“Fuck ’em,” his father said. “Can’t drive me out.”
“Fine,” said Ed, “fine.” But still he didn’t turn the knob on the front door. “Listen, let me ask you something: Why do you suddenly care about the rebbe? I’ll tell you the last time you stepped foot in a shul, because I know. And you haven’t even said kaddish. Nothing. Not even for her.”
“You watch,” said his father, clearly not listening to any of it. “You watch how Rabbi Steuyer leaves his devoted congregation of slumlords and working-class racists. Sure,” he said, “he’ll go somewhere morally superior, but watch how he will also conveniently leave the schwartzes. He’ll go someplace far away, where he can cry about civil rights with the rest of the rich and deluded mishpocha out there in the suburbs, who are sending all of their money to Christian charities in Alabama while their own people—” He faltered for a second, and Ed and Hugh watched him do it. Neither interrupted, and when he noticed this, he just stood there, seemingly uninterested in finishing.
“You couldn’t even sit down for a goddamn minute, let alone not embarrass me.” Ed opened the door and then closed it again. “Let me ask you something else, Pop. Why can’t you sit down when I come here with my friend? Why can’t you show me that respect? You’re shuffling around like some kind of martyr—”
He didn’t know what to expect when he said that, but his father’s face registered fury to its full—and in fact rare—extent, and though his father had hardly ever punched him, Ed had to stop his own hands from flying up, ready to protect his face.
Murray Cantowitz did not punch his son. He only ran his hand over his face a few times before he looked at Ed once more.
“You know why I can’t sit down?” his father asked. “You want to know about it? I can’t sit down because a schwartze youngster slashed my back pants pocket with a razor so that my wallet would fall to the ground. Happened to Sol Cohen and he only lost the wallet. Me? I can’t sit down on my goddamn ass because the hoodlum wasn’t so skilled—or maybe he was!—and I got cut.”
Ed felt ill, physically ill, the same terrible feeling in the pit of his stomach and the very top of his skull as when he’d looked over at his father the one time during the burial, after he’d shoveled dirt onto his mother’s coffin.
“You try lying facedown on a gurney while some medical intern sutures your ass,” his father said. “You just try it.”
“You should have called me,” Ed said.
His father shook his head, and finally, carefully, sat down on the amber couch. “Any day now,” his father said, wincing. “Watch that rebbe put his house on the market.”
They drove back to Cambridge in silence. Ed was relieved that evening had come, that at least the light was cooperating in ending this awful day. There were boats on the river, cars on the highway, so many people busy with getting the most from their Sunday, before the week took hold. He felt the opposite and always had, even when he was a kid. The routine of school—its clarity and urgency—was what he enjoyed most, and he imagined that even if he had all the time and money in the world, he would always want to work. The weekends felt amorphous, and the absence of structure unnerved him. When he woke up each morning, he had to fill up the day somehow, fill it up until it stopped feeling so shapeless, so free.
“Sometimes I think it’s good my mother didn’t live to see him like this,” Ed said at last.
Hugh only nodded.
“She would’ve been so ashamed.”
“What do you think she would have thought?”
“About my father?”
“No,” Hugh said, “the neighborhood. The—what was the word your father used?”
“I don’t know,” Ed said, agitated. “Why? How the hell should I know? Was my mother a political person? No, she was not.”
Hugh didn’t respond right away. He lit a cigarette and smoked. Only when he finally needed it did he flip open the glossy wood ashtray. “Why didn’t you call your father?”
“What?”
“Why didn’t you call him to let him know we were coming?”
Ed stepped on the gas and changed lanes twice. “What are you saying?”
“I’m not saying anything. I’m asking why you didn’t tell him—warn him—that not only were you coming but that you were bringing me along?”
“Is that what you would have done?”
“Yes.”
“Because you’re so courteous?”
Hugh shook his head. Hugh said nothing, but Ed heard: Because I’m not cruel.
“You leave that house and you see who my father is, what an aggressive, bigoted person, and the first thing you say is that I should have given him fair warning? You think it would have made a difference?”
