A Dual Inheritance (62 page)

“I’m a procrastinator,” she cried, a little loopy. “A late bloomer!”

“Hardly,” said Brian. “And,” he raised his glass to her, “I love you,” he said, to approving murmurs and
hear hears
. “Thank you for coming,
everyone. Thank you to Grandmother Ordway, especially, for her patience with our brood and for hosting this wonderful occasion.”

As he continued the brief toast, his children hung around his legs and he gathered them closer.
He’s classy
, Ed thought, disappointed with himself for the teensiest bit of jealousy on Rebecca’s behalf. He’d been expecting a more pretentious tone.

Then Vivi stood on a chair and read out loud from a crinkly piece of paper.

“Among you,” she began, “is a talented chef who taught me how to dance, a person who can make me laugh no matter how shitty—sorry, Grandmother!—my mood, a poet who taught me to stop using all my unnecessary adverbs, and,” she looked up, “at least two people who are, very literally, changing the world.”

She continued with these descriptions, never naming names. She progressed to discussing her upbringing; her parents, who’d taught her everything; her struggles with her career; her inability to separate from both her parents and her children. The (purposefully overstated) theme of the toast became:
What Poor Brian Has to Endure
. The room was overheated—from the Oriental rug came a whiff of old canned soup—and though a part of Ed recognized that Vivi was being more than a little self-indulgent, he also could not take his eyes off her. He found himself wanting her to get back to the mystery descriptions and even wondered if some of them—
you’re an example of fierceness; you’re New York to me
—could have possibly been about him. This was the attraction of self-indulgent people: They gave you permission to be self-indulgent, too. No wonder Rebecca had been drawn to Vivi, especially at fifteen. He remembered his daughter in eighth or ninth grade, throwing a fit because he’d insisted she go to sleep; she hadn’t wanted to be unprepared for school the next day.
I have a responsibility to my classmates
, she’d insisted.
I’m accountable, Daddy
. He’d been so proud of her diligence that he hadn’t noticed—had he?—that in addition to being serious-minded and conscientious, she’d also been a very stressed-out kid.

And there she was
—his daughter
—no longer a kid but so much the
same, intently listening to a tall old man in a wheelchair. Ed sidled up beside her. “Excuse me,” he said, with a smiling glance at the man. “Nice toast, huh?”

She looked down at the old man. “Daddy, this is Mr.—I’m sorry, sir, I only know what Vivi calls you.”

“You can call me that, too. So can he. Who’re you?”

“He’s my dad,” she said, and Ed placed his hands on his daughter’s shoulders.

“Ed Cantowitz,” he said, reaching out his hand, which the man ignored.

“Well, you can both call me Uncle Larry. Why the hell not? Old geezer like me.”

“Uncle Larry,” Ed said, “no kidding.” This old geezer had blown a goddamn bullhorn in his ear. He almost wanted to remind him—but something held him back: Pity? Empathy? Yes, he realized, it was empathy, or something closer to empathy than was exactly comfortable.

“We know each other?” Uncle Larry squinted; the skin around his eyes sagged and pouched so that his eyes looked barely open.

“Nope,” Ed said, while giving Rebecca’s shoulders a squeeze, as if to say,
Time to go
. The old man looked benign now, but there was no point in sticking around to find out; he wasn’t in the mood to be insulted in front of his daughter. And then, as a kind of farewell: “I’ve only heard the stories.”

“Hope you’ll ignore them,” he shouted out as they headed toward the piano, as if this was his favorite line.

Kitty was handing out song sheets. Having written some original lyrics for the occasion, she’d titled the song “Hello, Marriage,” (to the tune of “Hello, Dolly”), and everybody sang—softly at first, despite uncomfortable laughter, and then, as the satiric edge fell away, everyone sang out louder. These were the voices of people who’d been drinking during one of the first days of fall, who largely didn’t belt out karaoke or attend religious gatherings (or if they did: High Holidays, a caroling service), and so singing was a rare enough occurrence that they’d forgotten how good it felt. To sing! Ed accepted a glass of bourbon. Everyone
sang in the Ordway living room as Hugh Shipley banged it out on the baby grand.

