A Dual Inheritance (8 page)

But before he could say hello, he’d noticed that Hugh was speaking with a girl, a stunning girl—he’d also downplayed that part of his observation—and that it was clearly no light conversation. First it had seemed that she was angry, but after watching for a minute it looked as though she was struggling to breathe.

Then Hugh had stood up and taken her by the shoulders, and—how could Ed explain this?—he’d looked scared. Ed watched them for another second, but it quickly started to feel as if he was not supposed to be watching, that no one should be watching, and that—though they were doing nothing but standing together—they should have been given complete and utter privacy.

“I wonder who you mean,” said Hugh.

“I’m sure it’ll come to you. Probably when you least expect it.”

Ed had woken up this morning with a keen urge to drive his new car and figured that—especially with some company—he didn’t need a destination. A Sunday drive. Wasn’t that considered a normal—even a
civilized—thing to do? Though he didn’t feel particularly civilized. He wanted to know why Hugh was avoiding talk about this girl and why he was getting the distinct sensation of being placated. It made him want to drive faster.

“Do you really not remember your mother?” asked Ed, in a tone that sounded aggressive, even to his own ears.

“Very little,” Hugh said. “I wish I did. What made you think of
that
?”

“I don’t know,” said Ed. “I don’t want to say you were lucky that she died so young, but—”

“Then don’t,” Hugh said.

Ed looked at Hugh, and there wasn’t a trace of a smile.

“Forget I said that,” Ed said.

He suddenly remembered a place he’d heard about—a pond closer than Walden, a place that reliably froze each winter, no matter how mild the weather. Ed imagined sliding out on his shoes, looking down at the expanse of frozen water, out at the kids who’d inevitably be testing new skates.

In his mind’s eye he could see himself speeding instead of slipping, feeling the air there just like he felt the air here on the highway, nearly raw on his face. They drove in wind-whipping silence and the road stretched out in front of them and, though the idea had never held all that much appeal—he was no great fan of the Beats—Ed briefly wished that they were setting out to drive across the whole country. He would drive and shut the hell up for once. But when they reached the turnoff into the woods—the one he’d heard about from a girl he’d taken out a few times—he made a sharp right, and they bumped along over rocks and branches until the trees thinned out and there was the silvery pond—
the Big Deep
, the girl had called it. She’d skated there when she was a kid.

It was a relief to get out of the car, to stop hearing the wind. Though he’d done nothing but drive, the air had made him feel as if he’d played hard in some outdoor sport. He’d make sure to put the top up on the
way back. There were only two other parked cars, and one looked as if it hadn’t been started in months. Ed scanned the pond for signs of happy shrieking kids, but there weren’t any kids, only a stooped figure standing far enough away that Ed couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, and this felt like a bad sign somehow.

Hugh jumped up and grabbed a thick branch, hung there momentarily before launching into chin-ups; he was short of breath by the time he let go. And of course Ed had to give it a try. As Ed pulled up on his fourth chin-up (Hugh had done five), Hugh said, “My father’s mentioned that my mother would let me out and run me—you know, like a dog.” He said it as if no time had passed between Ed’s original question and now, and this was one of Hugh’s best qualities as Ed saw it—the ability to pick up on lost queries, to not care if the moment was over, and to thereby create a sense of extended, even luxurious, time.

As Ed pulled up on that branch with every ounce of his strength, he watched how Hugh hoisted himself up onto the hood of Ed’s new car, which should not have mattered, but Ed wanted him off the green paint.

“Whatever the weather,” said Hugh, “if it was snowing or raining, she’d open the door and out I’d bolt.”

“Huh,” said Ed, after letting go of the branch. He’d done five chin-ups. His arms were shaking.

“He’d probably instructed her to train me,” Hugh said. “Probably wanted me disciplined for athletics early. What a false start that was.”

Ed recalled the previous month when they had gone to The Game. Hugh wouldn’t pry the goddamn movie camera from his face, and Ed knew that Hugh wasn’t capturing it for any sentimental reasons. Hugh cared less about football—and whether Harvard beat Yale—than about capturing the
naïve hysteria
of this game that Ed knew Hugh had grown up watching with his father and brothers each fall and that Ed, incidentally, wholeheartedly enjoyed. With his giant camera (which held by anyone else would have been awkward), Hugh was making some kind of avant-garde short film—at least that was what Ed deduced from Hugh’s grudging description. All Ed understood was that the game in
its entirety—when put forth by Hugh—would be rendered in fast motion and thus (Ed supposed) would seem suitably ridiculous.

