The Heirs

by Susan Rieger

  Sam loved his grandfather the way he loved no one else ever; it was undefended love, love without boundaries. “There’s a meeting of the minds with me and Poppa,” he told his mother. For Sam’s tenth birthday, Mr. Phipps bought him a dissection kit and a fetal pig marinated in formaldehyde. Sam was over the moon. The next week, Mr. Phipps asked him two questions; they would become his standard greeting: “What did you observe today?” and “What did you think about what you observed?”

  “Is this about my pig, Poppa?” Sam asked. “Are you training me to be a scientist?”

  “Partly,” said his grandfather. “Mostly, I’m training you to be a person.”

  “Sometimes I see things that make me sad, things I’d like to fix but can’t,” Sam said.

  “Ah,” Poppa said.

  “Do you have to live with Granny?” Sam asked.

  “Yes,” Poppa said. “It’s my duty. Old-fashioned, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t think I have a sense of duty,” Sam said.

  “Good,” Poppa said. “It can hobble your life.”

  When Eleanor’s mother died a year and a half later, only her father and Rupert went to the graveyard. The funeral service had been impersonal: readings, hymns, prayers. The priest gave a canned eulogy. Eleanor remembered him saying, “She was a remarkable woman.” The day was rainy and cold. “No one need go to the interment,” Mr. Phipps told the mourners. “We’ll meet you back at Eleanor’s.” At lunch, out of the presence of their parents, the boys speculated:

  “Pops and Dad went to the graveyard to make sure she was dead,” Jack said.

  “I didn’t cry. Nobody cried,” Tom said.

  “Will anyone miss her?” Sam asked.

  “Did anyone love her?” Harry asked.

  “Did she love anyone?” Will asked.

  Sam knew she didn’t love him. When he was four, he had asked his grandmother if she knew how to wipe a little boy. There was some urgency to the question. His grandparents were looking after the boys while Eleanor went out briefly to do an errand. “Are you saying you can’t wipe yourself?” she said. “Are you a baby?” Mr. Phipps rose from the sofa. “This is between us men,” he said. He took Sam to the bathroom. “Was Granny ever a little girl?” Sam asked his grandfather. Sam would not miss her.

  After the guests had left, Mr. Phipps took a walk over to Lincoln Center with Eleanor. “She was very beautiful, your mother, as a young woman, and I knew nothing of young women,” he said. “I can’t regret the marriage. There’s you. I’m sorry we stopped you from marrying Jim Cardozo.”

  “No need to apologize,” Eleanor said. “I married the right man.” She gave a small laugh. “You kept me from making your mistake.”

  “Well, well,” Mr. Phipps said. “I’ll take the credit.” He patted her hand. “I love Rupert,” Mr. Phipps said.

  “Why don’t you give up the apartment and move to the West Side,” Eleanor asked.

  A month later, he put the apartment on the market. It sold in two months, with all its furnishings. He gave Eleanor the family silver. There were generations of it, including a huge set of Christofle Cluny, enough for four brides and a groom. Her father bought a two-bedroom, two-floor artist’s studio on West Sixty-Seventh, down the block from the Hotel des Artistes. He filled the bookshelves with books. He and Sam had a Philharmonic subscription. The boys all had keys and strict instructions to drop in anytime. “Anytime,” Poppa said. “Night or day.”

  Sam took him at his word. A week after move-in day, he dropped by on his way home from school. He stayed five minutes.

  “I saw Poppa today,” he said as he slid into his seat at dinner that evening. He spoke slowly in a hushed voice, leaving spaces between the words. Everyone looked at him, even Tom. “He has—” Sam trailed off and looked around the circle, making sure all eyes were on him. “—a girlfriend.” The boys squinted sideways at their mother. Granny had been dead less than six months. “How do you know?” Eleanor asked. She hadn’t known. “I have eyes,” Sam said, opening his own very wide, for punctuation.

  “What did they see?” Eleanor said.

  “I interrupted,” Sam said. Jack snickered.

  “Do we have to beat this story out of you?” Harry said.

