The Heirs

by Susan Rieger

  “Anne,” she said. “Why haven’t you told us you’re pregnant?”

  Everyone looked at Anne. She flushed at the attention.

  “I’m not,” she said. “I’ve stopped exercising so vigorously and gained weight. My muscles must have turned to fat.”

  Mrs. Lehman didn’t like to apologize; she saw it as a sign of weak-mindedness.

  “ ‘Three things can not hide for long: the Moon, the Sun and the Truth.’ The Buddha,” she said. “I’d take the test, if I were you,” she said.

  Jim didn’t say anything to Anne until they got home.

  “Are you pregnant?” he asked. He hadn’t noticed before Mrs. Lehman had spoken but once she had, he too knew she was.

  “You can leave,” Anne said.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.

  “I didn’t want to have an abortion unless I had to. I was waiting for the amniocentesis.”

  “Why did you do this?” he asked.

  “I didn’t do this. It happened.”

  “Who’s the father?”

  “You are,” she said. Jim looked at her for a long time without saying anything. She met his gaze.

  “I can’t have children. You know that,” he finally said.

  “Vasectomies fail,” Anne said, “and we’ve been having lots of sex.” She kept his gaze. “I think it was the bikini panties.”

  “Who are you?” he said. “You’re a different person.”

  “Yes,” she said. Jim was silent for several seconds.

  “I’m not angry,” he said. “I would have thought I would have been—if I had thought this could happen, which I never did.” He stopped. “I’m stunned.”

  “I expected you to be angry and then gone.”

  “I’d look a cad if I left you pregnant,” he said. “I’d be a cad.”

  “We can say we had agreed not to have children and I decided on my own to get pregnant. I’ll do the explaining. I’ll say we were having trouble before I got pregnant.”

  “I’ve never seen you look lovelier,” he said. “How far along are you?”

  “Twelve weeks.”

  “And it’s my baby?” he said.

  “Your baby,” she said.

  “Let’s go to bed,” he said. “I’m not thinking straight.”

  “There’s no reason we can’t have sex,” Anne said.

  He took her hand. “Your breasts are even more wonderful,” he said.

  Will was the family pundit. “Granny slap-down” was one of his jibes. Harry briefly claimed ownership but no one believed him. “You don’t have a sense of humor,” Sam told him, speaking for the family.

  Will gave all his brothers nicknames, mostly as a cover for giving Harry nicknames. Harry was most famously “the Blurter,” but also “First Brother” or “First.” Will had numbered all the boys, after The Five Chinese Brothers, and they often called one another by their numbers. For two years, Jack was known almost exclusively as Fourth Brother, or, when his brothers were feeling more kindly toward him, Perfect Fourth Brother. Tom was in heaven; he wasn’t the butt. Sam refused to play along. “You have no respect for numbers,” he said to Will. “You don’t know the difference between an irrational number and an imaginary number.” Rupert occasionally called them out by their numbers, to quiet them down, in the manner of Mr. Darling in Peter Pan. “A little less noise there, First and Second, a little less noise.” He didn’t tease. Eleanor never used the numbers. “No way,” she said. “I’d only get in trouble calling you by numbers. Another example of Refrigerator Mom when you came to write your memoirs.”

  Will had worshipped Harry when he was little, following him everywhere, doing whatever he did, setting the pattern for his younger brothers, who came to worship him too. Harry accepted their homage with princely condescension and ruthlessness. He was harder on Will than the younger ones, but with all of them he shouldered his responsibilities as the oldest. He might goad or punch or bully or tease them, but no one outside the family could do it. He instilled in his younger brothers a sense of their specialness; they were the Five Famous, Fierce, Forceful, Faithful, Fabled, Fortunate, Fearless Falkeses. He left off “fantastic.” “We’re not comic-book heroes,” he said to Eleanor. He was ten. Well into his teenage years, Will was under Harry’s thrall, safe and surly in his thralldom. The mocking nicknames were the earliest signs of revolt. Will wondered if he hadn’t gone to law school because Harry had.