“Keep your eyes on the road,” Hugh said.
“They are.”
Hugh started to say something but stopped himself again.
“What.”
“He was unwashed. He was embarrassed. If you know you’re going to object to him to begin with, and if you know I am, too, why not at least give him the opportunity to present himself the way he wants to?”
“Are you saying he deserves that?”
Hugh shrugged. “I think I would at least do that for you—if not for him—if we were going to see my father.”
“Your father is different.”
“That’s true. My father is very well dressed.” Hugh forced a smile that went nowhere. “Okay, he went to Harvard and, yes, he’s rich. But he is also a racist and a drunk and an anti-Semite on top of it, and so, if I was going to subject you to him, if I—for some mysterious reason—felt the need to do that, I would at least try my best to warn him to behave in front of you. That’s what I would do.”
Ed just nodded and kept his eyes on the road. He couldn’t imagine he’d be able to look at Hugh after the car was long parked, after they were back in their world, which, it seemed to him now, was as fake as the ivory sailboat in his father’s house. “You’re right,” he said.
“I know.” Hugh rolled down the window and the air came rushing in.
“But you would never invite me to meet your father.”
“Why do you say that?”
Ed willed himself to slow down and shut up, to stop plunging this day into an even greater decline. But though he managed to ease off the gas, this fake temperate voice did not stand a chance. “Because,” he answered, “you won’t even tell me the name of a girl you are obviously sleeping with.” He saw the lights on the river, the familiar blur that was Cambridge, and felt a crushing nostalgia for the day he’d set out to have.
Hugh emitted a hollow laugh. “Are you saying I was lying to you earlier, when you asked about her?”
“I’m saying you’re not interested in honesty.”
He thought of how Hugh seemed somehow too eager to step into his father’s house and to engage in a conflict that belonged to Ed and his father, a conflict—so many conflicts!—that was ugly and embarrassing and theirs, and how Ed could not imagine Hugh ever allowing any conflicts of his own to go anywhere beyond the realm of storytelling.
“I’m saying,” continued Ed, “that with or without that Leica around your neck, you’re a voyeur.”
Ed parked, and—to his amazement—Hugh made no move to get out of the car. He didn’t speak or look at Ed but sat finishing his cigarette. Finally—when they were back on the sidewalk, when they started walking the short distance toward their houses, before they would need to decide whether or not to split ways—finally Ed came out with it.
“I’m going to be blunt,” Ed said. “What’s the big secret?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I can’t handle secrets. I’m too suspicious by nature and I’m too tense.”
“No, really?”
“Listen—”
“No,” Hugh said calmly, “no. You listen.” He looked up for a moment at the evening sky. “You put me through some kind of test today, and I didn’t appreciate it. You’re impatient an
d aggressive—and that’s not the same as being Jewish.”
“I didn’t put you through a test,” Ed argued.
“Why did you want me to meet your father like that?”
“I wanted you to see where I come from.”
Hugh shook his head. “Not really. You were just using me.”
“Using you? You think I’m using you?”
“Sure. Isn’t that what friends do?”
“No, not in my book. I don’t want that kind of friend. I told you, I don’t have any time for it.”
“I see,” said Hugh.
Some jerk honked his horn in one steady blare in the distance, and Ed saw Hugh wince.
“Come on,” said Ed, giving Hugh a gracious punch on the shoulder. “The rest of them are the secret-keepers.” He looked out on the Yard, where people were climbing steps and walking in clusters toward dinner on Mass Ave. “Not you. You’re different.”
“Is that right?”
“You know you are. Listen to you. You’re taking me to task! You are so disappointed in me right now. You are disappointed in everything and everyone, and it kills you. That’s why you’re different. Because you can’t stand it. And also, although you have shown nothing near your potential and you are in some ways—let’s face it—kind of lazy, you want to save the world.”
Hugh looked down at the sidewalk and, despite himself—Ed could tell—he smiled. “And you’re going to help me do that?”
“No,” Ed said, “of course not.”
