The Heirs

by Susan Rieger

  On Sundays, after browsing the wedding notices to find out whose children had married, she browsed the death notices to find out whose husbands and wives had died. When did I become the last generation before death? she wondered. She envied the lucky dead, those who lived to eighty-eight, the perfect age to die after a brief, chemo-free illness, leaving just enough time to say good-bye and good luck. Those who lived longer she pitied; they were too likely to have outlived their friends, their money, their arteries, and their wits.

  Eleanor didn’t see Jim’s notice when she was in L.A. She found out only when Anne called her to ask if they might meet. “Jim left you a letter.”

  Eleanor agreed as agreeably as she could manage. She couldn’t see her way to denying a grieving widow bearing a letter meant for another woman. “Does morning coffee work for you this Saturday, ten a.m.? We could meet at E.A.T.”

  After their last dreadful time together, Eleanor had never wanted to see Jim again. She got her wish, though she’d never wished him dead. As a girl, she had wished her mother dead, dreaming violent ends for her as she fell asleep at night. Eaten by tigers was her favorite. Tigers would succeed. She found herself relieved by Jim’s death. He’d become an albatross. She had not minded his mooning over her, at St. Thomas, at his wedding, at the movies, not until Rupert was dying. He kept dropping by the hospital room as if she wanted to see him. Rupert’s oncologist noticed it. Eleanor shrugged it off. “Does he?” She had given up, temporarily, her budding rudeness. There were so many people whose goodwill she needed for Rupert’s care; she couldn’t let rudeness take over. Rudeness, she had discovered, was an earthquake emotion, growing exponentially with each eruption. She held her temper even as she wished she could get a TRO against Jim. What had she seen in him, she wondered. We were twenty. He was beautiful. Our mothers were harridans. He’d read Anna Karenina in Russian.

  As she walked across the park to meet Anne, Eleanor wondered what about her encouraged postmortem confessions. She had never heard from Louisa again after their last encounter. She imagined Louisa hadn’t the stomach to confront her mother. She had heard from the mother only once after her father’s funeral, a month later. Mrs. Cantwell had phoned to ask for three items from Mr. Phipps’s apartment, a pair of Nefertiti-head bookends, a silver candlestick, and a Persian prayer rug. Mrs. Cantwell giggled when she asked for the last item. “Your father said he worshipped me,” she said. Rupert wanted to say no “on principle,” the lawyer’s aversion to making distributions outside the will to people he didn’t approve of. Eleanor said to let her have them. “My principle is expediency. I want to be done with her.” Nothing in her father’s new apartment meant anything to her, and Mrs. Cantwell’s claims on the items had made them repellent to Eleanor. She hoped she might part with Anne as easily, if more cordially. She would walk out of E.A.T. again if she needed to.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Eleanor said as she sat down. Anne had gotten to the restaurant first and taken a table in the back. Eleanor silently gauged the number of footsteps to the exit. “I hadn’t heard until you called,” she said. “I was in Los Angeles, visiting my son Will, and his wife and their new infant daughter.” Anne sat up straighter at this personal opening, fearing for a moment that Eleanor knew from her father about her stalking days. Officially this was only their second encounter.

  “It was sudden,” Anne said. “Blocked arteries. No one knew. He never got checkups. He didn’t believe in stress tests. He didn’t believe in doctors.”

  “My mother died of a heart defect,” Eleanor said, “though she knew about it. She was younger than Jim. Dr. Schwinn—do you know him?—was her doctor. Jim found him for me.”

  “Schwinn reviewed the autopsy report,” Anne said. “If you die at home alone, too young, they do an autopsy.” She reached into her purse and pulled out an envelope. It said “Eleanor Falkes.”

  “Do you mind if I read it here?” Eleanor said. She didn’t want to take the letter with her.

  The note was written by hand:

  Dear Eleanor,

  I’m sorry for being so out of sorts the last time we met. I didn’t much care for Road to Perdition and it made me irritable and no doubt irritating. I know I talked too much about Nathan. I was still recovering from his year in Haiti. Anne and I worried all the time, even though he’s the most sensible and practical young man I know. It’s a huge relief to have him safe in medical school. He’ll be an excellent doctor. We feel very lucky in him and each other. I don’t know how you managed with five.

