A Dual Inheritance (4 page)

“Too bad he couldn’t have just come on over to our neighborhood. Don’t laugh. He and my father—despite appearances to the contrary, I’m sure—would have plenty in common.”

“Is that right? Well, I don’t know about your father, but mine didn’t like everyone lavishing attention on the children, because he always wanted to be at the center. See, he’d had a taste of it, a real taste of attention. Worst thing that could have happened to a guy like my father. He was a boxer, okay, and I guess a pretty promising one—”

“Your father was a boxer?”

“That’s what I’m telling you.” Ed tried not to sound frustrated, but he knew that if he didn’t keep talking, he’d lose steam. This was the first time he’d told anyone at Harvard anything about his father. He’d guarded these stories, kept them close. It was as if telling them too frequently would dull their power. To Ed, the very existence of these tales proved that his father wasn’t solely a bitter, drunk steamfitter. That there was some spark to his past. Some interest.

Hugh said, “I’ve never met a boxer.”

“Yeah, well, unfortunately, he got knocked out early in his career. He lost his hearing in one ear and broke a few of his vertebrae, and I guess the recovery really took it out of him and his boxing days were over quickly. He went from being some kind of local hotshot to having not much of an education and a lot of aches and pains.”

Ed thought about stopping, but he couldn’t stop now, not when Hugh looked so genuinely interested. It was as if Hugh was counting on him, relying on Ed to deliver a good, engaging story. What else could he do?

“My mother always told me that was when he changed, although who knows. She met him right before he got knocked out. I guess by the time he was injured, she was sufficiently impressed. He was greeted with respect when he took her out and she was just a kid, she was from an extremely strict family, and when he showed her a night out in Boston—y’know, cocktails and dancing, the whole bit—she was charmed. He was handsome then, even after the injuries, a genuinely handsome man. I don’t look like him—in case you were wondering—though I did get his shoulders.” Ed sat up taller, grinned. “Not too bad, am I right?”

Hugh laughed, as if he couldn’t believe anyone would say something so vain. “Hmm. Especially for your height.”

“Ouch,” he said. “
Ouch
. At any rate, my mother saw him through his recovery and he never forgot it. He loved to talk about how patient she was and also how tough. And how, after having me, my mother never gave him that kind of attention again.”

“So he’s a real tough guy.”

Ed nodded, grinned. He told Hugh how—after eight straight amateur victories—during his father’s first professional fight in downtown Worcester, he was felled by a roundhouse curse of a punch. How the press clippings stated that he’d been knocked out cold, but this was not the case. How he’d stood up by the count of eight. How those who’d been there that miserable night still sometimes stopped him on the streets of Dorchester to insist that he’d been robbed.

After an appropriately solemn shaking of the head, Hugh piped up, “Did he teach you to fight?”

Ed paused before nodding. “In the basement.”

“That must have been … something.”

“Oh, it was great. It was the best time we ever had.”

He wasn’t sure why he’d said that or how the lie had come so easily. He imagined the basement, where no lessons had occurred. The furnace was in the basement, and it had been Ed’s job to put the hand-painted sign (
COAL!
) in the window so that the delivery truck would stop. The coal man rigged a series of steel chutes from the truck to the furnace,
and the coal had crashed through the chutes and shot its way into the coal bin. He had grown up accompanying his father down to the basement, watching him shovel fresh coal into the steel door, fit the crank into the middle of the furnace, and slam that crank left to right as if his life were hanging in the balance and depended on the force of the slam. His father had brought him down to the basement to ostensibly train him to one day take over the task of the furnace, but Ed always felt that his father relished doing it himself and the real reason he wanted Ed to watch was to demonstrate just how strong he still was, despite his life-defining injuries. His father slammed that crank until the ashes of the burned coal came through the grate, onto the furnace floor, and, as soon as Ed could sweep, it became Ed’s job to sweep the ashes into the ash can. Several weeks after Ed’s bar mitzvah, his father had sent him down to the basement to get ash for the icy sidewalk. When he’d come up with a bucketful and stood at the top of the dark moldy stairs, the door had been locked and no one would answer. At first Ed thought his father had locked it out of habit, by mistake, but he soon realized his father was playing a joke on him, the kind of behavior that would come up with more and more frequency until his departure from home, and Ed would always be left to wonder just what was it that he had done wrong. But his father wouldn’t admit it was a punishment. “It was a joke,” he’d said. “You gotta learn to lighten up.”