“Hey, listen,” said Ed, attempting his best impersonation of nonchalance. “Would you mind getting off my new car?”

Hugh did so without hesitating, and they walked toward the pond. “So that’s all you remember?” Ed asked. “Running?” He was suddenly nervous about sliding out on the ice. There was likely a reason for the absence of the kids. And how could he know that the girl who’d told him about this place wasn’t trying to exact some kind of revenge? He wasn’t always terribly polite, especially when it was clear that a date wasn’t going well. His social unease quickly became physical, and he often started to twitch. He couldn’t remember if she’d told him about the pond before or after he’d suggested they call it quits.

“I think I remember this one window,” Hugh ventured. “I have an image in my head of this small window—a picture window. Seeing it from outside. Seeing my mother’s face and then the face disappearing. It used to seem like a memory I’d invented, but now I think it might be a real one, because I would have been outside in the cold and she would have been inside and the window would have fogged from her breath against the glass. And she would have been smoking, too. She’s smoking in almost all of the pictures. So—there you have it—a memory.”

“It wasn’t for me to ask,” Ed said.

Hugh gave a noncommittal nod.

“Even I know that,” Ed admitted.

“Please, tell me something else so I don’t have to be stuck with my one image of the window all day long.”

“What do you want to hear?”

“I don’t know,” muttered Hugh. “Something.”

Ed thought about how, as a little kid, he’d been terrified—petrified—of the dark. His mother had taken him into the windowless bathroom next to the kitchen, in order to get him over his fear. She shut off the lights and stood with him. At first he’d cry and then he’d settle down and then they’d just stand there, talking in the dark. He remembered her
laughter and how she loved to talk and that she was truly good at it. When any conversation went off the rails, she could always, seamlessly, steer it back.

Ed had always thought of this as a happy story, and he considered relaying it to Hugh, but he realized it wasn’t a happy story; it wasn’t even a story. It was a mother and son talking in a dark bathroom, and that seemed kind of weird.

“Well?” said Hugh. “Give me
something
. What kind of kid were you?”

“Nosy.”

“Big surprise.”

“I asked my fourth-grade teacher—Mrs. O’Connor, a widow—if she’d ever had sex with her husband before he died. I’d just gotten a handle on the birds and the bees, and since she didn’t have children I was confused. I was sure I was going to get a beating, but she nodded. And of course I couldn’t leave it alone,” Ed said, surprised at how embarrassed he actually felt with this memory fresh in his mind. “I asked her what it was like.
What was it like?
Jesus, what a mouth I had. Again I expected to get a beating, a bad one, but instead she looked very calm and still and—I’ll always remember this—she said:
Lovely
.”

“I can’t believe she didn’t kick you out of class.”

“
I
would have kicked me out of class.”

“No, you wouldn’t have.”

“That’s true. Who knows what I would have done. Probably would’ve given me a smack. God help my future kids.”

They were standing on the banks of the pond. The water, to Ed’s relief, wasn’t frozen after all. It looked black in patches, and the sun had gone behind the clouds. Hugh just shook his head.

“You hungry?” Ed asked.

“I could eat.”

There was a place on the road. Inside was nothing special. When Ed ordered raw sirloin, Hugh looked at him askance.

“Trust me. I know meat. My uncle’s the supplier here.”

When the raw sirloin arrived, Ed split it in two, seasoned it with salt and pepper, cut it up in small pieces, and—voilà!—steak tartare. He’d had steak tartare for the first time on a date last year with a Radcliffe girl who proclaimed it her favorite dish, and he’d figured why not make it himself for a fraction of the cost? He was so proud when Hugh tasted it and declared it as fine as any he’d ever had. They drank scotch and ordered more raw sirloin and ate more steak tartare.

Ed could not stop talking about money. “For instance,” he said, making an effort to keep his voice lowered, as he knew that the subject—not to mention the drinking—would raise his voice automatically, “this check. If you pay it, I feel bad; if I pay it, you feel bad.”

