A Dual Inheritance (20 page)

He took in the room, which, first thing in the morning, never failed to impress. It was a sea of mahogany desks. Only Mr. Ordway and Mr. Keller had offices. Everyone else was out in the main room, all within earshot of one another. He thought about how Hugh would react to this room, housed in a former squash court with little to no ventilation, with décor consisting of severe antiques and paintings. He couldn’t picture Hugh’s life, but he did keep up imagined conversations.

Your workplace is giving me anxiety
is how he imagined Hugh would respond.
Anxiety and a double migraine
.

Come on
, Ed would say,
don’t all these old hunting paintings make you feel like going out and conquering something?

He wanted to tell Hugh just then that someone could make a fortune selling this kind of décor to the educated average Joe, who was smart enough to know that dead pheasants and dark wood meant not that you gave a shit about hunting but that, if you could somehow possess these images (home products, hunting-influenced sportswear), they would signify wealth and class and … being an authentic American.

Since Hugh was, of course, not there, Ed reminded himself to jot down that idea when he arrived at his very own (at least until Labor Day) mahogany rolltop desk. He sketched out his ideas in green felt-tip pen on a yellow legal pad, usually on the subway—in motion, which was where all his best ones began.

“Good morning, Polly,” Ed said expansively. “Good morning, Bess.”

“Good morning, Mr. Cantowitz.”

“Any news about the air-conditioning?”

“ ‘Fraid not,” said Polly.

“Terrible heat,” said Bess.

He was usually the first to arrive, and he relished the moment. Polly was an apple-cheeked brunette with green eyes, who couldn’t have been much older than he was. She always brought the same thing for lunch—cream cheese and cucumber on rye—and ate at her desk. He was often tempted to ask her to join him at the diner around the corner, just for a change of scene.

“If you don’t mind my saying so, Mr. Cantowitz,” said Bess, “that’s a smart suit.”

“Why, thank you, Bess.”

As he arrived at his desk and sat down for the morning, Ed actively willed himself to forget that Helen’s father was his boss and that Hugh was living in the bush and that, even when Hugh eventually returned, Ed wasn’t sure they’d have anything to talk about ever again, especially because Ed
was
working for Helen’s father, whom Ed knew that Hugh—though he wouldn’t, of course,
just come out and say it
—officially despised.

Each time he laid out his papers—his
Wall Street Journal
, his
Financial Times
—each time he licked an ink-smudged finger to turn a page or outlined a number or a phrase in his green felt-tip, he thought of Guy Ordway sitting at the breakfast table, eating buttery eggs. He thought of the sky through the trees, those sharp blue angles, clean white cotton sheets. But by the time he progressed to making his phone calls, he forgot about Guy Ordway and Fishers Island and all he thought of was earning the confidence of whomever was on the other end of the line. He tried to picture the eyes of the fellow to whom he was speaking and to always get straight to the point, and it appeared that his tactics—lack of small talk, tendency to skip the salutations before launching into the
matter at hand—were working. It seemed to Ed that with each phone call, he was accumulating notice from the investment funds.
What are you working on?
said Ed, first thing. And they were talking.

Most of the time, Ed forgot about how he’d broken the news of the Ordway Keller offer to his father and how his father had hollered about betrayal for a good twenty minutes before Ed had called him an uneducated bully and they hadn’t spoken since. He forgot he was the only Jew in the office, forgot about how more than once he’d returned from the john to hear a peal of collective laughter peter out or how, upon returning to his desk after lunch, he heard that moon-faced Parker Earle say cheerily into the telephone, “I couldn’t agree more! Absolutely! This is why one doesn’t want
too
many Heebs as friends!”

Ed forgot everything besides his ultimate goal: to distinguish himself. And after being at Ordway Keller for about a month, he knew that if he wanted to distinguish himself in the long term, he could not focus solely on the established companies that Ordway Keller handled, not where the majority of these well-bred gentlemen who’d be arriving any minute from Greenwich and Darien and the Upper East Side and sitting at desks all around him were already connected, those who would be content to discreetly negotiate their clients’ mergers and tinker with their financial strategies. Ed knew that his strength lay in knowing—
really
knowing—that the past was no guide to the future. Opportunity rested in thinking about Americans and how they were changing and how change would affect their decisions. He knew that decisions started small, but he was sure if he could just understand how certain decisions were made, he could excel at buying and selling stock and he would be indispensable.

