The Heirs

by Susan Rieger

  They met at her cousin’s wedding; he was a law school classmate of the groom. Still blond at twenty-six, he was good-looking without being too handsome. He had high cheekbones and Arctic eyes, giving him the glint of a wolf. All the girls and women at the wedding noticed him as he moved about the room with the easy gait of an athlete. Though he insisted, laughingly, that he had bought his dinner jacket secondhand from Moss Bros., he wore it with the elegant carelessness of a young Olivier. He spotted Eleanor early in the evening, the loveliest girl in the room, and, without waiting for an introduction, approached her. “Hello, you,” he said. He was a wonderful dancer, which left her breathless, and he talked easily and wittily. He seemed older than the groom and the other young men and had read everything. “He comes from nowhere,” the bride whispered in Eleanor’s ear, “but if he offered to run off with me, I’d go. Right now. He’s a man, not a boy.”

  Eleanor’s expectations of marriage were by then hardheaded: So long as it is less awful than my parents’, she thought. She wanted contentedness not ardor. She had had ardor and it had set her back on her heels. The summer before her junior year, she’d fallen in love with a Jew, a Russian major at Yale, beautiful, brilliant James Cardozo. Both families were dead set against the match, his even more than hers, and the young couple couldn’t see making their way in the world on their own. Jim was planning on going to medical school; like all the young women she knew, she had no plans, other than marriage. The breakup was a watershed for Eleanor. She would marry the next man who asked her, as long as he could kiss and hold down a job.

  Carlo Benedetti could do both. Three months after she broke with Jim, they started dating. He was in his last year at Columbia Law. They had known each other from childhood; his father did business with her father. Her mother pulled the plug the first time Eleanor brought him home. “Stop it now. He’s not one of us,” she said. “What do you mean,” Eleanor said. “He’s descended from Popes. He goes everywhere.” Mrs. Phipps held up her hand. “Not St. James’s,” she said. Rupert was a godsend, an Episcopalian her mother disliked more than the Catholic, as much as the Jew.

  The Falkeses’ marriage looked like many marriages of their generation and class. Eleanor loved being pregnant and loved her babies; Rupert worked hard, leaving at seven, coming home at eight. By their third anniversary, they had achieved, without words, an easy, unguarded relationship, animated by a deep sexual connection. Their friends might have said they loved each other, but brought up without family warmth or affection, neither had the vocabulary of ordinary, everyday happiness. They were very good at sex, it turned out, but no good, with each other, at casual touching. It suited them both.

  Their division of labor was conventional; Eleanor didn’t read The Feminine Mystique until after the last baby. Rupert was the breadwinner; she raised the boys and ran the household, as she had been raised, with help from nannies, maids, cooks, and drivers. They were kind, supportive, and respectful to each other, publicly and privately. Handsome, clever, and rich, they were popular with friends and colleagues. Eleanor’s lineage allayed any questions about Rupert’s idiopathic origins. Over time Rupert’s friends diagnosed his rudeness as “an English thing,” like eating Marmite, and paid it little mind. At the law firm, the associates kept lists of his taunts and insults, comparing them almost as badges of honor. They pined for his praise.

  Eleanor and Rupert had a floor-through apartment in the Hotel des Artistes, the old studio building on West Sixty-Seventh. In pursuit of Van Vlietism, Eleanor had wanted to live on the Upper West Side. Her father approved and bought the apartment, originally two apartments, as a wedding present. He put it in her name. The boys never knew another home. Their attachment to it was primal. After Rupert’s death, they all worried that Eleanor might sell it. “Who will buy it if she does?” Harry asked his brothers. They all offered although they knew it was unhinged sentimentality.

  “Do we keep it as a shrine to our childhood, never changing anything?” Will asked.

  “It must cost a fortune to run and maintain,” Sam said.

  “I love it,” Tom said, “but I couldn’t live in it. I’d feel like an imposter.”

  “Who’d get to sleep in their bed?” Jack asked.