  —

  Will came east for the Fourth of July. It was only his second time back since his father’s death, more than two years earlier. He felt bad about that, but also relieved. He’d only had to deal with the Wolinskis secondhand. Francie stayed in L.A. The first trimester had been rough. “All I want to do is sleep for a week without throwing up,” she said. “Off with you.” The second day there, Will went through the family photos. Eleanor had them in boxes, by decade. She had photos of everyone dotting the apartment, on tables, mantels, and bookshelves, but she’d never made up albums. Her mother made albums. In an ancient, tattered, straw suitcase with a luggage tag marked “R. H. Falkes, The Rectory, St Pancras, Chichester,” Will found relics of his father’s early life: his English driver’s license from 1954; a photo of him, age twenty or so, punting on the Cam; another photo of him at the same age, standing next to an aged priest; a clipping from the Chichester Observer, August 3, 1940, with a photo of five small boys in V-neck sweaters, shorts, high socks, and sandals, under the headline “St. Pancras Home for Orphaned Boys Collects 200 Tins for War Effort”; a faded baby blanket and bonnet. The blanket and bonnet had never been laundered. Eleanor picked them up. “They smell stale, like old books,” she said. “There’s no baby smell left.” She laid them back in the suitcase.

  “What does the H stand for?” Will asked. “Dad never used it.”

  “Henry. Reverend Falkes gave Dad his first and last names, fronted by ‘Rupert,’ for Rupert Brooke or Prince Rupert, Dad was never sure which,” Eleanor said. “The name was the making of Dad. Without saying it, he and the Reverend took it as a special relationship, a claiming. And Dad could call him Father.”

  “Is that Reverend Falkes in this photo, with the collar?” Will asked. “He looks so proud of Dad.” He laughed. “Dad looks so serious.”

  Eleanor picked up another photo. “That’s Dad in the orphans’ photo, second from right,” she said. “No smile. He never smiled to please anyone.”

  “I remember Dad smiling,” Will said. “Where are the wedding photos? I’ll bet he’s smiling there.” Eleanor pulled them off the shelf. Will was right; in photo after photo, Rupert was smiling at Eleanor. “My mother wanted us to face the photographer. Dad wouldn’t. ‘Why should I look at him?’ he said. ‘Who is he to me?’ Then he turned to me and said, ‘Look at me.’ And I did. I think this is the photo. Look at us. We were so young.”

  “This is my favorite,” Will said, pointing to a photo of his parents dancing. They were laughing, as if they had a secret.

  “You look so in love,” Will said.

  “Do we?” Eleanor said.

  Will nodded. “You know how kids, when they’re seven or eight, never think or want to think their parents had sex? Most of our friends had only one or two siblings, which meant their parents only had sex two or three times, max.” Will laughed. “I punched out Trip Fitzgerald for saying, ‘Yuck, your parents had sex five times.’ I felt I was standing up for the family honor.”

  “It’s mutual, you know, or reciprocal, one or other of those,” Eleanor said. “Children don’t want their parents to have sex and parents don’t want their children to have sex. At least, they don’t want to think about it; the mind recoils.”

  Will looked sideways at his mother. “I thought you and Dad had a good sex life,” he said. “Not when I beat up Trip. Later. You were so undemonstrative in public. I took that as proof. I’ve always distrusted public displays.”

  “Are we ready for this?” Eleanor said. “What we talk about when we talk about sex
.”

  “Did I put my foot in it?” Will asked.

  Eleanor shook her head.

  “Those earrings you’re wearing,” Will said, pointing to a wedding photo, “you’re wearing them now.”

  “Dad gave them to me. His wedding present. I wear them all the time.”

  “I bought a pair like them for Francie last year.”

  “Did you?” Eleanor said.

  “She doesn’t wear them,” Will said. “Occasionally she does. She said they were beautiful.”

  “Ah,” Eleanor said. “The old spousal gift fallacy.”

  Will laughed. “What fallacy?” he said. “It would have helped if we had a sister or two. Susanna came too late to civilize us.”

  Eleanor smiled. “Not all men but most, when they’re buying their wives a gift—a necklace, a nightgown, a handbag, it doesn’t matter—are buying their mothers a gift. And when their wives show their disappointment, by returning it or burying it in the back of the closet, the men are baffled, hurt. ‘What woman wouldn’t want a Tiffany tennis bracelet?’ they ask. Wrong question. ‘What woman would want it?’ Dear old Mom. Dad didn’t fall into that trap. A benefit of being an orphan.” Eleanor looked at Will. “You look abashed. We can talk about sex instead, if you like.”