Ed knew this, but it didn’t change the fact that this was his first job that didn’t involve laying pipes in the ground, he had yet to set foot in a business-school lecture hall, and—most important—Guy Ordway was his only connection, and a tenuous one at that. He also knew that, before distinguishing himself as brilliant, it would go a long way in this old-line world to distinguish himself as distinctly genial and conventional. Here at Ordway Keller, the first task he laid out for himself was to consistently
listen to Jack Stone, which was much
much
harder than it seemed when he wrote this directive in green ink on yellow lined paper each morning on the subway.
LISTEN TO STONE
(or at this point: LTS) meant that—in addition to suffering through the pointless chess analogies—Ed had to complete the endless daily loop of life as an associate junior analyst. Jack Stone asked him to do something and he did it. Phase one.

This was difficult.

Because after only a week of commuting from the Upper West Side to the Financial District and seeing how many men and women wore office attire on the subway—even when it was just after dawn—he became convinced that factory jobs in the United States were overwhelmingly giving way to office jobs and that there was a fortune to be made in office products and office furniture. He became convinced of the urgency of this situation and how much money there was to gain.

Also, art. During his first weekend in town, when he went to the Museum of Modern Art, he was shocked at the lines to get in. And since he knew from his excellent liberal arts education that displaying art on one’s walls in order to display personal wealth was, in fact, a Jewish phenomenon begun by the Rothschilds in the 1700s, he liked the notion that during this most cruel twentieth century, when so many art collections—so many legacies—were ripped off lavishly papered walls, some Jews would acquire all over again and, in doing so, they would triumph. Upon achieving that first, significant deal (already inflated in his mind to mythic proportions), he vowed to enter the art market and buy something important, preferably a painting—brightly colored.

He’d run the art idea by Ira Gersten, a sportswriter he’d met outside the YMHA, who, unlike Ed, was primarily an enthusiast (
Great
, he said in response, while vigorously nodding;
that’s terrific
). Ira looked decidedly disheveled, but Ed had assumed he was wealthy because he was also unlocking a beauty of a car, and who had a car in New York City? But when Ed admired the gleaming black Chrysler Imperial and told him about his own green beauty back in Dorchester, Ira had volunteered how he’d put himself through Columbia University by working at his
uncle’s Chrysler dealership out in Oceanside. “I’ve always loved cars,” said Ira.

Sometimes life was really that simple.

Because, by the end of their first conversation, not only had Ed made a fine friend but he had borrowed Ira’s Kelley Blue Book, and after a week of sleepless nights comparing the prices of the used cars sold at auction in the States to the recent market-share values of Chevy, Ford, and Chrysler, quarter by quarter, Ed had come up with this: They were all the same-quality car and they were all worth the same figure, more or less, at retail. But—and he’d been over it countless times—it seemed that Chrysler was selling, used, at three hundred dollars less. Which meant—it was obvious, wasn’t it?—that Chrysler was going to be more popular with a conscientious consumer. Time to buy Chrysler stock. Time to explain this personal theory to a significant financial institution. Phase two.

When he wasn’t working at the office, he was perfecting this theory or tagging along with Ira to ball games (a highlight being two weeks earlier, when—clearly under some nostalgic spell of the Yankees winning in the eleventh inning, after forsaking baseball for years—a sassy older broad extended a Labor Day weekend party invitation to Ed and Ira both). His life: baseball and numbers and subway tokens. Numbers for hours on end; rows and rows of numbers that represented companies’ lifeblood, which only reproduced in his head when he finally walked away for the day. The women on the subway rocking side to side, reaching up for straps to steady themselves, reaching and revealing—against their silky shirts—the intimate glory of sweat stains. In his minuscule rented room—so tired he could barely bring himself to read the evening paper or even work himself into a frenzy about the parade of women who rode public transportation in this city—he fell into a crushing sleep.

The longer Ed had the car theory, the more clearly he recognized its excellence, but he also kept checking it again and again—not only for
fissures but also for the unacceptable discovery that someone else had already thought of it. It was, needless to say, distracting. He was almost hesitant to share it with Ordway (Ed had no trouble imagining him listening intently and advancing him not an inch within the company), but the longer he sat on it, the more acutely he felt that he was in no position to do anything with his own idea. He had a little less than two hundred dollars to his name, and—up until this point—the extent of his relationship with a bank had been accepting a free pen when, upon graduation, he’d opened an account at Cambridge Savings Bank.

