The Heirs

by Susan Rieger

  —

  Anne, unlike her mother, had been educated by Vassar. She studied biology, chemistry, and physics along with the literature of hopeless love: Villette, The Age of Innocence, The Scarlet Letter, Great Expectations, The Spoils of Poynton. After graduation, she got a PhD in neurobiology at Columbia. She met Jim finally when she was twenty-seven and he was thirty-three. She was working at Presbyterian Hospital, doing research on the brain’s limbic system. He was finishing a cardiology fellowship. A friend introduced them. At last, karma, she thought. They got along. They went out. They were almost a couple. Jim didn’t say he loved her, but he liked her immensely and he liked her company. She knew from Jim’s friends there had been an early love affair that ended badly, shattering Jim—the girl wasn’t Jewish, no more needed to be said—but by the time they met, he would speak of it only as his “Romeo and Juliet moment”; he seemed recovered. They had been dating for two years when she proposed the first time. “I don’t want children,” he said. Anne went home and wept. In proposing, she had cast herself as Leah, the unloved, wrongfully supplanting Rachel, but finding consolation in her “open womb.” She had anticipated her marital happiness lying with their children, three of them, dark and beautiful like their father, Rebecca, Simon, and Benjamin named for the Justice. She retreated for three months, then came back and proposed again. “No children,” he said. She submitted. I am the beater and the beaten, she thought.

  Jim bought Anne a beautiful ring, a large, good, square-cut diamond. After their engagement party, she asked him why he agreed to marry her. “We have nice times together. We have friends in common, interests in common. You understand my work, I understand yours. And no more holidays with my parents.” He laughed when he said this. He referred to his parents as Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, “but less loving.” He was genuinely fond of the Lehmans, “not a rotten one in the bunch,” he would say. “The real question,” he said, “is why you want to marry me. You could do so much better.” She shrugged. “Sheep love,” she said, looking up at him with tender eyes. He tousled her hair. “I forget to mention,” he said, leaning down to whisper in her ear, “you’ve got wonderful breasts.” It was the only compliment he regularly gave her about her looks. She saw the two of them as a New Yorker cartoon of a couple, the lump of lignite coal standing on the wedding cake with the Koh-i-Noor diamond.

  Jim had had a vasectomy when he was thirty-five, not long after he met Anne. Starting in college, he’d always taken precautions, carrying condoms in his wallet, a gesture that passed for gallantry. When women asked him whether he minded using a rubber—most of the men they knew did—he’d shake his head. “Look, it’s not as good as sex without one,” he’d say, “but don’t let anyone tell you it’s bad.” Pre-pill, he didn’t want to rely on ill-fitting diaphragms or coitus interruptus. Post-pill, in his prowling years, he didn’t want to rely on the women he slept with.

  Jim told Anne about his vasectomy only weeks before the wedding. He’d always insisted on using condoms. Anne was stunned and hurt by his deception. He didn’t apologize, he explained. “It’s not about you. I made this decision before we decided to get married. The condoms were for protecting you against possible diseases.” Anne hadn’t reckoned on a vasectomy, but on the usual, less reliable methods of birth control, the kinds that failed. She had wondered, before Jim had boxed her in, or out, whether down the road, had the responsibility been hers, she would have lied to him about taking the pill. He would be angry if she had gotten pregnant, she knew, but she’d have the baby. “A vasectomy was the only fair way,” he said with an air of magnanimity. “The burden shouldn’t fall on you.” Anne’s temper flared, the only time in three years. “Will you still use a condom after we’re married?” she asked. “No,” he said, “I was tested for STDs. I’m clean.”

