older boy reeling in shock, feeling the insult without understanding it. He told Dominic that he had introduced the word into the Leater’s lexicon, along with Firsters and Publicans. His advantage was his fearlessness and his inventiveness. When his insults fell short, he resorted to threats of dismemberment and disemboweling. He seemed capable of it. The second month he was there, he threatened to eviscerate a fifth-former who tried to suck him off one night in his bed. “I’ll knife you in the stomach, I’ll make mince of your intestines,” he said. “You’ll pass out from the pain.” A month later, he resorted to physical force, against a more pressing suitor, a sixth-form rugby player who kept groping him, thinking it a gre
at joke. The third time he did it, Rupert kicked him in the balls, rocketing him to his knees. The rugby player took the battering ill, working himself into a rage. “No pissant new boy gets away with that,” he told a pal. “Are you in?” The next day, as afternoon services let out, the player and his pal cornered Rupert in the chapel stairwell; securing the door, they took turns buggering him until they got bored.

  Rupert took time planning his revenge. Three weeks to the day, on a cloudy afternoon, he took a friend’s cricket bat and walked over to the rugby field. Practice was breaking up. Spotting his assailant, Rupert stepped in front of him, holding the bat down with both hands on the handle, poised to swing. The player stopped and laughed. “What’s the matter?” he said. “Didn’t you learn your lesson?” Looking him in the eye, Rupert brought the bat back, and, angling it with the edge leading, struck his lower leg so hard his shinbone cracked. The player went down writhing and howling. Rupert stood still over him. “I’ll kill you next time, you cunt,” he said. The player’s teammates, having watched the spectacle, made no move toward Rupert or his victim, recognizing in the ways of honorable schoolboys that justice had been done. After a minute of silence, two of them lifted the wailing boy by his arms and carried him to the infirmary. The rest walked back to their houses. No one told. After that, Rupert was left alone; there were many more scared and docile little boys to prey upon.

  Self-abuse was rampant at Longleat. One of the masters called it “a cursed bugaboo, more heinous than cheating, a crime against the temple of the body, made in God’s image.” The boys called him Old Bugger-Boo, which Rupert realized by his third year was neither mocking nor affectionate. The boys knew the masters knew what went on in the houses at night. Their rooms reeked of semen. They reasonably concluded that mutual masturbation was not self-abuse, a relief for the boys with religious scruples or Victorian parents or homosexual desires.

  Growing up in an orphanage had made Rupert dislike the close company of other boys. He took up boxing at Longleat so he wouldn’t have to wrestle; touching other boys’ bodies was repulsive to him, like touching someone else’s snot or vomit. When Harry, at two months, peed on him, he almost dropped him. He never changed a diaper; he couldn’t. “I was the tenth person in the bathwater,” he told Eleanor. “I can never get clean enough.” Eleanor mildly objected. “I didn’t know little boys minded being dirty.” Rupert shook his head. “I didn’t mind being dirty. I minded bathing in other boys’ piss and shit.”

  American bathrooms, with their endless hot water pouring from the ceiling, were a refuge and revelation to Rupert. He showered twice a day. When he and Eleanor moved into the Hotel des Artistes, Eleanor saw that he had his own bathroom. It was the best gift ever, he told her. His bathroom was off limits to everyone in the family, including Eleanor. Only the housekeeper was allowed in. When he was made managing partner at Maynard, Tandy, he moved into an office with a private bathroom. “I’d have given up fifty thousand dollars a year years ago for a private bathroom at the office,” he told Eleanor. He regarded American plumbing as the pinnacle of its civilization, more impressive than its dentistry, its skyscrapers, even its air-conditioning. He loved air-conditioning. “It can never be too cold in summer,” he would say. He thought American homes were overheated and, in the winter, he was always opening the windows in the apartment, to let in fresh air. What fresh air? Eleanor thought. She followed behind at a discreet distance, closing them. Brought up in the city, she was most comfortable, summer or winter, at eighty degrees.

  —

  Rupert arrived by freighter in New York in July 1955, with two hundred pounds sterling, the remnant of his legacy from Father Falkes. The exchange rate was in his favor, providing him with more than five hundred and fifty dollars, enough, he reckoned, to carry him at least six months. He had read the classified ads in the New York newspapers regularly before he left England. He thought he would be able to rent a room with two meals a day, pension-style, for sixty-five dollars a month in Manhattan, less in one of the boroughs. He was confident he would find a job in six months. He could teach history; he had read history at Cambridge. If he had to, he’d wait tables or tend bar, anything except clean. He needed a job to get a green card, a green card to get a job. He’d find a cricket club or a bar where English expats hung out. He’d offer his services to an Episcopal church with a serious choir; he’d sing for his supper and other meals as well. Someone would help him; someone always had.