  Eleanor’s old boyfriend, Jim Cardozo, didn’t marry until 1975, when he was thirty-six and had finished his residency in cardiology. His wife, Anne Lewisohn Lehman, was also a Vassar graduate, six years behind Eleanor, a biology major. She was short, blond, sturdy, and kind. They were married at Temple Emanu-El, the Reform German Jewish synagogue that looked like a bank on the outside. Reading the wedding invitation, unexpected and unwelcome, Eleanor felt a twinge of irritation, realizing, after fourteen years of marriage to Rupert, she hadn’t thought about Jim in years. Her heart had broken and then it mended, good as new. I was twenty, she thought. I didn’t know there was sex without love. Jim had loved her, she knew, more than she had loved him, but she couldn’t believe he harbored at this remove anything more than passing wistfulness for their ardent youthful selves. Perhaps he wanted her to know he had landed on his feet.

  The Cardozo reception was at the Harmonie Club. There were six hundred guests, including Eleanor and Rupert. Their gift, from the registry, was a sterling fish server, in the same pattern as her parents’. Jim and Anne spent all their holidays with her family, an uncomplicated bunch who loved tennis, sailing, practical jokes, and charades. Anne loathed Jim’s parents. Meeting the young Cardozos for the first time at their wedding, Rupert pronounced Anne a “good sort.” He never said what he thought of Jim, except to say “damp handshake.”

  —

  Eleanor thought of her marriage as a stroke of luck, sweeter for being unexpected. In her romance with Jim, she had seen herself as the victim of selfish and uncaring parents, more interested in their comfort than in her happiness. As she grew older, she acknowledged her conventionality and her cowardliness—and Jim’s too. She had been bred for marriage; even her high-powered Vassar education had only served to make her more marriageable to the right sort of man, and she hadn’t known what else to do with herself. She hoped she might come to love Rupert, and by the end, her attachment to him passed for love. To her delight, he had turned out to be sexually gifted. Who taught him? she wondered.

  Rupert married Eleanor because she was the girl of the year in 1960, because all the other men he knew wanted her, because she knew the difference between sarcasm and irony, because she was a knockout, because she’d read George Orwell, because she was sexually electrifying, because he could talk to her. She was like an Arabian racehorse, angular and lean, almost as tall as he, with dark hair and eyes. Reverend Falkes had been dark, probably Welsh. Seeing the photo of him that Rupert carried in his wallet, Eleanor thought, dark and tall like me. Makes sense. Rupert’s blondness was one of his minor selling points, the un-Jim.

  Rupert understood from the start theirs was a marriage not of convenience exactly, more of mutual benefit, and all in all, he thought they’d both held to the bargain and made it work. Once, years into the marriage, he asked her whether she was fond of him. She was quick to answer. “Of course I’m fond of you,” she said, “and I admire you.” He nodded and smiled at her, then took her hand in his. Later, she marveled at the oddness of this exchange, after so many years together. The meagerness of his expectations—or sadder, his desires—was painful to her, as was this unexpected, transient willingness to expose himself. He didn’t risk asking whether I might love him, or could love him, or did love him, or ever loved him. Her thoughts took a sharp turn. Of course, I’ve never asked him if he loved me. Did I mean to marry a man who didn’t love me? She wondered sometimes whether he’d ever been unfaithful. She had never required fidelity, only discretion. Their sexual bond was the glue of the marriage, but almost a thing apart from their emotional connection and requirements. In their couplings they were like world-class athletes. They didn’t think about what they did. Eleanor thought downhill skiing came closest to sex with Rupert.

>   Rupert and Eleanor disagreed now and again—politically, Eleanor was more liberal—but never acrimoniously. There wasn’t enough heat to raise the temperature of an argument and there was so much money smoothing the way. The boys were a source of pride. “Not a duffer among them,” Rupert would say, “even if they’re all Democrats.” Henry (Harry) came first, in 1962, eleven months after they were married; the rest followed in two-year intervals: William (Will), Samuel (Sam), John (Jack), and Thomas (Tom). When Tom was a year, Eleanor had her tubes tied. “I take it there will be no Guy,” Rupert said. “Five in ten years is an excellent sufficiency,” she said. They were good-looking boys—tall, dark, and lean, like their mother, athletic and brainy. People used to say they had Eleanor’s looks and Rupert’s brains. My brains too, Eleanor thought, but she let it pass. Rupert took mild exception. “Where are the rosy-cheeked towheads?” he would ask now and then.