“Hello, Marriage” turned into “Some Enchanted Evening,” which turned into “My One and Only.” Ed didn’t see Rebecca or Vivi or anyone under sixty. Also, he didn’t see Helen. He told himself he needed some air, and when he hit the lawn, he realized just how true this was. He planted his feet in the grass, took one of Dr. Goldfarb’s deep breaths, and walked on toward the tennis courts, where there was neither the pop of balls on the Har-Tru nor the grunts of self-laceration with which he was now so familiar, after decades of playing. On the court there were no players, only several children taking turns jumping over the middle of the sagging, fraying net.

Past the courts was where he was headed; he wanted to see what had become of the garden. Though he realized, as he drew closer, that he was actually filled with dread at the thought of seeing all that bounty gone to seed, and he was relieved to see a sunflower blossom poking through the various trees and shrubs that created such privacy within. Of course the garden wasn’t entirely abandoned—he was foolish to think so; surely such a property as this employed at least one gardener.

He remembered being alone in Mrs. Ordway’s garden in the middle of the night. He remembered the heady scent and the humidity and the lingering shame and confusion he’d felt at having upset Helen, who’d been in a touchy mood. He had teased her about wanting babies. Now he understood the reasons for her outsized reaction. But the thought of how she’d snapped at him so bitterly, it filled him—even now—with fear. He was afraid he would inadvertently replicate that feeling, that he would somehow ruin whatever time was allotted to him today.

“Hello, stranger,” Helen said now. She was wrapped in a pale shawl; she was smoking a cigarette. Hydrangeas drooped off the overgrown bushes, the blooms barely holding on. She regarded the cigarette as if it were a foe. “I quit,” she said. “For almost fifteen years.”

“Put that thing out, then,” he said. “Just go ahead and put it out.”

While maintaining eye contact, she took another drag and then she
crushed the sucker into the bottom of her beaded sandal. Her toenails, he noticed, were opalescent, like the inside of a shell.

“You did it,” he marveled.

“You look amazed.”

“Well,” said Ed, “I guess I am.” He took the crushed cigarette from her long cupped fingers and put it in his jacket pocket. He’d throw it out later. He tried not to think of later. He opted not to think beyond this: Helen; her fingers.

“So here we are,” she said.

The garden had nothing of the wildness that he remembered, and yet it was still a garden. Aside from the patch of sunflowers and hydrangea bushes, there were several climbing vines merging with wisteria trees, Japanese maples. Ed felt himself working to contain a smile and wondered why he was doing that; what did he care if she knew he was happy to see her? What did he care if she knew that he was, in fact, ecstatic to find her here, specifically away from the others, away from the distraction of both of their daughters and her grandchildren, her mother, sister, Hugh.

“What?” asked Helen gently. “What are you smiling about?”

“Well, I was thinking that here you are,” he said, “hiding.”

“I’m not hiding.”

“Sure you are. You’re like a princess in some dark fairy tale: hiding in the garden, trying to break a curse.”

“With a stolen cigarette?”

He shrugged. “You tell me.”

“Maybe I’m a young princess trapped in the body of an old hag.”

“Hardly.” And it did come as something of a relief to feel in every cell of his body that he was telling the truth.

“Then what’s the curse?” she asked. For a moment she stepped into a patch of sunlight, and her eyes looked almost golden. “And what’s the princess after, if not to be young again? Isn’t that what all those princesses want?”

“I thought they wanted to find their way home.”

“I’m never at home,” she said. She didn’t seem particularly bothered by this. “You?”

“Sure,” he said, not mentioning that he hadn’t lived there in years. “So,” he said, “Vivi’s married.”

“Yes.”

“Are you happy?” he asked her, ostensibly about the wedding, though it came out with far more portent than he’d intended. He didn’t want to open the door to speak about their actual lives.

She picked up a hydrangea blossom that had dropped to the ground and rubbed its petals between her fingers. She smelled her fingertips and, with a familiar burst of giggling, rubbed at the flower some more. “At the moment?” she asked.

“Sure,” he nodded.
Please
. “Let’s stick with the moment.”

“Then, yes,” she said. “I guess I am.”

“Okay, then,” he said. He wanted to take hold of her hand, her neck, and her tufted hair. “I thought—” He stopped himself.

“You thought what?”

“I thought you’d stay with me.” He hadn’t planned on saying it, hadn’t even dreamed of it, but once he did, he knew it had been inevitable. His own breath echoed in his ears the way it had on so many turbulent flights he’d taken; then as now, he prayed for his own survival. “You have any idea how badly I wanted you to?”