  I’ve cut back on my surgeries. My hands are getting arthritic, my eyes are growing cataracts. Getting old surprised me. You never seem to change. Anne only gets better. Wishing you all the best.

  Jim

  Eleanor handed the note to Anne. Anne shook her head. “No, no,” Eleanor said. “Please read it.”

  Anne read the note. “I promised myself I wouldn’t cry,” she said, her eyes watering.

  “We went for coffee after the movie. Jim talked about Nathan the whole time,” Eleanor said. “He was so proud of him, so happy he was going to be a doctor.” Anne handed her back the letter. “No, keep it,” Eleanor said.

  “I always thought I was in the looking-glass version of Pride and Prejudice,” Anne said, “the one where Charlotte Lucas and not Lizzy Bennet marries Mr. Darcy.”

  “Funny,” Eleanor said. “I thought of myself as Isabel Archer in a bowdlerized Portrait of a Lady. She accepts Lord Warburton’s proposal on the spot.”

  “A Vassar education does that,” Anne said.

  “Yes,” Eleanor said. “It allowed us somehow to think of ourselves as both heroines and wives.”

  Anne shifted in her seat. “Jim was Heathcliff,” she said, “in Philip Roth’s Wuthering Heights.” She didn’t mean to be witty or malicious, though she knew she might be accused of being both.

  Without thinking, Eleanor reached across the table and touched Anne’s hand. “Don’t rewrite,” she said. “Don’t let the present get in the way of the past.”

  Anne’s eyes watered again. She folded the letter and put it away in her purse. Would she now have to mourn him, miss him? she wondered. She didn’t believe the letter but it moved her, the effort he’d made, writing it for her.

  “I’m afraid I have to run,” Eleanor said. “I promised to look after my son Harry’s two girls. I had five sons and now I have four granddaughters, with a fifth on the way.” She stood up. “He saw you, you know, as his great good luck.” Anne looked away to keep from crying. “He did,” Eleanor said.

  —

  Lea called Sam. “Harry told me he had a fling with a colleague, Mary Ann Evans, like George Eliot. He says it’s over.”

  Sam groaned. “He’s a schmuck, Lea. He’s always been a schmuck, he’ll always be a schmuck. You married the schmuck. He’s yours.”

  Lea laughed. “I like that, the Schmuck Theory of Matrimony. Like the sign in the antique store: ‘You Break It, You Own It.’ ”

  “He told me about it. He was heartsore. He was ashamed and sorry and so afraid you’d leave him,” Sam said.

  “She was pregnant,” Lea said. “She miscarried. She has a husband. It might have been his.”

  “I told him not to tell you,” Sam said. “I told him to man up and live with his guilt.”

  “Yes, well, the schmuck is also the blurter, as we all know.”

  “What did you do?” Sam asked.

  “I told him he had to move out, at least for a while. I needed to get my head clear. He asked your mother if he could stay with her. She said no. She said, ‘If you’re old enough to mess around in your marriage, you’re too old to live with your mother. Or, your mother is too old to live with you.’ ”

  “Good old Mom,” Sam said.

  Lea liked talking to Sam. Unlike her women friends, he didn’t commiserate. He didn’t make her feel sorry for herself.

  “Did you meet her?” Lea asked. “Did you see her? Was she pretty?”

  “I saw her once, a
t the law school. She was crying. I think she was pretty. Hard to say when they’re crying. She looked like you.”

  “Have you heard from him?” Lea said.

  “No, I saw him maybe two weeks ago. We talked about talking to the Wolinskis.”

  “Harry told me. You got tested. Harry’s not so angry now with your father. He’s not sure he wants to do anything about it.”

  “I’m not angry at Dad. I never was. I’m curious.”

  “She was younger than me,” Lea said.

  “They always are. That’s their great appeal. Also, they’re not the wife or the husband. In an affair, you don’t have to talk to them. Better, you don’t have to listen to them.”

  “Oh, Sam,” Lea said, “you’ve lived a very sophisticated life.”

  “Take him back, Lea. You’re good for each other. He’s a dog.”

  “I don’t like him right now. I need to like him again before I can let him come home.”

  “That sounds like something my mother would say,” Sam said.