  As expected, Eleanor’s mother disapproved of Rupert and the match, but her father, who had been a phantom presence in her childhood, gave his blessing, firmly quashing any maternal interference. He insisted on having a big wedding and then offered to support the young couple for the first five years while Rupert was getting his footing. Eleanor wondered if he was making amends for closing ranks with her mother against Jim; she drew closer to her father. Rupert never forgot this kindness, and his regard for his father-in-law, as with Reverend Falkes, approached love. They lunched together at least three times a month and Rupert went to Mr. Phipps for advice on investments. Mr. Phipps had spent his career, more than forty years, at the family bank, Phipps & Co. He had studied chemistry in college, thinking he would be a doctor or scientist, but his father and grandfather pressed him to join the bank and his early marriage forced his hand. His wife would be expensive. He had a genius for identifying coming companies and industries, which his father and grandfather recognized, and by the time he was thirty, he was director of new investments. This position, with its spending clout, kept him from growing restless or careless. At fifty, he was chairman of the bank. He made himself and many others very rich. In 1966, Mr. Phipps recommended that Rupert invest eighty thousand dollars in McDonald’s, and offered to loan him the money interest-free if he didn’t have it. Rupert took the loan and bought the stock. By 1973, it was worth five and a half million dollars. Rupert insisted on paying back Mr. Phipps; he gave him five hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Mr. Phipps gave the money to Eleanor. “A sunny-day fund,” he said. Both men loved to sail and would often spend their Sundays together on the Sound, off Kings Point, where the Phippses had a house and Mr. Phipps kept a sloop. The second and last time Eleanor knew her husband to weep was at her father’s funeral.

  Mrs. Phipps grew wary of Rupert, who played with her as a cat with a mole. If she was in a hectoring mood, criticizing one of the boys or, more likely, Eleanor, he would deliver a “Granny slap-down,” as the boys called it, asking her repeatedly to repeat herself—“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you”—until she sounded stupid even to herself. At those times, Eleanor felt something approaching real love for him. Only once did Rupert lose his temper with his mother-in-law. It shut her down in his presence. She never again said anything to him other than “How are you?”

  In marrying Rupert, Eleanor had accepted his limitations. He was capable of expressing gratitude, appreciation, generosity, even affection, but not stronger emotions, even if he felt them. He had decided, at twenty-one, he would be a successful man in ways New York society respected, and this he had achieved. He did what he could with what he had.

  Their last conversation before the morphine shut him down was fittingly valedictory. Afterward, Eleanor wondered if he had planned it, holding out as long as he could. She was sitting by his bed in the hospital. Schubert’s Trout was playing on the radio.

  “I wasn’t always a good man,” Rupert said. “I wanted to be but couldn’t do it.”

  “Good enough,” Eleanor said.

  “My life turned out to be much better than I had any right to expect,” he said.

  “Mine too,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Eleanor leaned over and kissed him. He reached up and touched her cheek.

  “I wish I could stay,” he said.

  “I do too,” she said.

  —

  Eleanor’s boys not only looked like her, they looked like one another. Acquaintances seeing the older or younger brothers together often took them for twins, even triplets. Ancient cousins frequently got their names wrong. Eleanor found this annoying but she came to see that on the surface, by their looks and close age, they invited confusion in the inobservant. Her mother was always mixing them up, whether out of weak-mindedness or spite Eleanor couldn’t tell. Her father, embracing grandfatherhood, kept them straight, buying each of them every year the perfect birthday gift. For Sam’s ninth, Mr. Phipps bought him a real stethoscope, sending Sam into paroxysms of joy.

  To Eleanor, the boys were nothing alike, each vividly himself. Harry taught law at Columbia, specializing in constitutional law and conflicts of law, “Torts for Pedants,” he called it. He was smart, canny, competitive, confident, at ease everywhere, a quick study, and a natural leader. Job offers came his way often; he was good at lunch. His law school colleagues saw him as a future law school dean or circuit court judge. He married Jewish. “We were sent to Trinity to meet Jews, right?” he said to his parents one night at dinner, graduation looming. He had invited Jane Levi to the senior prom. He thought he was his mother’s favorite, the fulfillment of the famous Freudian dictum: “A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.” He felt a conqueror. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