Helen didn’t say anything. But she also didn’t look away. He took a few steps closer.

When the girl came running into the garden, Ed felt ungenerous toward the little interloper. But then Ed saw Helen’s skin flush from her chest, up her neck, and up to the tips of her vaguely elfin ears, and his ungenerous feelings melted into gratitude, because he could tell that Helen was embarrassed, and what did she have to be embarrassed about? What, indeed.

“Nana, there’s cake,” said the little girl. “And we made the cake? And so I think you should eat a lot of it, because I know you love cake so much?”

“I do, darling,” she said, scooping her up onto her hip, with surprising—even shocking—ease. “Bina, this is Ed. Auntie Rebecca’s daddy. Ed, this is Bina—
Sabine
. But Nana doesn’t call her that—too grown up for now, in my humble opinion.”

“Nana doesn’t like candy so much,” Sabine said, by way of a greeting. “She doesn’t like gum or lollipops.”

“No?” asked Ed. They began to walk back to the house.

“But cake?” said the girl, with her eyes comically wide. “Cake or cookies? Forget about it! She LOVES cake.”

“Forget about it?” Helen was laughing now, and it was so different from any of her familiar giggling spurts. It was a laugh that made him realize not only that there was little current information he
did
know about her but that he was really curious; he wanted to know. He wanted to know.

He wanted to know.

As they approached the house, Sabine spotted Brian, crying out, “Daddy, I found Nana.
Now
can we have the cake?”

Helen sighed. “She doesn’t take me for granted or anything.”

The sun went behind a patch of clouds, and Ed was struck by the fact that this day would turn to evening, and sooner than he’d realized. “That’s a beautiful thing, you know.”

“What is?”

“To have a grandmother to take for granted.”

She looked at him for seconds longer than she strictly needed to. “I want you to have something,” she said, as they entered the house through the kitchen. “Do you mind waiting here? I’ll just be a second.”

“What is it?” he asked, and then, “Never mind. Of course.”

While he waited for her—what was she getting?—Ed sat on a bar stool and ate grapes from a fruit bowl, although he was anything but hungry. Helen hadn’t mentioned his questionable business practices or the
Times
article or prison, and he wondered if and when she would. It then occurred to him that she might see him as nothing more than some kind of colorful character, a notion that made him queasy.

“Can I get you something?” asked the caterer, a woman who looked like any number of teenage boys from his youth, complete with brilliantined hair.

“No thanks,” he said, before starting with his mantra of self-comfort: interrogation. Did she work in the city? Where did she buy her meat? Her produce? Did she go to college? Cooking school? Why not? Pastimes? Tennis? Gym? Concerts? He found that the details of other people’s lives worked to soothe his nerves. He wasn’t interested in people, per se, but rather in the mundane details of living; everybody—
everybody
—had to pass the time.

Just then Vivi came into the kitchen, looking upset. “Hi, kiddo,” he offered.

“Hi,” said Vivi flatly. She put her fingertips to her eyes. “Ed,” she asked, “what are you doing here?” And though he knew she meant here in this kitchen, it did sound as though she meant here—at this party, today.

Though always ready with a comeback, Ed had absolutely nothing to say. The caterer busied herself with vast sheets of plastic wrap; the dishwasher washed dishes; from the living room came the sound of laughter.

What are you doing here?
It was a fair question.

If he could have, he would have said this to Vivi with the utmost sincerity:
I am here for your mother
.

But even that wouldn’t have been the whole truth. Because he was here for Hugh, too.

He was here to have Hugh condemn him not only for cutting him off but for
why
he’d cut him off. What happened with Helen: He did want to be condemned for it. Ed realized that for this to happen he would have had to show up at this wedding party and not only confess to having slept with the mother of the bride almost fifty years ago but he would have had to reveal the (perhaps deranged) extent of his torch-carrying.

What are you doing here?

He was here for Hugh to look him in the eye and—just as his own
daughter had—condemn the illegal manner in which Ed had made
real dough
for fifteen years. He was looking for Hugh to seem disappointed in him. To say:
I just thought you were better than that
. But all Hugh had seemed was wounded. He’d also seemed bitter.