  —

  Anne didn’t recognize Eleanor at the wedding. The reception line moved with breathtaking alacrity. “There are six hundred hands to shake,” Mrs. Lehman said as the bride and groom came into the Harmonie Club’s great hall. “Let’s keep things moving. No kissing except relatives of the first degree.” She had hired twice the usual number of waiters and they were everywhere, carrying trays of Veuve Clicquot and Perrier. Along the walls, she had placed four well-stocked bar tables and four lavish hors d’oeuvres tables, mostly trafe. She knew her crowd. Half the guests went for the shrimp over the line, knowing that the bride and groom would circulate during dinner. Rupert insisted they go through the line. His good manners were often more annoying to Eleanor than his bad manners. He knew in some way that Jim was an old boyfriend but he didn’t mind. Who was going to run off on his wedding day with the mother of five young boys, the oldest thirteen and deep into sarcasm, the youngest still occasionally wetting his bed?

  Eleanor had been surprised when Rupert had indicated interest in attending the wedding. She had planned to send their regrets. “No, no,” he said. “I’ve never been to a posh Jewish wedding.” More than a cross-cultural experience, he wanted to know people in “Our Crowd.” His firm was a white-shoe firm, with only two Jewish partners out of fifty. He wanted more Jewish lawyers; he wanted more Jewish business. He hadn’t known Jews until he came to America and his relationships with the two who launched his career, Dean Rostow and Judge Friendly, made him think anti-Semitism was rooted in envy and insecurity. He never joined a club that discriminated against blacks or Jews; he thought it bad behavior and bad business, and he led the charge for the Century Club to admit women. When women were finally admitted in 1989, Eleanor was one of the first women invited to join, along with Jackie Onassis, Brooke Astor, and the dean of Columbia Law School. The Phippses had been members since the club’s founding and Eleanor assumed she was proposed as a “legacy” candidate. She turned them down, politely. “Rupert deserves a club of his own,” she wrote.

  The year after he made partner, Rupert began advocating for hiring Jews, blacks, and women at Maynard, Tandy. He never appealed to the better angels of his partners’ natures, only to their business interests. Moving in their limos between the Upper East Side and Wall Street, most of them hadn’t noticed the changes the ’60s were bringing, except for the demonstrations. Nixon’s election in 1968 reassured them. Rupert, alert to the shifting zeitgeist, took it upon himself to rouse them out of their complacency. He made a list for them: A Jewish pitcher threw a perfect game; a month later, he refused to pitch the first game of the World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur. A black man was appointed to the Supreme Court. Actors let down their hair and took off their clothes on Broadway. Boston’s Cardinal Cushing had stopped eating grapes in support of farm workers. Yale College had voted to admit women, with only one faculty member dissenting. “Listen to Dylan,” he told his partners, “listen to what your children are listening to.” When he was forty-two, he was elected to the management committee, the youngest member in the firm’s history. Eight years later, he was made managing partner. Rupert was a first-rate lawyer but he had no illusions about his partners’ barometers; he owed his success within the firm to his English badges, the accent primarily, so irresistible to even the bluest bloods in the firm. His ability to speak in well-formed sentences also served him, though he knew, as his colleagues didn’t, that in England, his very articulateness would be held against him, the telltale sign of upstart origins. Upper-class Englishmen stammered like Hugh Grant, or said w for r, like Elmer Fudd or his old pal John Earlham. It fell to parvenus like him to speak like Olivier. Then there was his rudeness, which was widely admired in the firm. “If only I could get away with it,” old Mr. Maynard said. “It” came back to the accent, a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card for every occasion.

  Eleanor watched Jim and Rupert shake hands. Rupert looked the happier of the two. Jim introduced them as Rupert Falkes and Eleanor Phipps. Anne smiled at them. “Thank you for coming,” she said, then turned to kiss a first cousin. To Eleanor’s surprise and relief, Jim’s parents were not in the receiving line. Mrs. Lehman had banished them. “We�
�re keeping it to Jim and Anne and my husband and me,” she told the in-laws. “Too many people to move through.” She had refused to accept any money from the Cardozos; they had offered five thousand dollars, an amount so paltry, she’d found it insulting.