  “Francie admired the earrings on you,” he said.

  “On me, yes,” Eleanor said.

  “Are we all buying our wives gifts you would like?” Will asked.

  “Not Jack and Sam,” Eleanor said. “Jack buys his wife gifts he would like. A laptop, a big-screen TV, a BMW, a turntable. I’m surprised he never bought Kate a trumpet mouthpiece. Sam and Andrew don’t buy each other gifts. But the rest of you, yes.”

  “Mama’s boys, that’s what we always say we are,” Will said. “A bevy of mama’s boys.”

  Eleanor didn’t say anything.

  Will looked again at the photo of his parents dancing.

  “You were a baby,” he said. “And the next year, you had a baby.”

  “We were the old young,” Eleanor said. “We liked it. Your generation wants to be the young old.”

  “We want to be the beautiful young,” he said, “and the forever young.”

  “You’re holding up very well,” Eleanor said.

  “Holding up is the word. Gravity has kicked in. I’m past my prime in L.A. I’m thirty-eight, no chicken. Everyone is too good-looking in L.A., until they turn thirty-two, except the nanny. Too risky. Then, one day, they’re too old, and only good-looking for someone their age. The feverish regimen begins: fasting, hydrating, lifting, running, cleansing. They see a trainer four days a week. They eat nuts and tofu. No drinking at lunch. Cocaine only on weekends. The men wear weaves and cowboy boots. The women have mouths like duckbills. As for their gravity-defying boobs…” He stopped.

  “Are the women looking for husbands?” Eleanor said.

  Will nodded. “L.A. is Noah’s Ark. A divorce means you’re on the market for your next husband—or wife. Men too need to be married. The unmarried ones are too expensive to insure.”

  “I’m not marrying again. I won’t risk my luck. And I’m not going to have ‘work.’ It’s too late anyway. I’ve been told you have to lay a foundation in your thirties.”

  “I’ll bet there are men who’d like to marry you, even with your crow’s-feet.” Will leaned in, as if to examine her face. “What about Carlo Benedetti?”

  “I can’t imagine the gauntlet a suitor would have to run with the five of you.”

  “We’d have a hard time,” Will said. “We’d give you a hard time.”

  “Do you remember proposing to me when you were five?”

  “I hope you accepted,” Will said.

  “I was torn. You all proposed.”

  “Oedipus run amok,” Will said.

  “Dad began locking the bedroom door,” Eleanor said. “ ‘Too much night traffic,’ he said.”

  “New York isn’t Noah’s Ark, is it? You haven’t been ‘dropped’ now you’re on your own?” Will said.

  “No, not yet,” Eleanor said, “but I am very careful at dinner parties. No gin or vodka. No flirting. Only married people are allowed to flirt. It makes no sense. A widow is much less dangerous than an unhappy wife. A female acquaintance, divorced for several years, was almost salivating at Dad’s funeral, like one of Job’s comforters: ‘Just you wait, the invitations will dry up. All your friends will think you’re after their husbands.’ As if.”

  “Bill Macy?” Will said. “Gag me with a spoon.”

  —

  Eleanor told Will about her conversation with Harry at Café Luxembourg. Will groaned.

  “Jesus, one for the Guinness book of blurts,” he said.

  “He was awful,” Eleanor said. “I had just told him I wanted to give some money to the Wolinski boys and he accuses me of a lifetime of deception. He sounded like an injured wife.”

  “I don’t think he believed it. He was angry, he thought it, boom,” Will said. “If he says he believes it now, he’s talked himself into believing it. Harry’s like Jack that way. Their editing functions are screwy. I don’t know where that comes from. You don’t shoot your mouth off; Dad didn’t.”

  “Oh, no, Dad did,” Eleanor said. “He said stinging things all the time, not at home, not with us, except of course his Granny slap-downs, but with almost everyone else, everywhere else. He was famously rude. I was always expecting New York magazine to write him up as ‘The Rudest Man in New York.’ People would complain to me all the time. He lashed the associates in the firm and even some of the partners. He told poor old Gosford he was a ‘useful idiot.’ Gosford called me in tears.”