Listen to Mr. Stone
. Ed repeated this to himself as Stone approached and dropped a sheaf of annual reports and 10-K statements on top of Ed’s desk.

“Mr. Stone,” Ed blurted out to Stone’s back, as he hadn’t so much as paused to say hello.

When Stone turned around, Ed couldn’t help but notice that it was a particularly athletic move, as if Stone had suddenly shed twenty years and was in the hallways of his alma mater.

“Did you play ball?”

“Did I what?” said Mr. Stone.

“I was just wondering if you played ball. Y’know, in school.”

“As a matter of fact I did. I was a three-year varsity letterman.” Though he finally grinned, he seemed determined not to show his teeth. “How did you guess?”

“The way you turned your foot. I’m good like that.”

“What can I help you with, Ed? I’m backed up at my own desk, you see.”

“Of course, sir. But I have an idea. An idea I’d like to share with you.”

Jack Stone didn’t even ask him to explain. He simply raised his thin ginger brow. He listened as Ed explained his car theory, but he never quit looking skeptical.

“Cantowitz,” he said, “this sounds like a marketing ploy. And this is not a marketing firm.” He said the word
marketing
as if it belonged in the same category as the dreaded
deal
.

Ed knew better than to argue. There was no arguing here, as far as he could see. That would only serve to make things worse. And so he simply shrugged and said, “Mr. Stone, thanks for listening,” and silently applauded such deep self-restraint. Because now he was absolutely certain that Jack Stone possessed a limited intellect and that it was likely the room and the street were full of fools like this. He wanted to prove his correct assessment and his clearly superior intellect, but—most crucially—he wanted to speed through this portion of his life, when someone like Stone was his superior.

As Ed approached the elevator after sundown, he was sure he was the last one to leave the office, and he checked his wristwatch, exaggerating the motion so that he might admire the cuff on his seersucker suit, which had not needed a stitch of alterations.

When he heard the voice behind him, he was so shocked he almost hollered.

“My daughter tells me your friend Hugh has yet to make it to Paris.”
Bastard
, he thought.
You scared the shit out of me
. “Is that right?” asked Ed, feigning indifference. “Good evening, sir. I haven’t heard from either of them.”

“No?”

“I doubt there are postcard kiosks where Hugh is working.”

“Working,” scoffed Ordway. “No, I suppose there aren’t.” He shook his head vigorously. His face turned distinctly pink. “Do you think he actually had the gall to stand her up?”

“No,” said Ed quickly. “Absolutely not.”

“Of course,” said Mr. Ordway. “Of course not. But it doesn’t look right. It
does not look right
. You understand?”

“Is Helen—” Ed began. “Is everything okay?”

The elevator doors opened and there was Mr. Grisby, who’d likely sat inside that elevator all day long, going up and down.

“What do I know?” muttered Ordway. “Do you think I understand any of this?” He coughed, and—after overdoing a smile for Grisby—Mr. Ordway took his voice down. “Do you think I understand why they are individually gallivanting around different continents? Why she is set
on hitching her future—not to mention her family name—to a man who has displayed not one sign of normalcy? Do you think I have the faintest idea of what is going on here? My daughter tells me nothing.”

“I imagine,” Ed tried, “she’s … swept up.” He knew he sounded foolish, but what in God’s name was he supposed to say? He wanted to keep his head down and to not fuck up; he wanted to devastate every powerful man he encountered with his excellent judgment. And though he’d tried—of course he had—to picture Helen
gallivanting
right down the boulevard, like any number of French actresses against whom she very much held her own (his basis for comparison based solely on the limited films he’d attended at the Brattle with Hugh and Helen), this was difficult to picture, because Paris may as well have been the Ethiopian desert. As much as his personal universe had widened
—he was living and working in New York City
—his vision had also narrowed. He knew how he needed to live right now in order to get ahead, and as the U.S. embassy was exploring alternate leadership in South Vietnam, and while Dr. King may well have been rehearsing his
I Have a Dream
speech, Ed scoured 10-K forms and read annual reports from early morning to well past any sane person’s dinner hour. When he was tempted to sleep an extra fifteen minutes or leave the office a little earlier, he only had to picture his father’s expression of absolute disdain.