  “Harry pays attention better when I sound like your mother,” Lea said.

  —

  Harry needed to confess to his mother, his confession to Lea providing little relief. Eleanor wasn’t interested. “No details,” she told him. “I don’t like confessions.” They were having dinner downstairs from her apartment, at the Café des Artistes, the farthest Eleanor felt like going to be with Harry.

  Harry was hurt. He didn’t understand. “I feel awful. I wish I hadn’t done it.”

  “I wish you hadn’t done it, but more, I wish you hadn’t told me,” Eleanor said.

  “I was miserable the whole time.”

  “What did you expect?” Eleanor said. “Happiness? It’s not in the cards. One person might be happy, but never both. The whole point of adultery is to be unhappy—excited, guilty, and unhappy. Sex, new sex, is the point.”

  Harry winced. He hated when his mother said anything about sex.

  “Do you think I was in it only for the sex?” he said.

  “Are you saying you wanted to marry the woman?” Eleanor said.

  “No, no,” he said. “But we talked too.”

  “How did she get pregnant?” Eleanor asked.

  Harry was quiet. Eleanor waited.

  “I don’t think it was mine,” he said.

  “Did you use condoms?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Do you want to stay in your marriage?” Eleanor said.

  Harry nodded.

  “Will Lea take you back?”

  Harry lowered his head and started crying silently into his napkin.

  —

  Harry agreed to go with Sam to meet Hugh Wolinski. He was, he admitted, curious. Iain couldn’t make it; he was at sea. Hugh was reluctant. “What’s the point?” he said. “Please,” Sam said. “We’d like to have a better ending than the one last year in the Surrogate’s Court.” They made a date for the Saturday before Easter at the Parlour Bar on West Eighty-Sixth. Rupert had been dead for three years, almost to the day.

  Sam and Harry got there early, taking a table in back. Watching Hugh walk toward them, Sam thought, He could be Dad’s son. Sam and Harry stood up. They shook hands with Hugh. They ordered beers.

  Hugh waited. This wasn’t his show.

  “I’ve taken a DNA test,” Sam said. “If you take one, we can find out if we are brothers”—Sam paused—“and we could make some kind of amends.”

  “And if I’m not your brother?” Hugh said.

  “We think our father knew your mother,” Harry said. “We think there was some kind of relationship.”

  “I don’t see what’s in it for Iain and me,” Hugh said.

  “There’s family money,” Sam said.

  “Look,” he said, “I don’t care. It’s too late. A father might have been useful when we were younger. But whoever took care of us financially—we called him Daddy Warbucks—took care of us well enough. Vera sent us to Catholic schools. Good places, Catholic schools. They make you read one Shakespeare play a year. They teach you to write sentences. Then we both went to the Coast Guard Academy. We love being on the water. We like our work. We like our lives.” Hugh stopped, then added shyly, “I’m getting married in June.” He laughed. “I think I’m the first person in the family in three generations to marry.”

  “Congratulations,” Sam said.

  “Money is useful,” Harry said.

  “It was our mother’s idea to sue your father’s estate. We didn’t want to. She insisted. It was humiliating, I’ll say that outright. I find this conversation humiliating.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sam said. “We want to do right by you.”

  “If your father fathered us, he did right enough by us. I have no interest in becoming officially the bastard son of a rich man. I’d rather be the bastard son of no one. Our mother might have had children with half a dozen pricks who wouldn’t have supported her or us. After Iain was born, she had her tubes tied.”

  “I want to make sure you know what you’re giving up,” Sam said.

  “If we got any money from your father’s estate, we’d give it to Vera. You want to do us good, start sending her money, like before.”

  “We can do that,” Sam said.

