The Heirs

by Susan Rieger

  —

  Francie had gone to St. Paul’s Girls’ School, London, where she had been educated within an inch of her life. Will said St. Paul’s was Brearley squared. Both parents taught there. She was a scholarship girl. At Cambridge, she was also a scholarship girl. It was a bond between Rupert and his daughter-in-law, though Francie said it was much easier in the ’80s and ’90s to be poor at King’s. “Very little tipping. We made our own beds.” Their immigrant status was also a bond but they felt differently about it. Rupert had come to America, fleeing England, wanting a better life. He did not look back or hold back. He gave everything he had to America and America gave back. His success was complete; he became a Republican. The first time he voted after becoming a US citizen, he voted for Nixon. Over time, he moved slightly leftward, “ ‘correcting’ toward the center,” he said. He deplored Reagan’s trickle-down economics. He remembered the humiliation of being poor at Longleat and Cambridge; he knew what it was to be the resentful recipient of rich men’s largesse. Government benefits didn’t have the sting of private cap-in-hand charity.

  Francie came as a bride, confident and assured, knowing and loving her parents, thinking of going back someday, ambivalent about America. She was Labour until Tony Blair, whom she called Thatcher’s Pussy, then George Bush’s. “Always someone’s pussy,” she said, “including Cherie’s.” She said she and Rupert were Churchillians, he Winston, she Caryl. She became an American when she got pregnant, registering as a Democrat but keeping her British passport. “In case the country goes berserk and elects Cheney president.” She often used bad language, which Rupert, to his sons’ surprise, found funny. “Nostalgie de la boue,” he said at a family gathering to celebrate Will and Francie’s seventh anniversary in 1999, not long after he had shared his grim diagnosis with his sons. The conversation had been circling around Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Francie, an English rose with a pukka accent, asked: “Would you call Clinton a cocksuckee?” Will, who loved Francie’s dirty mouth, laughed. So did Rupert and Eleanor. The others weren’t sure what to do. “I don’t remember table talk like that,” Harry said. “What happened?” Eleanor looked around the table. “We were waiting until you all grew up.” Jack thumped the table.

  “We had foul mouths at the orphanage, every last little bugger,” Rupert said. “I didn’t know the correct word for a woman’s private parts until I went to Cambridge.” The boys shifted in their seats. Rupert went on. “I knew it only as ‘cunt,’ which we called each other at the orphanage.” All the boys, except Sam, stared at their father in astonishment. Rupert continued, “Americans don’t use it much. A shame.” Eleanor shot him a look. “Americans take it so seriously; they’d rather be called an asshole.” Harry fiddled with his flatware. Tom put his head in his hands. Francie shook her head, as if in commiseration: “I’ve known so many, I can’t count. England is cunt-try.” Lea looked at Harry: “I didn’t know I was allowed to say it. This is very interesting.”

  “Do you miss England?” Rupert asked Francie after dinner. They were sitting together in the living room, away from the others. Francie had brought along her wineglass. Rupert was drinking scotch. The cancer had spread to his bones and whiskey helped with the pain. “I’m more lucid with scotch than morphine,” he had said to Eleanor. Eleanor ordered four cases of Black Label. “Optimistic, are you?” Rupert said when he saw the boxes in the pantry. “Thank you.”

  “All the time, but it’s all right,” Francie said. “Your family is so offbeat, I feel at home. I feel I can say anything to you and Eleanor. And Sam. Jack is his horn. Tom shies, like an Arab horse. I’m never quite sure of him. Harry is, well, Harry. Wonderful and maddening. He’s like Kip, my old dog, our border collie. There were five of us in the house then, my parents, my sisters and me. In the evening, when we had all gone to our rooms, Kip would spend ten minutes, more sometimes, trying to find a place to lie down. It was her job to lie equal distance from all of us. In case of wolves. We were her sheep. Harry’s like Kip. He’s always looking out for his brothers, not perhaps the way they’d want it, but the way he sees it. I find his devotion, his protective impulses, moving. I think his fundamental identity is as the oldest of five brothers.”

  “I missed out on a lot when the boys were growing up,” Rupert said. “I wonder if that’s it with Harry, making up for the missing dad.”