  “Are you still planning to give money to the Wolinski boys?” Will asked.

  “Probably. I don’t know,” Eleanor said. “It’s become so fraught, all of it. Harry is still angry, calling Dad a bigamist, rewriting his childhood.”

  “You should think about it some more,” Will said. “I’ve been wanting to say something, looking for the right moment. I didn’t know if you wanted to talk about it.” He looked at his mother, trying to read her face. “What a mess,” he said. She was silent, unreadable. Will continued, “Vera was disingenuous. Not the boys.”

  “What’s this?” Eleanor said.

  “Did you look carefully at the photograph of her and Dad, her and Alleged Dad?”

  “Only to see if it was Dad,” she said. “It didn’t seem to matter.”

  “I took it with me,” Will said. “There was something about it that seemed off. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Not the sandals, the whole thing. It kept bugging me. Last week, planning this visit, I looked at it under a magnifying glass. It might be Dad; it might be Viggo Mortensen. I assume it is Vera, yes?” Eleanor nodded. Will continued, “I asked a photographer friend to enlarge it. The faces got blurrier but the rest got clearer. Eureka. The cars were all from the ’50s rounded with a kind of Deco look. There were four of them. I don’t think any of them was later than 1954. No pointed fins. Vera and Alleged Dad are standing in front of a restaurant, Toffenetti’s. It was rounded too, with glass bricks and metal trim. Toffenetti’s closed in 1968. I called the New York Public Library’s reference line. Nathan’s Famous took over the site. At Forty-Third and Broadway. I remember eating at Nathan’s.”

  “It didn’t hold a candle to Gray’s Papaya.”

  “I think I bought a hot dog at Gray’s Papaya every day after school for ten years.”

  “Do you remember when Sam preserved one in formaldehyde, in the same jar as his fetal pig?” Eleanor said. “The pig life cycle. It made me queasy.”

  Eleanor picked up the photo. “It’s Dad,” she said. “I knew it the minute I saw it.”

  “In her letter to you, Vera said she’d had a relationship with Dad in the mid-’70s. This photo is twenty years earlier.”

  Eleanor was silent. The lost year, she thought.

  “Are you all right, Mom?” Will said.

  “I’m taking this all in, or tryin
g. You’re saying Vera knew Dad in the mid-’50s.” Eleanor cleared her throat. “I thought Dad, the young Dad, looked like the young Max von Sydow. He had wolf’s eyes. You all have them.”

  “Sheep in wolves’ clothing then,” Will said. “We’re an uxorious clan.”

  “Are you?” Eleanor said.

  Will stared at his mother. “We’re not?” he asked.

  Eleanor didn’t answer. Will started to ask, “Who?” but changed his mind. He didn’t want to know.

  “Dad, Viggo, Max, sheep, wolf,” he said, “the photo wasn’t taken in ’75.”

  Eleanor thought back to 1975. She and Rupert had visited England for the first time since he’d left; they had celebrated their fourteenth anniversary, double seven; they had gone to Jim’s wedding. Though never unkind to her, Rupert was seriously out of sorts all that year, distracted and irritated, as the English would have it; anxious and depressed, in the American vernacular.

  “I think it odd, don’t you,” Will said, persisting in the face of her inscrutability, “that Vera’s only evidence is so old, long before the years she claimed she had a relationship with Dad? Why didn’t she say she’d known him in the ’50s? Wouldn’t that have strengthened her case?”

  “I lie sometimes,” Eleanor said. “Don’t you? I never told you boys to always tell the truth. We don’t owe the truth to everyone.”

  “Do you really think Dad is the father of the Wolinski boys?” he said.

  “They’re so blond; you’re all dark,” she said. She was silent for a few seconds. “Why didn’t Harry notice this? He’s a lawyer, paid to pay attention. Or Tom? Or Sam, for that matter? He’s a scientist. He should have noticed.”

  “We took our lead from the Maynard lawyers. They said the photo proved nothing. Don’t you remember Gosford intoning to the Surrogate: ‘If a photo of a man and a woman standing next to each other was proof of paternity, I am the father of George W. Bush.’ ”