  Will was literary, witty, astute, and stealthily ambitious. At eleven, he announced at dinner: “I’m a Marxist.” The table fell quiet; everyone looked at him. He grinned. “A Groucho Marxist.” Will had been an editor in New York at Random House, but then went off to L.A. to be a talent agent. He loved making deals; he felt most alive in the middle of a deal. Every year on the anniversary of the day he sold his first book to the movies for a million dollars, he and his wife, Francie, went to dinner at the Polo Lounge. He’d gone there to celebrate with his boss after that first big sale. The place never changed; it was Hollywood, unapologetic and unadulterated, with its dry martinis, aged steaks, plush banquettes, and lavish flowers. “I read Dickens and Eliot in college so I could sell Thane and Gordon,” he told Eleanor. “Plot,” he said. “ ‘A gun in the first act.’ ” In 1999, he had three bestselling authors with seven-figure movie options. Eleanor thought he was the smartest. He was the most intellectual, Thane and Gordon notwithstanding.

  Sam was a scientist, an MD/PhD researcher in infectious diseases. Eleanor thought of him with remorse, as the outlier, neglected in the tumult of three boys under five; but hers was a minority view. Rupert, in his stiff way, and her father, in his, had worked to fill the void she had left, and in their coalition, they had, remarkably, succeeded. Sam was insightful and observant, his senses alive to those around him, with a barbed sense of humor and a stubbornness that often passed for principled objection. He was slow to anger but, once aroused, slow to forgive. Like his brothers, he loved his mother, almost without criticism. He saw himself less as the odd one out than as the gravitational center of the five brothers. “I am the keystone,” he told his mother when he was ten. Of the five, he was closest to his father and, Eleanor thought, his father’s favorite. He was, if not his brothers’ favorite, then the one they found least irritating.

  Jack, the only artist, was the most talented, the most driven. A jazz trumpeter, he was interested in little besides music. People, hearing he was from a large family, pegged him as the youngest; he had the sweetness and self-centeredness of the baby, indulged by older brothers as well as parents. “I love the trumpet more than I love food,” he told his mother. “It’s the brassiest of all instruments. It struts.” My id, Eleanor thought.

  Tom, wh
o was the baby, missed having someone below him to push around and often felt the weight of the older four as oppressive. He would refer to himself as the runt of the litter, though he was the tallest and the best athlete. There was never any unalloyed good news, no winning without losing for Tom. He was the only one of the five who’d been in therapy. Among his grievances, he resented that he was born in the ’70s, not the ’60s like the others, a different generation. He was a federal prosecutor, working in the white-collar crime unit in the Chicago US Attorney’s Office, “having a not-too-bad time of it” going after insider traders. Eleanor wondered if his decision to be a prosecutor was his way of arming himself against his big brothers. He too married Jewish, a niece of Jim Cardozo’s wife, Anne.

  All five had gone to Princeton—Harry, Will, and Tom as tennis players. Eleanor had wanted them to go to Yale, their grandfather’s old school, while Rupert, along with Trinity, their high school, had pushed Harvard. Harry, being Harry, beat his way to Princeton and brought the rest along. Growing up in New York City, they liked the country all right while they were there, but after graduation, they gravitated to cities. Tom insisted he’d never have gotten into Princeton if he wasn’t a legacy, seeming to forget he had been a highly ranked tennis recruit with 1400 boards; in fact, it was Jack, with a patchy academic record, who presented a challenge to the admissions office. Still, Princeton took him. They didn’t want to risk losing Tom, who’d be applying in two years, or alienating the older brothers; and the head of Trinity’s music department told admissions that Jack was the most talented music student he’d ever taught. “Reject him and regret it,” he wrote.

  For thirteen years, from 1980 through 1992, there was at least one Falkes on campus; for nine of those years, there were two. Harry blazed the trail, writing his way into a junior history seminar in the fall of his freshman year and making the varsity tennis team in the spring. The younger ones walked onto campus already celebrities; everyone seemed to know who they were. Harry joined Quadrangle—he didn’t want to join an eating club that didn’t have women members, and he didn’t like bicker. His brothers followed but even Quadrangle was too elitist for Tom, who dropped out. Harry liked Princeton best, then Will, then Sam, then Jack, then Tom. After Rupert’s death, Harry endowed a scholarship at Princeton in his father’s name. The others thought he was gunning for a seat on the board of trustees.