  “I don’t think so. Harry took on the responsibility of the Oldest, the First. What are they, the five famous, fierce, fearsome Falkeses?” Francie laughed. “Will can recite the whole series. They all can.”

  Rupert poured himself another scotch.

  “Do you miss England?” Francie asked.

  “Never. I have no nostalgia for it. I wish Father Falkes had lived longer. He was a decade younger than I when he died.”

  “Do you think about your parents ever? Will said you hadn’t wanted to know. Is that still true now? You might be able to find them with the Internet.”

  “Good God, no,” Rupert said. “The Internet is a curse. I’m so glad I came up before everyone could find everyone else, before everyone knew what everyone else was doing. The thought of English relations crowding around my hospital bed, looking for my bank accounts and will…” Rupert stopped, overcome by visceral disgust.

  “Are you dying?” Francie asked. “Everyone’s afraid to ask.”

  He nodded. “ ‘Most things may never happen; this one will.’ Eleanor knows, of course. She says the boys, the men, are not afraid to ask; they don’t want to know.”

  “Are you afraid?” Francie said.

  “Cross. Too soon.”

  “Are you still getting treated?” Francie asked.

  “Yes, experimental protocols. I’m being kept alive by poison. Eleanor wants the end to be as good as it can be. I want it to be as long as it can be. She’s right, of course, but I can’t let go. I want a scientific breakthrough, a miracle.”

  “Not very English of you,” Francie said. “We still ‘go gentle into that good night.’ ‘So sorry to bother you, Sister, but I think the liver transplant has failed. Eyes awfully yellow. My fault I’m sure,’ Old World fatalism.” She shook her head. “Americans think they can beat the reaper with bench pressing and cod liver oil. Maybe that’s only L.A. Midwesterners must know they’re going to die. They’re farmers. Charlotte’s Web. Will had me read it. ‘When Charlotte died, she died all alone.’ Heartbreaker.” She shot Rupert a sly smile. “ ‘When Charlotte passed, she passed all alone.’ Not the same.”

  “Eleanor’s bugbear,” Rupert said. “ ‘Passing be not proud though some have called thee/ Mighty and dreadful…’ ” He smiled at Francie, then took a swallow of scotch. “I maintain the English disdain of euphemism, but I’ve been Americanized on the medical front.” He paused. “Almost all fronts. I love America.”

  “I take it the doctors are willing to cooperate,” Francie said.

  “With unseemly enthusiasm,” Rupert said. “They haven’t tried arsenic or mercury or Drano, but almost everything else.”

  “I shall miss you so,” Francie said. “When I met you the first time, in 1989, when you came to visit Will at King’s, I thought, All right, I might be able to marry this young American, with his English father. I won’t stop being English. I won’t become American, or Americanized. You’re still very English, you know. Not all fronts. You walk like an Englishman, a cricketer. You’ve got that English athlete’s slouch.”

  “Do I?” he said. He smiled at her.

  “And then, you were so open with everyone there, about being an orphan and being poor. It knocked me for a loop,” she said.

  “I wasn’t like that when I was a student. When I was at Longleat, I played on the cricket first eleven. I’d been given a bat by a master but I didn’t have any of the other equipment or any of the clothes. The headmaster asked an old boy if he would buy them for me. He did. I was instructed to write him a thank-you note.”

  “Christ,” Francie said, then stopped. “I’m sorry. No bl
asphemy,” she said. “Only profanity. Like the Restoration.”

  Rupert waved his hand. “I’m past that distinction these days,” he said.

  “Did you play cricket at Cambridge?” she asked.

  “Yes. For King’s, not for Cambridge. This time, I asked Father Falkes if he could help. I couldn’t ask the provost. It would have been too humiliating. And the thought I might have to write a letter of thanks was stomach-churning. I’ve never supported the named scholarships that have the student recipients write the donors. Exacting gratitude. Father sent me money. He must have taken it from the collection plate. My paltry pocket money probably came from the collection plate. I didn’t think about it.” He paused. “I have a tendency to avoid thinking about personally unpleasant things. All my life. Close the door and move on.”