  Exploiting the momentousness of his intelligence, Sam stood up. “I went into the apartment with my key. Poppa and this lady were sitting next to each other on the big sofa, very close, drinking Champagne. They were surprised to see me. Poppa burst out laughing. She looked cross.” Sam suppressed a laugh. “She said, ‘Who’s this intruder? Is he armed?’ She was trying to be funny.” Sam grinned like a maniacal clown. “Poppa got up and brought me over to meet her. He said, ‘This is my grandson Sam, number three, out of five. They all visit me. They have keys and can come whenever they want. Sam comes the most.’ Then he said, ‘Sam, this is my friend, Mrs. Cantwell. Mrs. Cantwell visits too.’ I told Poppa I just stopped by to say hello. I shook hands with the lady and left.” Sam made a bow. His brothers pounded the table. Jack reached under his chair for his trumpet and blasted the racetrack salute.

  The next day, Mr. Phipps called Eleanor. “Sam met a friend of mine last evening,” he said.

  “Yes, he told us all. Mrs. Cantwell.”

  “She’s an old friend. We met again recently. She’s a widow,” Mr. Phipps said.

  “You don’t owe me an explanation. Do you still want the boys coming and going whenever they want to? I think Sam was embarrassed. Also thrilled.”

  “They must come anytime when they want to. They come first, I told Marina that. My family comes first. Any friends come second, third, ninety-ninth.”

  “Maybe you want to have some kind of schedule. If the boys feel awkward, they won’t drop by,” Eleanor said.

  “I’ll work it out,” he said. “You must meet her. Wonderful woman. Almost as beautiful as when she was young.”

  Eleanor laughed. “No use warning you, I suppose, against beautiful women.”

  “Touché, touché,” he said, laughing. “She’s beautiful and generous.”

  “Good work,” Eleanor said.

  “We’ll have dinner, the four of us, one day in the next few weeks.”

  Two months later, Eleanor, Rupert, Eleanor’s father, and Mrs. Cantwell met for dinner at Côte Basque. It was a success of sorts. Everyone was courteous. Mrs. Cantwell’s daughter Louisa, a sophomore at Smith, joined them. A pale blonde with a snub nose and bow mouth, she was pretty, like Sandra Dee. She wore an expensive suit—bespoke, Eleanor thought—and elegant jewelry. Eleanor admired her necklace, an intricate gold chain. Louisa preened. “Isn’t it the loveliest necklace ever?” she said. “My boyfriend, Carter, gave it to me, for my twentieth birthday. Harry Winston.” She paused for a moment, then with more warmth added, “It’s amazing. I can wear it with everything, a swimsuit, blue jeans, a ball gown.” She gave Eleanor a wide smile. “I came out last year at the Waldorf. It was so much fun. You meet the best young men. Did you come out?” Eleanor thought back on her debutante years. “I liked the rough-and-tumble of weddings for meeting men,” she said. “You never knew who might have been invited.”

  “My friends aren’t getting married. Only engaged. I hope to get married a year after I graduate. I want to work a year, to see what it’s like.”

  “Do you like being at a woman’s college?” Eleanor said. “I went to Vassar, but that was in the ’50s. I don’t think I’d do it again.”

  Louisa looked slyly at her mother, who smiled blandly at her. “My father died when I was nine. He wanted me to go there.”

  “My mother went to Smith,” Eleanor said. “A rigorous education.”

  For the rest of the evening the Cantwell women held the floor, occasionally talking over each other. Louisa talked gowns, parties, and jewelry. Mrs. Cantwell, in full throat, gossiped about people the Falkeses didn’t know. “Did you hear?” she’d ask. “Would you believe?” Mr. Phipps chuckled at everything she said. She smiled back flirtatiously, as though she was still the pre
ttiest girl at the cotillion. The Falkeses tried to open up the conversation. Rupert brought up the Iran hostage crisis, Eleanor, Apocalypse Now. Mrs. Cantwell closed them down. “You’re both too clever for me,” she said. “I don’t understand those things.” She gave all her attention to Mr. Phipps. “I could listen to him all day,” she said. She gazed at him with Nancy Reagan eyes.

  “I don’t think mother and daughter have much to say for themselves,” Rupert said to Eleanor as they crossed the park in a cab. He stopped, remembering his late mother-in-law. “It’s good for your father. Mrs. Cantwell is so very fond of him. The way she looks at him must give him happiness.”