  His first night in New York, Rupert slept in a Times Square hotel, one step up from a flophouse. He checked in as Robert Fairchild, under a wary premonition that he might not want to be remembered by his earliest New York acquaintances. The admitting clerk sat in a cage. The charge for a private single with a toilet was seventy-five cents. The bathtub was down the hall. Rupert had put two crumpled dollars in his pocket so he would have to reach inside it only to pay the bill. He flattened out a one carefully, giving the impression that he was hoarding his last dollars. He had worn an old pair of khaki trousers, a worn tweed jacket, a fedora, and an oversized shabby raincoat, a legacy from Father Falkes. The rest of his clothes and his toiletries were in a straw suitcase. He didn’t look like someone worth robbing, though he was clean and unblemished and not drunk. The room smelled of stale cigarettes, the bed was unmade, the sheets stained with food and human emissions. Rupert locked the door and moved the dresser against it. He slept on top of the bedspread with his money belt, underwear, and shoes on. He checked out at seven a.m. and walked to Penn Station, where he brushed his teeth and washed his face. He then walked ten blocks down Seventh Avenue to the McBurney Y. A room there was a dollar fifty. He figured he could stay four nights. He checked in again as Robert Fairchild. He took a twenty-minute shower.

  Everyone spoke English, but no one was. He was in a foreign country where no one knew him or understood him. He felt light-headed. Anything was possible.

  —

  Stefan, one of the Y lifeguards, told Rupert about a room in a house in Brooklyn, in Greenpoint. “It’s a Polish neighborhood, nice people mostly,” he said. “They don’t like blacks or Jews, but you’ll be fine. They’ll like your fancy accent. Where’d you get that?”

  Rupert phoned the owner, Ruta Wolinski, and made an appointment to see the room. “I don’t let just anyone stay, Mr. Fairchild,” she said. “Stefan said you were nice, clean. I run a decent house. I cook simple food. Two meals a day, breakfast at seven thirty a.m., dinner at five thirty. You share a bathroom. I clean the house. I keep it very clean. I make your bed and give you fresh sheets and towels once a week. Two dollars a night. Some months sixty dollars, some months sixty-two. February, a bargain, fifty-six.” Her voice had a slight inflection, not a full-blown accent, as if she were a native speaker who had learned English from immigrants. She sounded not warm but not unpleasant, which suited Rupert. He didn’t want a relationship with his landlady.

  The house was on the five hundred block of Leonard Street, a working-class neighborhood. It had four floors. The front was faced with peeling clapboard and crumbling brick. The entryway was on the ground floor. Mrs. Wolinski eyed Rupert through a keyhole, then let him in. He took off his hat, sealing the deal for her. She was a bad judge of character, showing a childlike reliance on extravagant compliments and florid manners. “Mrs.” was an honorific, like the French “Madame,” belonging to age not status. She had had two children with three men, none of them the marrying kind, none of them still on the scene. “Their fathers were gentlemen,” she told Rupert. “They had refinement. You can see it in my girls. Vera, come here. Meet the new tenant.” Vera glided into the room. At seventeen, she was golden and silky, Greenpoint’s Lana Turner. Her older sister, Daria, lived down the street. She was a plainer version of Vera, already faded at twenty-four, the mother of three children under three. Her husband, an electrician, didn’t beat her when he was drunk, but he was tight-fisted, a skinflint.

  Men were always buzzing around Vera, but she knew her value and, for the most part, s
watted them away. She wasn’t going to have her mother’s life or her sister’s. She was meant for bigger things. Setting her eyes on Rupert as her mother showed him around the house, she sized him up in a glance. He’s it, she thought. He’s my ticket. She was wearing a cherry-red cotton sundress, which displayed a riveting cleavage. Even as his pulse raced, Rupert recognized the moment as kitsch film noir: the femme fatale meets the sap. His instinct for self-preservation kicked in. He was curt to her, on the border of rude, the Englishman’s standard response to a threat. Any other manner, he knew, would show him to be clueless, feckless, hapless. Mrs. Wolinski approved. He wasn’t interested in Vera, she said to herself; he wouldn’t ruin her. Vera knew better. “We need to Americanize you,” she said. She didn’t smile at him; she didn’t flirt with him. They had to come to her, preferably on their knees. She walked out of the room, brushing his arm with her breast. He lowered his hat to cover his erection.

  Rupert spent his first week in Greenpoint walking the neighborhood. He took the GG train to the Fort Greene post office, and rented a PO box in his own name. He found the local Carnegie library, around the corner from the Wolinskis, and took out a card in the name of Robert Fairchild, using a letter from Ruta Wolinski as his identification. The librarians, he discovered, were helpful, especially when he told them he was looking for a church to join. He explained that his father had been an Anglican minister and he wanted to find a church that might offer the kinds of prayer services he was used to. “Do you know of any Episcopal churches with good music?” he asked. “With evensong? With choristers?” He saw that a willingness to ask for help served him, though less successfully than sincerity. What is it with Americans? he thought. They overvalue sincerity. He saw sincerity as a portal to egoism.