His father had not taught him to box—not in that basement, not anywhere. Ed had asked his father to do the honors, and at first he’d said of course he would, but after asking repeatedly and having his father say he was tired or in no mood or watching the game, it became clear that, for whatever reason, his father didn’t want to. Ed had learned boxing from other teachers; they were never hard to find: his gym teacher Mr. Coleman; “Big Sully,” who cleaned the monkey house; his gambling friend Schwartzy, who had good form as a boxer but lacked the nerves to compete. Ed was a good student in general; he knew this now. He was certain his ability to learn quickly was going to help him later in life, and more than boxing ever had. When his father was in his prime, he’d
saved three Jewish boys from a bunch of Irish thugs. People had said how brave he was, how he looked out for his own, how he’d always be known as a hero. But this was no longer.

“My father’s a decent man,” Ed said, as if it was pity and not anger that consumed him.

The waitress cleared their plates away and Hugh said he’d pay.

“No,” Ed insisted. “I offered. Besides, I thought you didn’t have any money.” With whom, Ed couldn’t help but wonder again, did Hugh usually spend his time?

“I said
real
money. There’s still a bit. The dregs. I’ll buy you beer, coffee, and half a sandwich with the dregs.”

“No,” said Ed. And that was that.

They went to Adams House and drank gin with limes, and Ed met the head of the drama club and a
Crimson
writer whose work he admired. Ed watched as girls approached Hugh and Hugh ignored their not-so-subtle invitations. Ed marveled at how, like preening birds, they offered their pale necks, their bosoms, arranged their jewelry to catch the light as if lighting were the issue. He knocked back more gin; he drank until he forgot to add the lime. Ed and the girls listened as Hugh spoke softly about the Dani tribe of West New Guinea, how their culture was based on a never-ending war between neighboring clans, an ongoing quest to avenge the fallen, to pacify ancestral ghosts. Hugh talked about how human cruelty was paralyzing but compelling and that maybe these specific warriors could be seen as a microcosm for all warriors and that maybe, if people really paid attention to them, some positive change for our own culture—no matter how small—might just result from it. When Hugh was done speaking, the girls didn’t stop listening. They listened to Hugh’s silence and eventual progression into playing impenetrable jazz piano, which only invited them to settle in. One of the girls started listing all of the jazz greats who’d been taken from this life too early, who must have been too pure for this world.

“The fact that they were drunks might have also had something to
do with it,” Ed pointed out, and there was a collective sigh of indignation, though one of the girls did laugh before running out of the room to be sick.

“Let’s go,” Hugh said. “I need some air.”

And on the banks of the Charles, Ed asked Hugh if he meant what he’d said about bringing change to America through studying savages in New Guinea. “There aren’t any Negroes in Fenway Park. Hitler almost succeeded in wiping Jews off the planet. Do you actually think people are open-minded enough to see themselves reflected in completely primitive people? Do you think
you
are?”

“I’m not sure,” said Hugh after a moment. “But, yes, I do think so.”

“Okay,” Ed said, skeptical. “We’ll see.”

“I know you think it’s ridiculous,” Hugh said, but not as if it really mattered.

“Look, I have another question. Why did you ignore those girls? Why did you seem so hell-bent on ending up alone or—worse!—still talking to
me
when you could be off seducing any one of them?”

Hugh picked up a stick and hurled it toward the tar-colored water. He tried to light a cigarette, but his lighter was jammed. “My heart’s bashed in,” he said.

“Your heart? Your heart is fine.”

“What do you know?”

“Your heart is
fine
.”

“You don’t know.”

“Hearts are very resilient.”

“I’m sure yours is.”

“That’s true,” Ed said. He was thinking not of Marla or any number of missed possibilities but of a girl he’d met in New Haven while tailgating two weeks ago; they drank bourbon from her brother’s flask. “It is.”

Hugh finally lit his cigarette and seemed marginally less pathetic. “Every now and then I’ll take a girl out, even go to bed with her, but it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference, no matter who it is. I’m all broken up. Have been for years.”

“I see that. So who did this to you? Who bashed Hugh Shipley’s weak and feeble heart? I’ll change her mind.”