  Mrs. Cantwell lived on the Upper East Side and didn’t like crossing the park. “Why did you move to the West Side?” she said to him. “You should move back. There’s so much crime where you are.” Her prejudice worked in Edward’s favor. Because she didn’t like coming to his place, he went to hers. He got to decide when he went and when he didn’t. The boys could always drop by his apartment. He might not be there, but neither would she. Sam ran into her only one other time. He was seventeen, a senior at Trinity. “I suppose you’ll go to Princeton too,” she said. “Yes,” Sam said, “we Falkeses move in phalanx formation.” She gave a quiet hmmph. “They’re very smart boys,” Poppa said. “I’m lucky to have them in my life.” Mrs. Cantwell smiled at Mr. Phipps. “You are a lucky man,” she said. “Lucky to have you too,” he said.

  The Falkeses and the Cantwells spent little time together. Once a year at most, Eleanor and Rupert would have dinner with her father and Marina. Eleanor and Rupert, but not the boys, were invited to Louisa’s wedding, a large affair, at the Plaza. They sent, as their wedding gift, six of her Tiffany china settings. Louisa’s note came three weeks later. “Dear Eleanor and Rupert (I hope I may call you that), Thank you for the six table settings. How very generous of you. We shall think of you at our Sunday dinners. Yours, Louisa.”

  “I thought Smith could do better than that,” Rupert said as he read the note.

  “What can you say about a gift that came from the registry? ‘It’s such a beautiful pattern.’ ”

  “No, Louisa meant to be rude,” Rupert said. “She’s envious. She has a grievance against you or us.”

  Eleanor looked startled. “Should we have sent all twelve place settings?”

  “If we had, the note would have been shorter, ruder,” Rupert said. “We should have sent one setting. The meanness of the gift would have pleased her. She’d have gushed in her note.”

  “So long as Marina makes my father happy,” Eleanor said. “So long as she doesn’t turn him against Sam.”

  —

  Sam waited a week after talking to Lea to call Harry. “When are you going to stop licking your wounds and call Mom? You can think about it all you want after that.”

  “I will,” Harry said. “Lea’s very worried about me. I think she thinks I’m having an affair. She can’t understand why I said what I said.”

  “I can’t either,” Sam said.

  “I’m right, but I’ll stop now,” Harry said. “For the record, Dad was a bigamist.”

  “Are you having an affair?” Sam asked.

  “Where did you get that idea?” Harry said.

  “Susanna said she saw you with a woman downtown, in my neighborhood. Good-looking, red hair, high heels.”

  “Did she?” Harry said. “A friend. A colleague really.”

  —

  Susanna Goffe was Sam’s best friend, and he was hers. “We lost each other climbing Mount Olympus,” Sam would say. “And found each other at Princeton.” They met during freshman orientation. Their attraction to each other was immediate and intense; within days of meeting, they were spending all their free time together.

  Sam arrived at college a virgin. He knew he was gay from the time he was thirteen—“awareness and hormones arrived on the same afternoon,” he said to Susanna—but Trinity was too small a village for experimentation. He didn’t want to be the butt of “Gay Falkes Day” jokes, even though he knew his big brothers would beat up anyone who picked on him. Older boys and men, strangers, often made passes at him on the street; he stared ahead, ignoring them, curious but afraid. They made him feel like quarry. Sometimes they got belligerent, yelling after him, “You too good?” He wondered at that as a come-on line. Did it ever work?

  Knowing Sam was gay didn’t keep Susanna from falling in love with him. “I don’t want to be in love with you,” she said, “and I won’t let it get in the way of our friendship. I just wanted to let you know. You’re my favorite person in the world.”

  Sam met Andrew in the spring of freshman year. Andrew was a first-year graduate student in history. Andrew knew from the very beginning that Sam was what he wanted. He pursued him the whole time Sam was at Princeton. Sam hung back, making excuses.

  “I’m too young to get seriously involved,” he said. “I have years of education ahead of me.”

  “You’re afraid of losing Susanna,” Andrew said.

  “Yes,” Sam said.

  “You don’t have to give her up,” Andrew said. “Just don’t sleep with her.”

  “No fear,” Sam said.