  “No, no, I’m just talking. Iain and I, we don’t want your money. Listen. You seem like decent guys. I liked your mother. She made me think your father, if he was our father, wasn’t a complete shit. You’ll pardon me. Our mother is something. Vera. The name means ‘truth.’ She wasn’t a bad mother; she may even love us in her way, but she couldn’t tell the truth if her life depended on it. Or mine. Or Iain’s. You five get all the money. I’m OK with that. Iain too. Men cycled through our house. ‘Uncles,’ we called them. One, Stefan, looked out for us when we were young. Vera almost married him. Three times. She couldn’t do it. She said she liked her freedom. There was talk that Vera was pregnant long before us, back in the mid-’50s, when she was seventeen. The story had many endings. Everyone told different versions, none agreeing. She got pregnant by a fireman who bought her a ring. He was a Baptist; she couldn’t marry him. She got pregnant by a young GI who was going off to Korea the next day; he died on a secret mission there. She married an old Pole, Koslowski, who beat her, forcing her to give birth prematurely. She was sent away to a home for wayward girls and gave the baby up for adoption. She miscarried. She had an abortion. The baby was stillborn. The baby died at three months, stopped breathing, crib death. She sold the baby to a rich Westchester family. The baby was a boy, the baby was a girl, the baby was two babies. Who knew what was true and what wasn’t? She liked being the heroine-slash-victim of everyone’s stories. It made her feel like a celebrity. She never cried over that baby, if there was a baby, not to us, and, I’ll give her this, she never cried for herself. She said our father was Scottish, a gentleman. But we’re not even sure we’re full brothers. You might test the wrong brother.” He stopped to make sure he’d made his point. “We never heard of Rupert Falkes growing up. The first time we heard his name, our grandmother showed us a picture from the New York Times, his obituary. I don’t know how she got it. It was months after he died. ‘Isn’t that Robert Fairchild?’ she said to Vera. Vera got a lawyer the next day.”

  Hugh stood up and reached for his wallet. “We don’t need any more family, Iain and me. We’re fine the way we are.” He put down a twenty. “I’d like to treat you guys.”

  Sam reported the conversation with Hugh to his mother. “Dad-like,” Eleanor said. “Dad never wanted to find his parents. He dreaded them finding him.”

  “Did he know anything about them?” Sam said.

  “When he was twenty, Father Falkes told him he had come from a ‘good’ family. He stood out from the other St. Pancras foundlings. He was plump, healthy, clean; his clothes were nicely made and unpatched.” Eleanor paused. “I’ve no doubt his looks and appearance attracted Father Falkes’s interest and attachment, and Father Falkes only meant to be kind, but the
story hardened Dad against his parents. He could have understood better a poor family abandoning a child.”

  “What are you going to do?” Sam asked. Eleanor said nothing.

  “Are you still going to give them money?”

  “Stop it, Sam,” she said. “He was my husband.”

  —

  Eleanor decided to fire Maynard, Tandy. They kept throwing up roadblocks to her plan to give money to the Wolinskis and then blaming the roadblocks when they did nothing. Jack used to do that as a small boy. He would never do anything he didn’t want to do if there was any way of not doing it. In the early years, until he became fully himself, self-interest looked a lot like self-sabotage. When he was nine, he tore up a homework assignment and then told his mother he couldn’t do the work because the assignment was torn up. Eleanor surveyed the crime scene.

  “You’ll have to tape it together if you want to go to your trumpet lesson on Tuesday,” she said.

  “I didn’t do it on purpose,” he said. “It was a mistake.”

  “Of course,” she said, “but you still need to tape it together.”

  “It will take too long, it’s in too many pieces,” he said.

  “Better get to work then,” she said.

  Jack looked down at the floor, covered with bits of torn paper. He started to cry. Eleanor handed him a tissue. “The tape’s on my desk,” she said.

  By the time he was thirteen, Jack had stopped tearing up his homework assignments. He did what he wanted to do, to hell with everyone and everything else. Eleanor held out stoutly against his iron will, buckling no more than half the time. He’d steal from her, if he needed to, to pay his trumpet teacher. It was addict’s behavior but admirable, she knew, in its way. “It’s my life,” he told her.

  In mid-August 2002, Jack’s wife, Kate, gave birth to a baby girl, Ingrid, another blonde. A month later, Jack won a MacArthur grant. “Good God,” Sam said, “now he’s a certified genius.” Shortly before Christmas, Eleanor flew to Austin to meet her new granddaughter. She rented a car, a convertible; she never depended on Jack for rides. Something more important always came up. “Do you mind taking a cab?” he’d say. “I’ve got a gig.” She arrived at his house late morning and found him outside on the lawn, jiggling the baby and crooning Irving Berlin. “We’ve been waiting for you,” he said. “I could have picked you up.”