  Eleanor hadn’t seen Jim’s parents in fifteen years, not since the breakup in 1960, when they approached her. She was standing alone. Rupert had gone to the hors d’oeuvres table to investigate; the orphan in him was always drawn to food excesses. “How nice to see you again,” Mrs. Cardozo said. “Yes,” Eleanor said. “Now, please excuse me, won’t you?” She turned and walked away. It was an electrifying moment. She had never been so rude to anyone in her life. I must be careful, she thought. I could get used to this. She found Rupert gazing admiringly at a mountain of shrimp. “Not a cucumber sandwich in sight,” he said with satisfaction. “I think I’d like a gin and tonic,” she said. Rupert nodded. “I was thinking of having a scotch,” he said. Fortified with shrimp and scotch, Rupert began circulating, introducing himself to strangers, saying, “Ah, yes, of course. So glad finally to meet you.” Eleanor tagged along, as much as the other guests, seduced by his charm offensive. At their table, he sat next to Mrs. Lehman’s sister, Pauline Straus. On her way out, Mrs. Straus took Eleanor aside. “I think you may be the luckiest woman at this wedding,” she said, “luckier than the bride.” A week later, Mr. Straus called Rupert to talk about problems his company was having with IBM.

  —

  Anne and Jim bought an apartment on East Eighty-Eighth, between Fifth and Madison. “Convenient to the Guggenheim,” Jim said, his idea of a joke. They hadn’t lived together before their marriage, and the two or three nights a week they had spent together had been spent at Anne’s place on Seventy-Eighth, off Lexington. Anne had wanted to stay in that neighborhood. It was lively, with good restaurants and shopping. “There’s nothing nearby on Madison except E.A.T.,” Anne said when Jim said he wanted to be closer to Central Park. “And it’s dead at night,” she said. “Yes,” Jim said, “like Paris.” Anne gave in. They split the down payment 50-50. They split everything 50-50, their mortgage payments, their vacation expenses, their food bills, their car loan, everything except devotion; that was 80-20. They had separate bank accounts, separate credit cards, separate savings. Am I the beneficiary of his life insurance? Anne wondered. Not knowing, she made her niece Caroline the beneficiary of hers.

  Jim kept his old apartment as a study. Anne had seen it only once. He showed it to her early on in their relationship, evidence of why they should always stay at her place. It was on West 106th between Broadway and Amsterdam, a 250-square-foot studio, spare and elegant, with bookshelves, a fireplace, a sisal rug, a refectory table, a chair, and a daybed. The kitchen had a half-size refrigerator, like a college student’s, with a tiny stove that looked like a Fisher-Price toy sitting on top. The bathroom could not have been more than 16 square feet.

  “Do I get a key,” Anne asked Jim, “now that we’re married?”

  “Of course,” he said, “just call before stopping by.” Two months after this conversation, she called him on a Saturday morning, asking if she could drop by the studio. She was in the neighborhood, finishing up a long coffee break with a friend at the Hungarian Pastry Shop.

  “I’m working against a deadline, honey,” he said. “Another time. See you at dinner.” She tried again two months later, in the early evening. She had been meeting with a colleague at Columbia’s Morningside campus.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” he said. “I’ve got to finish my article. I was going to call you. I’ll be home late. Don’t wait up.”

  “Honey” is shorthand for no, she thought.

  Anne took to visiting the studio when Jim was out of town, at a conference or convention. She would move around the room, touching the furniture, taking a book from the shelves, never sitting. If she used the toilet, she would lift the seat before she left. Once she saw a note on his desk: “Do you want me to wash the sheets? It’s been a while. Doreen.” Another time she saw a riot of pink and magenta peonies in a crystal vase sitting on the mantel. Sometimes, there were tulips—red, purple, and orange—gorgeously tangled together in a silver pitcher on his desk.

  Nine months into their marriage, Anne discovered that Jim had changed the lock to the studio. She wanted to call a disreputable locksmith but hadn’t the spirit. Snooping was shameful enough. The following Sunday, as he dozed between first downs, she took his keys to the local locksmith and had them all copied. None of them worked on the studio door. Locked out, she started calling the studio from pay phones. If he answered, she stayed on the phone, not saying anything. The fifth time she called, Jim asked, “Who is this? What do you want?” What do I want? she asked herself. The next time she called, she found the phone had been disconnected. She waited three weeks before saying anything to Jim.