  Rupert gazed at his lovely daughter-in-law, realizing he had never had a conversation so personal, so unguarded with an Englishwoman. He understood why Will had fallen in love with her. He felt half in love with her too. Cambridge in his day was a man’s world. There had been so few women when he was there, fewer than ten percent, and the university had shunted them to the women’s colleges on the out-outskirts. He had never spoken to a female student. He wouldn’t have known what to say. It was as if girls spoke a foreign language. He had known no girls or women growing up, except school matrons and housekeepers. If he had seen a girl like Francie, he wouldn’t have approached her. It wasn’t until America, until Vera, that he ever talked to a woman. He knew he was lucky to have married Eleanor, as elusive as she was, and until he met Dominic, she was the only person he spoke frankly to and with. Still, he was a man of his generation. It wasn’t so much that he preferred the company of men as that he found them so much easier to be with. “How about those Yankees?” Until Susanna, he was grateful he’d had only boys. Now there was Francie too.

  Rupert cast back his thoughts to Cambridge. His memory was fragmenting, whether from the cancer or the chemo or the scotch, he couldn’t say. He had not been happy at Cambridge, but not unhappy either. It was his ticket. He took advantage of his opportunities. At Longleat, he had kept mostly to himself, the fear always lurking in the back of his mind that he’d be exposed, despite his last name, as a parish child, “to be cuffed and buffeted through the world, despised by all, and pitied by none.” That fear receded at Cambridge. As a bona fide Leater, he’d moved up in the world, becoming even an object of envy. There were boys at Cambridge from lower castes, boys who went to grammar schools and minor public schools, boys with regional accents, boys who weren’t Church of England. He saw there was currency other than money and ancestry: accent, education, Latin, cricket, most of all the aura of effortless superiority. He knew what he needed to do.

  “Being poor in my day was still thought to be a personal failing, as being rich was regarded as a personal virtue,” Rupert said. “Americans still feel that way. The English seem to have moderated their views. The landed rich are deserving; the rest just got in at the right time.” He paused. “Partners at my firm used to point to me as the American Dream incarnate, the orphaned immigrant who came from nowhere.” He laughed. “There are Americans who never heard of Cambridge, only Oxford.”

  “Why Cambridge?” Francie said. “I’d have taken you for an Oxford man, so worldly.”

  “Reverend Falkes had gone to King’s, right after World War I. ‘So many dead young men,’ he said. ‘They took me because I applied and could pay the fees.’ ”

  “I’m no different from your partners. I had never heard of Princeton, only Harvard and Columbia,” Francie said. “Will felt slighted. I told him I was London provincial. I had never before met anyone who’d gone to Princeton.”

  “Eating clubs. Princeton is famous for its eating clubs,” Rupert said.

  “Will said you’d say that,” Francie said, laughing. “He said you’ve always regretted that none of them went to Harvard.”

  “I’ve never understood why Harry picked Princeton,” Rupert said.

  “I asked him once, a few years ago, when I first realized that the whole pack had gone there. He said, ‘I think I knew it would take even Jack.’ Harry rounding up his sheep.”

  Rupert poured himself another scotch. “Sweet old Harry,” he said. They sat quietly for a few minutes, Rupert sipping his drink the whole time. “Tell me,” Rupert said. “What’s going on with you?”

  “Will may have told you. We’re trying in vitro fertilization, a test-tube baby. It fills me with hope and dread. I want a baby so much but I worry that I’ll get someone else’s baby and someone else will get ours. I’m half-mad with worry. Will says I’m completely mad. It must be the hormones, I’m on the verge of tears all the time and I obsess about everything, not only Rosemary’s Baby. How will I know if it’s ours, both of us in that tube? People are so careless, so sloppy.” She stopped. “I’m sorry about what I said, not wanting someone else’s baby. I can be so stupid.”

  Rupert shook his head. “No, no. Science is doing miracles, as it ought,” he said. He reached over and touched Francie’s hand. “Don’t get sentimental. Don’t name a boy for me. I never liked Rupert—better than Cyril, but just.” Francie nodded. Rupert sat back. “If we had had a girl, we were going to call her Mary, after Father Falkes’s mother.”