  Sam stayed in Princeton the year after he graduated, doing research for one of his professors, waiting for Andrew to finish his coursework. The following year, they moved to New Haven. Sam started medical school. Andrew worked on his dissertation, on “the Troubles.” When he finished, he got a position at NYU as an assistant professor. He commuted until Sam finished both degrees. Sam did his residency at New York Hospital, then stayed on, doing research.

  In theory, Andrew liked Susanna and Susanna liked Andrew but they were jealous of each other and competed for Sam’s attention when they were all together. Sam took to seeing Susanna alone. Susanna worked for NPR, producing shows out of New York and waiting to fall in love with someone who wasn’t Sam.

  Older relatives sometimes asked Eleanor if Sam was going to marry Susanna; she was around so much. “Of course not,” Eleanor would answer, “he’s gay.” They’d persist. “But wouldn’t you like it, if he did?” Eleanor always answered the same way. “I like him just the way he is.” To the boys, she always delivered a similar message: “We’re package deals. All or nothing.” It was intended as a caution against wishful thinking and envy.

  When Sam was no more than eleven, he asked her why she was always polite to her mother, but never minded when Dad delivered one of his Granny slap-downs.

  “Package deal,” Eleanor said. “Dad is who he is.”

  Sam shook his head. “I think you like it,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Eleanor. “ ‘All or nothing’ occasionally works to one’s advantage.”

  —

  Eleanor and Rupert met Susanna on Parents’ Weekend freshman year.

  “Are you a Goffe Goffe?” Rupert asked.

  “That’s me, bona fide regicide stock. We did it. We killed Charles I. You don’t mind, do you?” she said, picking up on Rupert’s accent.

  “No, I’m a republican, small r,” he said.

  “Big R too,” Sam said. “We don’t mind, do we?”

  “Not in the family, only the White House,” Susanna said. “No one in my family has done anything revolutionary since. And William Goffe died in his bed. Still, we’re treated better in Ireland than in England. Ancient grievance keepers, your tribe.”

  “I’m a thoroughgoing American these days,” Rupert said. “No sense of history anymore.”

  Susanna’s parents didn’t come for Parents’ Weekend, not that year or any year. They had divorced when she was an infant. She lived with her father and stepmother.

  “I can’t tell if my father is nice, or only pleasant,” she said to Sam. “He’s completely under the thumb of my stepmother, who is a self-pitying pit bull.”

  “Is she better or worse than your mother?” he asked.

  “I’d put the odds in favor of my mother as 6 to 5,” Susanna said.

  Susanna’
s mother had three children with three husbands. “She was misnamed Prudence,” Susanna said to Eleanor and Rupert. “Her mother, Granny Bowles, gave all her children allegorical names. Prudence was the most ironic, Patience second most.” Prudence paid the bills for her children’s private schools and college but otherwise ignored them. Susanna’s father came to her graduation, the only time he stepped onto the Princeton campus. Her mother sent a check. Susanna graduated magna and won the English prize. “How come you’re not nuts?” Sam asked her. “Granny Bowles,” she said.

  Sam brought Susanna home for Thanksgiving that first year, then for Christmas, then for spring break. In June, she went on holiday with all of them to Spain. By sophomore year, she had achieved the status of a beloved cousin. I’m becoming Sonya in War and Peace, she thought, with chill foreboding. She had full kitchen privileges. She answered the phone and, unlike the boys, took messages. She looked like a member of the family: dark-haired, dark-eyed, long and lean. People took her for Eleanor’s daughter, to the pleasure of both.

  “It’s narcissism, Mom,” Sam said. Andrew was also dark and long and lean. “Except for Dad, I’m used to loving people who look like me,” Sam said.

  “Ditto,” Eleanor said.

  In Susanna, Rupert felt both the loss and pleasure of a daughter. Until she came into their lives, he never thought he had missed anything by not having a girl. He had liked their all-of-a-kind family. “I don’t know which one I’d give up,” he said to Eleanor, “but I think now I’d like to have had a daughter.” Eleanor was past wishing for a daughter. She had wanted one in the beginning, to make up for everything she had missed, but after Sam, she wanted only more boys. She knew the routines and rituals of boys. “Oh, I know which one I’d give up,” she said. Even after twenty-five years, Rupert was not sure Eleanor was joking.