They started to walk again, and when Ed suggested they eat dinner, when he said he was starving and Hugh expressed little surprise, because Ed was always hungry—always starving—Ed finally said, “I apologize.” But it lacked a certain sharpness.
“That’s okay,” Hugh replied. But it wasn’t, not exactly.
Chapter Four
Spring
Guy Ordway had succeeded in life despite his education. His business credentials and background were the subjects of much speculation, but because he had married Helen’s mother, whose family was one of the best on the East Coast, the speculation could go only so far. He’d married into a good family; he was protected, and because he’d never forgotten his shaky origins, he was adamant in wanting his daughter to marry someone if not of Wall Street and the Ivy League then certainly of the Ivy League. He made no secret of wanting to protect his legacy, to bolster it with the appropriate names.
He’d forbidden Helen to live in Manhattan, where (he reasoned) there was far too much trouble for someone like her, but he’d approved of Helen living on the bottom floor of a Brattle Street townhouse with her cousin Lolly (whom he remembered as always having been a well-behaved and frankly bland little girl) and her cousin’s husband, Raoul Merva.
Raoul was Hungarian, twenty years older than Lolly, and chair of the Harvard mathematics department. After meeting Raoul at Lolly’s father’s funeral on Fishers Island, Mr. Ordway had gotten it into his head (and Hugh had a difficult time imagining how) that Raoul Merva—though problematically Catholic by birth if not practice—possessed a traditionalist sensibility that had boded well for keeping Helen out of trouble. That, and he was industrious; he’d come to the United States—to Harvard—to escape the clutches of Communism and had—as Hugh could best understand it—done something revolutionary with triangulation in applied mathematics as well as investing some of Lolly’s money, which had made them a modest fortune. Part of Helen convincing her father to let her live with her cousin Lolly had involved Raoul phoning Guy and offering reassurance that he would keep a strict eye on Guy’s daughter. Which was, of course, patently untrue. Raoul thought Helen should live however she liked. His only suggestion was that she go and get analyzed, after being brought up by a father like that.
Lolly was an excellent cook. There was always a glass pitcher of home-brewed iced tea in the refrigerator, along with roasted chicken and potato salad she’d learned to make when she and Raoul had lived in France, with mustard and oil and fresh dill that she grew in their back garden, along with grapes that, come August, would be fecund and fallen to the ground. Lolly acknowledged that her plants were overgrown and attracted bugs, but she was terrible at pruning.
“I’m afraid that nothing will grow back,” she explained one evening, as they all sat outside under the burgeoning grapevine, drinking a bitter Hungarian liqueur.
Raoul took her hand. “My mouse. She is afraid of death.”
“Everyone is,” said Helen sweetly—thought Hugh—and reassuringly.
“Raoul isn’t,” said Lolly. “When he told me he didn’t want children—you know, soon after we’d met—he said he had a similar certainty about not needing to continually publish.”
Raoul solemnly nodded, not letting go of her hand.
“A similar certainty?” asked Helen.
“No fear of death,” Lolly gently explained.
Each Thursday evening, Helen went to typing class (she really was a hopeless typist; in class she would eschew the instructive exercises, instead typing up lengthy descriptions of the people around her, which were rife with errors but amusing to read), Lolly went to her analyst, and Raoul invited a remarkably diverse group of professors to the house. His only requirement of the evening was that everyone had to drink the disagreeable liquor of his homeland and actively try not to be boring. His theory was that, by the end of two months, 50 percent would become Unicum drinkers for life. In addition to Raoul’s mathematics colleagues, Hugh had met a Dante scholar, a few psychiatrists, physicists, poets, and several esteemed anthropologists, who’d all shown their slides of Amazonian jungles, the sand-swept Sahara, the mesas of New Mexico. In a matter of weeks, Hugh had met experts in smallpox, Freud, the Tzotzil Maya, and the Nuer. He kept waiting for Charlie Case to walk through the door, but the most anyone could offer were rumors about his completed film; one professor had heard that it was a shoo-in to win a big French prize, another mentioned (with evident distaste) that Charlie Case had become quite comfortable in Hollywood.