Hugh started laughing, a great unruly laugh, the kind that can change a mood entirely and stop a night’s potential downslide. “I bet you could,” he said.

Ed jumped up on a bench and jumped off it, up and down until he was out of breath. “Tell me something funny.”

“Funny,” Hugh said, as if he was about to recite a dismal poem. But when he spoke up again, he was animated, maybe more than he’d been all night. “All right. I was sent to an Episcopal boarding school when I was eleven.”

“
Eleven?
Jesus, I said funny—not Dickensian.”

“I’m getting there. At this school—where, by the way, I refused to take communion—I was … 
exploring
the storage room in one of the main buildings and of course I was smoking and I opened up a can of potassium sulfate or nitrate—I still can’t remember which one it was—”

“I’m guessing nitrate.”

“Right. And it exploded. Not supposed to be combustible, but I’m telling you I nearly burned the school down. This was unintentional and unconscious, until I read all of Freud during the summer of my senior year and had some fairly major revelations about unconscious desire.”

“I’m still waiting for the funny part.”

“So there I was, running up the stairs with this impromptu bomb, and I threw the bomb in the toilet. Clouds of smoke billowing, I was coughing—terrified—but what happened when I had the opportunity to let it all burn? That school that I hated? That venerable institution where my father broke all the records for athletics, including my grandfather’s? Did I let it burn? Of course not. I saved it!” Hugh was laughing now, and Ed tried to but couldn’t stick with it.

“I saved the school.
I
did. That’s the way I saw it, at least. After the smoke cleared—so to speak—the headmaster took one look at me and said, ‘Now I
know
I’m going to be able to kick you out of this school.’ He was thrilled to finally have a good enough reason. But in the end—here’s the funny part—he couldn’t because my father was, and still is, an important
trustee. Ridiculous,” he said, laughing again. “So completely ridiculous. I nearly burned their school to the ground and still they kept me around.”

“What did your father say?”

“Well, I’m fairly certain he was just relieved that I wasn’t coming home. One of my father’s favorite routines was to talk about how boring children were and to construct the kind of conversations he wished he could simply have had with the help, with regard to looking after me when I was a child.
See that pile of money over there
, he would say,
go on, over there, that pile in the corner—take it. Yes, the PILE. Take the PILE, just take care of the boy and for God’s sake don’t tell me about each sneeze!
”

“I’ve never met him, but you’re a pretty good mimic,” Ed admitted.

“The man can still make me laugh even though I basically hate him.”

“I don’t hate my father,” said Ed, not because it was true but because he could never imagine saying so, certainly not to Hugh Shipley, not to someone whose father didn’t understand what it meant to do any kind of work, not to mention the kind of backbreaking work that his father still did as a steamfitter, laying pipes in the ground, getting coated with dirt and unspecified grime, often narrowly escaping electrical fires because of what he called
Depression cheapo wiring
.

“That’s good,” said Hugh. “I’m happy for you.” He tossed his cigarette and sat down on the bench.

“Is your mother funny, too?”

“My mother’s dead.”

“Oh,” said Ed. “Oh.”

“A long time ago,” said Hugh, as if Ed had asked. “I barely remember her.”

The river and the sky were far off in the distance, and all that felt real was the bench where Hugh was seated and the stubble of grass underfoot. Ed sat down on the bench, too. He wanted to say something, if for no other reason than he was uncomfortable with silence. He hated to sit in silence with anyone. He hated hearing other people’s uncomfortable sounds—their toe-tapping, their throat-clearing, their quiet cracking-of-knuckles. He hated how driven he felt to make the silence stop, how
a roar of discomfort filled his own head like a giant wave crashing to shore. Every few summers, his mother had prevailed and borrowed from the credit union so that they could go to Nantasket Beach, and that cold Atlantic once gave him the tossing of his life; he’d never forgotten the roar of it as the wave drew him up and over. The more he didn’t say to Hugh, the more he withheld words of kindness or humor or whatever the hell he was supposed to say, the more absurd it felt to be there, hearing that ocean’s roar. Why couldn’t he simply say
I’m sorry
, the way that Hugh had done earlier this evening?
I’m sorry
. Hugh had said it strong and clear, and here Ed was, unable to say a word. They were strangers, he thought. They’d remain so.