  “Your telephone at the studio has been disconnected,” she said.

  “I was getting obscene calls,” he said. “I don’t need a phone there. Call me at work if you want to talk.”

  The next morning, when Jim was showering, she went through his wallet, looking for receipts. There were lunches at the Madison Deli and E.A.T. and one at the Four Seasons. After he left for work, she rifled through his desk, looking for his American Express bills. When she couldn’t find them, she decided they still went to his studio address. I’m like a woman in a Russian soap opera, she thought.

  She joined the 92nd Street Y and started exercising: weights, rowing machines, step machines, stationary bikes. She got a trainer, Ted. She had always liked games—she had played softball for Vassar—but she’d never liked gym workouts. They made her feel like a hamster on a wheel. Ted changed all that. He was very encouraging. Soon, she was seeing him five times a week, early in the morning. These sessions were the best part of her days. Jim noticed.

  “You’re looking thinner, stronger. What’s up?” he asked.

  “Decathlon prep,” she said.

  He stared at her, then tousled her hair. “Don’t lose too much weight,” he said. “I’d miss your breasts.”

  Ted made a pass at her. “Not yet,” she said.

  Ted was dark-haired and dark-eyed like Jim, but shorter, sturdier. She had never known a man so comfortable in his body. He likes himself, Anne said to herself. He’d look at his body sideways in the mirror, and if she caught him, he’d smile and say, “C’mon. Feel my muscle.” He never made the self-deprecating remarks that Jim and his buddies made about their bodies, looking to their women to reassure them: “I need to lose this belly.” “My backhand’s going to hell.” “I gave Greg a good game for an old guy, losing only by two points.” Ted’s interests were narrow—cross-training, fiber, Pink Floyd, and the Godfather movies—but his conversation was effective, mostly movie lines. “ ‘In Sicily, women are more dangerous than shotguns,’ ” he said in a gravelly voice that made her feel she might be dangerous. It was a new and startling feeling. Has there been a dangerous Jewish girl since Judith? she thought. In the locker room, she looked at herself in the mirror. Her underwear, which her mother ordered specially from France, was made of heavy white silk and lace. It looked like the underwear nuns, schoolgirls, and grandmothers wore; it covered her navel and hid her cleavage. I’m thirty-one years old, she thought. Why am I wearing Nana’s undergarments? That afternoon, she bought herself bikini underpants and push-up bras to wear to the gym, beige and pink and lavender lace. Ted picked up on the change. A hint of danger, Anne thought, feeling almost happy. “Let me know when ‘yet’ arrives,” Ted said.

  —

  Jim sent Anne twenty-four pale yellow long-stem roses for their first anniversary, and took her to dinner at La Grenouille. No peonies, Anne said to herself, no tulips. The next week, she began following him. She would call him around two thirty in the afternoon to check on dinner plans. If he said he might be late, she’d make her way to the lobby of his building at five p.m. and take up a post of discreet surveillance. She wore a brown knit hat with a visor
that hid her face; she buried her head in the Post. She wasn’t hiding from Jim, but from the staff. Jim, on his way out, wouldn’t notice her—or anyone else in the waiting room. Like most doctors, he avoided eye contact in waiting rooms, fearing he’d be accosted by a patient or, worse, a patient’s relative.

  The first three weeks were uneventful. Jim came home on time, stayed late working, or went to dinner with colleagues. Twice he stopped by his studio in the early evening, but both times he stayed only a half hour or so. “Pay dirt,” as she dismally called it, came in the fourth week.

  Jim called Anne at one thirty in the afternoon to say he would be home late. “Don’t hold supper for me.” She immediately left the lab and took up her position in the lobby. At two forty-five, she saw Jim leaving the hospital. She followed him out, giving him a ten-second lead. He got into a cab. She got into the one behind. “Follow that cab,” she said. “You’re kidding, lady,” the cabbie said. “I never kid,” she said. “If you don’t lose it, I’ll give you an extra ten dollars.” Jim’s cab took off down St. Nicholas Avenue; Anne’s raced after it.