Ice clinked and highballs were refilled; the lilac bush brushed against the open window. Hugh watched the men: all sitting, all listening, as an unassuming fellow with thin pale skin (Hugh couldn’t stop picturing it scorching in the African sun) who’d done extensive work in Upper Volta described a tribe called the Mossi as the Japanese of West Africa, due to their numerous rituals and greetings. The man started out speaking softly and grew more and more animated, until Hugh sensed him progressing toward an out-and-out performance. This little pallid man became a skilled—if vaguely campy—mime, bowing and scraping, even lying on the floor.
Hugh ran downstairs, retrieved his camera, quickly returned, and started shooting.
He hadn’t asked Raoul if he might take photographs, he hadn’t thought it through, but he knew that if Raoul admired anything about him it was what (toward the end of Hugh’s first dinner at the townhouse) Raoul had heralded as his independence. Which may or may not have been a euphemism for trust fund, but Hugh had decided to be hopeful. After the first few kisslike clicks of his Leica, he attempted to catch Raoul Merva’s eye, and when he did, Hugh felt nothing short of soaring relief as Raoul smiled and even mugged for the camera.
“Bravo,” said Raoul. “Hugh will document these evenings. What shall we call ourselves?” mused their host. “A good salon needs a name,” he said, with just enough absurdity in his voice for Hugh to realize that he was joking.
Paparazzo, thought Hugh mordantly, that’s me. Though he’d be hard-pressed to discover more substantive and less attractive subjects, as he trained his lens on Raoul Merva and co. he imagined he was Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita, whose palpable self-hatred was somehow completely appealing. He thought of sitting in the Brattle Theatre last spring, staring into the eyes of that final moment’s Umbrian angel and vowing to learn Italian. Which of course he never had. He thought of how he was a Shipley and it didn’t matter what he did, because the peak of the Shipleys had already happened and the point of his existence
was nothing more than to ride out the wave of the Shipley name until it dumped out onto the shore.
Although he maintained to Ed that inheritance meant nothing and that the individual self was everything, he often thought that this was bullshit, and if he remembered one thing from his spotty education it would be how the anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown, while doing fieldwork in Australia, went walking with an Aboriginal in the outback and how they met another Aboriginal to whom the first Aboriginal spoke for hours. How after this conversation (of which Radcliffe-Brown understood nothing) the first Aboriginal said to the anthropologist: We’re going to be killed.
Why? asked Radcliffe-Brown.
Because, explained the first Aboriginal, after two hours of conversation we still cannot find a blood link between us. This is why.
Maybe this was all life amounted to. Maybe he was allowed to sit in this room and amuse himself by taking photographs because he was a Shipley and nothing else he might do in this life could ever come close to that.
But as he continued to shoot, he forgot about his pointless fate or even that he was ostensibly supposed to be capturing—for posterity—this evening’s guests. He saw patterns emerging and he didn’t shy away from capturing them, whether or not Raoul would appreciate it. He shot short men in the foreground to look enormous, while the taller men faded into the background like unfocused ghosts. Three men stood side by side with their hands pressed so tightly into the pockets of their sport jackets they looked almost frozen, and he shot them from below to exaggerate their immobility. As he retreated further behind the lens, Hugh began to identify these impressive men less by their contributions to scholarship than by their defining gestures—how they sat and stood became as compelling as what they were saying.
The proper way to greet your superior, the Upper Voltaist explained, was to drop to the ground and throw dirt on your head (which he promptly pantomimed), and Hugh immediately imagined himself under a mound of dirt, as he’d never understood so completely that he knew nothing. He also realized that he really had never gone anywhere and that he had to go everywhere, that he’d seen nothing and he’d have to try to see everything. He had just enough money that he didn’t have to work, so long as he lived modestly. He was nothing if not the perfect candidate to be a perpetual student. Normally such a realization would have rendered him useless for days, weeks even, but at the moment he felt not only inferior to this room full of experts but also suddenly, shockingly motivated.
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