“I don’t feel bad if you pay it,” said Hugh, laughing.

“I just hate splitting tabs. I feel like a communist.”

Hugh kept laughing, drained his last drink. “You’re generous,” he said. “I get it.”

And it was Hugh’s dismissive sarcasm in that moment (the same laconic sarcasm that Ed otherwise greatly appreciated) that clarified for Ed the true destination of the day.

He wanted—in fact he needed—Hugh to see his father’s house.

If Hugh could only see where Ed was from—or so Ed reasoned—he would admit that he felt superior to Ed. Ed always
sensed
superiority, but each time he confronted Hugh about it, Hugh insisted he was being paranoid. There was an incident at the Museum of Fine Arts that still elevated his heart rate; Ed had mistaken a Monet for a Manet, gone on to elaborate for a good minute on the latter’s life story before Hugh bothered to point out his mistake. And only after Hugh had let him go on and on.

The thing was, Ed didn’t really mind if Hugh felt superior in terms of where they came from. In fact, maybe what he was realizing was: He preferred it. They were from two different places, and on venturing into the world Hugh had definite and specific advantages. Ed only wanted to hear Hugh acknowledge he’d had it easy in comparison, which Hugh never would come out and say. He preferred offering philosophical arguments,
which were rarely enlightening, which were, in fact, irritating and only backed up Hugh’s stubborn denial that any of it mattered.

Ed would get over this discrepancy in their backgrounds; he would. Because he was going to personally level the playing field, and he was looking forward to it. He didn’t want to be an underdog forever.

Yes, they wanted entirely different lives, and, yes, Hugh cared little for Ed’s version of success, just as Ed cared little about the Third World, unless it was in the context of untapped resources that might affect the marketplace. And perhaps it was senseless to frame anything between them as a competition, because there was no relevant contest. But could Hugh be
totally
uninterested in money? Could anyone be?

Ed only wanted the acknowledgment before they left the starting gate that he
was
the underdog. Objectively. And that maybe it wasn’t fair, maybe it wasn’t even important. But it was so.

As they drove along in his new Thunderbird (top up), Ed watched the circus that was Blue Hill Avenue through a faint whiskey haze: the fruit and fish stores. The sock and underwear stores. The bakeries and hosieries and crowds of people in transit. He watched the old men in skullcaps and long black coats, the Negro women in bright clothing, and the men in those wide-brimmed hats that Ed knew came from Roxbury’s Hat Man; he watched the
balabuste
matrons haggling and lugging their goods. And Ed, of course, watched Hugh, who was also taking in the scene.

The Italian banana man called out, “Banana, banana, banana.”

When Ed switched his focus entirely to Hugh, he saw two things: that Hugh’s expression was unreadable and that the avenue—when he attempted to view it with an outsider’s gaze—was, if nothing else, lively.

“Roosevelt rode his limo right here,” Ed said, as if he had complete confidence that Hugh was even vaguely interested. “Thousands of Jews throwing rose petals—can you imagine? And JFK—he ate French fries in
kishke
grease right there.” He pointed at the G & G Deli, with its enormous vertical sign. “Ever had
kishke
grease?” Ed asked.

Hugh shook his head, but whether this was an answer to Ed’s question or whether he was simply overwhelmed was unclear. “I’ve never seen so many pharmacies,” he said.

Hugh was quiet, and maybe Ed was imagining it but he seemed either overly respectful or profoundly uncomfortable as they parked in front of the triple-decker three-family home.

“He knows we’re coming,” Hugh asked, “right?”

“Not exactly,” Ed said, getting out of the car. “It doesn’t matter,” he assured Hugh, but he sounded unconvincing—even nervous.

As he led Hugh up the steps and knocked on the door, Ed wondered if maybe this was a terrible idea. He was suddenly overcome with the fierce desire to have never revealed a single personal detail, not only to Hugh but to anyone he had ever known. Power emerged from mystery. And what the hell else was he doing besides killing any vestige of mystery he possessed? This was—he was sure now—a terrible idea, but when he heard his father coughing his way to the door, he also knew he didn’t have it in him to run away, leaving his father (not to mention Hugh) to wonder why someone would do such a thing—such a little-punk thing to do to a broken man.