  “My granny was Mary,” Francie said, wiping away tears with her sleeve. “Don’t mind them,” she said. “Hormonal.”

  “I’m sad I won’t get to meet your baby,” Rupert said.

  Susanna and Sam had sex once, in their sophomore year at Princeton. Both were drunk, though not as drunk as they afterward remembered. The mechanics had worked but for both it was a mortifying experience. Sam had no interest in foreplay; a quick ejaculation was the most he wished for. Susanna felt abandoned, stranded with wrenching emotions she couldn’t express. They hadn’t even gotten fully undressed. Minutes after they’d finished, Susanna slunk back to her dorm room.

  The next morning at breakfast, Susanna moved quickly to restore law and order. “Let’s never do that again,” she said. They were facing each other across the table in the Mathey dining room.

  “I’m sorry,” Sam said. “I was drunk.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Susanna said. “It was a bad idea and a worse experience, and it won’t ever be repeated.” She paused. “Or talked about.”

  “Can’t I tease you about it?” Sam asked.

  “No, not yet, maybe not ever,” Susanna said. “I’m too embarrassed.”

  “In my family, that’s the time to start making fun,” Sam said. “It speeds recovery.”

  “How did your mother stand the five of you?” Susanna said.

  “She drew the line at blood. And if an older brother picked on a younger brother, she might call him out, except if it was Jack being picked on. The Teflon Kid.” Sam shook his head. “He’s amazing. He’s a genius. He’s a dickhead.”

  “There should be a book about the five of you,” Susanna said.

  “We have the title: The Five Famous, Fierce, Forceful, Faithful, Fabled, Fortunate, Fearless Falkeses. Harry made it up when he was ten, in the spirit of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, but out-adjectiving it. Mom praised Harry for including ‘fortunate.’ ”

  “Self-fulfilling title, I’d say,” Susanna said. “You are famous, famous for Princeton.”

  “Harry left off ‘fruity,’ ” Sam said. “He didn’t know then. I didn’t know then.”

  “Stop that,” Susanna said.

  “You aren’t entering into the spirit of things,” Sam said. “I can’t keep bringing you home with me if you’re too well behaved.”

  “Where’s all that ‘He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother’ stuff?” Susanna said.

  “Harry believes that. ‘We few, we happy, we band of brothers.’ Only marines feel that way. Real brothers have the long knives out. The first murder was fratricide, and it only took one generation. Whoever wrote the Bible knew his onions. Mom said her goal was getting Tom t
o twenty-one with the rest of us still alive.”

  “Will I ever be able to joke about last night?” Susanna asked.

  “Yes,” Sam said. “It’s our lavender moment. September 18, 1985. Next year we’ll celebrate our first anniversary. I’ll buy you a lavender bouquet. You’ll buy me a lavender tie.”

  “For a gay man, you’re horribly insensitive, and mean too,” Susanna said.

  “It’s time to explode the myth of the sensitive gay man, once and for all,” Sam said. “I’m the middle of five boys. I wouldn’t have survived if I’d been sensitive. The baby, Tom, is sensitive. Straight and sensitive. It’s been rough for him.” He smiled. “Anyway, you weren’t looking for sensitive in me.”

  “No,” Susanna said. “You’re a beast a lot of the time. I like the guyness of you. I think that’s what confused me last night—in my drunken stupor.”

  “I was curious,” Sam said. “That’s settled.”

  —

  Sam didn’t want Susanna to have a baby with someone else. He thought it should be his baby. The idea of a sperm donor, “some anonymous, muscled-up onanist,” as he put it, “with decent college boards and blond wavy hair,” enraged him. He told Susanna she shouldn’t go the donor route.

  “But I’m not,” she said. “A friend has offered.”

  “Is he gay?” he asked.

  “No, straight,” she said. “You don’t know him. He’s a friend from work. Charles. Blond, tall, a bit nerdy, very smart. Stanford. He’s younger than I am, thirty-two.”

  “Will he be the dad, on the birth certificate?” Sam asked.

  “We’re talking about that.”

  “I don’t like it,” Sam said.

  “You can be the godfather,” she said.