The Heirs

by Susan Rieger

  “Harmonie, as in musical notes. It’s a brisk three-minute walk down Fifth,” Mrs. Lehman said, her tone taking on its own briskness. Jim’s list had fifty people on it. Mrs. Lehman told the Cardozos they could invite another fifty. When Mrs. Cardozo offered to pay for more guests, Mrs. Lehman stopped her. “We wouldn’t think of it. I know how hard it is to decide whom to leave off,” she said. “Could you send the names and addresses by the end of the week?” Until the Cardozos showed up at Temple Emanu-El and saw the packed sanctuary, they had thought the wedding would have no more than two hundred guests.

  Anne knew many passive-aggressive men; both her father and brother, at home, in their easy chairs, were adept practitioners. Their specialty was a mix of chagrin and forgetfulness. Mr. Lehman would slap his forehead when one of his daughters told him that, once again, he’d forgotten his wife’s birthday. Her brother would look dazed, a rabbit in headlights, when he found out he had booked a golf game on Mother’s Day. Jim dispensed with chagrin. His art was forgetting. He forgot everything that made unwanted demands on him. Anne thought of him as aggressive-passive. She was almost admiring. She hadn’t realized she might, without remorse, without apologies, treat another person as though his feelings didn’t matter. When she occasionally remonstrated against his high-handedness, he would shrug. “Occupational hazard. Hanging around with surgeons. We’re an arrogant lot.”

  Jim had half played with the idea of keeping the wedding small, just Anne’s parents and siblings, and not inviting his parents. Mrs. Lehman wouldn’t hear of it. “A small wedding is out of the question; with relatives alone, there are at least a hundred and fifty, and they all expect to be invited and fed.” She shook her head as if she were the victim of circumstances and not their master. “But that is beside the point,” she said. “Small or large, your parents have to be there. To exclude them would be to make a scene. You’d find yourself the object of criticism, the Ungrateful Son instead of the Happy Groom.” She paused, rifling her brain for a trouncing bon mot. Finding no quotation on point, she improvised: “I’ve always found that elaborate courtesy makes most people behave.” Anne laughed. “Well done, Mum,” she said. “You can retire Bartlett’s.” Her mother shook her head. “No. Someone somewhere at some time said something like that. I always credit my authors. ‘Honor among thieves.’ Anonymous. I’ll find it.”

  The next day, Mrs. Lehman left a message with Jim’s answering service: “ ‘There can be no defense like elaborate courtesy.’ Edward Verrall Lucas.”

  All the years he lived in his monk’s studio, Jim saved money for the purpose of paying back his parents every cent they ever spent on his education, with interest. The thought of being indebted to them, of being reminded of their sacrifices for him, shriveled his soul. He estimated four years at Yale at fifteen thousand dollars; four years at Columbia P & S at twenty thousand; and seven years of internship and residency subsidized at thirty-five thousand. In 1975, on the eve of his wedding, he sent his parents a certified check for eighty thousand dollars. Taking his cue from his future mother-in-law, he included a note. “This is to thank you for your support through college, medical school, and advanced training. I recognize the sacrifices you made for me. I wouldn’t want you in old age to find yourselves in straitened circumstances because of them.” After depositing the money, his parents mildly protested. “Can you really afford this? Is your practice doing that well?” they asked. They used the money to buy a co-op in a doorman building on East Eighty-Seventh and a condo in Delray Beach. As their wedding present, they gave Anne and Jim leather-bound, autographed copies of Stephen Birmingham’s popular histories, The Grandees: America’s Sephardic Elite and Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York. “He’s writing about the two of you!” Mrs. Cardozo wrote in the note she sent with the books. Despite her disappointment in Anne’s plainness, she was deeply gratified by the match. The Temple Emanu-El membership had paid off; all her friends were envious. Writing to Jim separately, she said: “Now, aren’t you glad you didn’t marry that pretty gentile?”

  Jim called his parents every Sunday morning. On their birthdays, he sent them presents—cashmere sweaters for his mother, golf clubs for his father—and every other month, he and Anne would take them to dinner at an expensive restaurant with hovering waiters, hoping to forestall complaints that he neglected them. “We really must do this more often,” his mother would say, like clockwork, as the main course was being served. “The hospital keeps us busy,” Jim would respond. “Don’t let your lobster get cold.”

  —

  Jim was surprised that Eleanor accepted his wedding invitation. He had thought of the invitation as a letter in a bottle, unlikely to reach shore. The Falkeses’ wedding gift was more surprising; she had chosen the fish server in her parents’ pattern. She remembered, he thought. He had admired it the one time he had had dinner at her parents’ apartment, days before the breakup. Against all reason, he began to spin fantasies again of stolen moments together at 106th Street; she would tell him she had never stopped loving him; she would know he had never stopped loving her. Catching sight of her at the reception, as she stood in the receiving line, he felt his hands getting sweaty, his breath shortening, his mind kaleidoscoping. He signaled to a waiter for a drink. “Hot in here, isn’t it,” he said to his mother-in-law, who stood to his right. “No,” she said. “It must be the excitement.” He waited impatiently for Eleanor to reach him, counting down with every handshake. When she was only four people away, he saw that Rupert was standing behind her. He hadn’t figured on Rupert.

  “Congratulations, Jim,” she said. “I’d like you to meet my husband, Rupert Falkes.” Jim knew who Rupert was, from his St. Thomas hauntings. The men shook hands. Jim introduced Eleanor to Anne. “A friend from my college days,” he said, “Eleanor Phipps.” She would be Eleanor Phipps if she couldn’t be Eleanor Cardozo. Why had she come? he asked himself. What did she want? He couldn’t think straight. His eyes followed her as she joined the swarms buzzing the food tables. He saw his parents approach her; she said something, then turned away. She still hates them, he thought. His mind began to break up again. They would run off together, today, his wedding day, like Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross in The Graduate. They’d get divorced; they’d get married. To hell with everyone else. He reached into his trouser pocket to make sure he had his wallet. A scant second later, he felt his mother-in-law’s hand on his arm, pulling him down to earth. “Look,” she said. “Henry Kissinger’s next in line. Now, no antiwar confrontation. He’s your guest.”

  The rest of the wedding passed in a blur for Jim. It reminded him of his bar mitzvah party: too many people he didn’t know or like. After Kissinger, his mind quieted, an unexpected response to the surprisingly bonhomous Secretary. He drank too much Champagne. He danced with Anne, then with his mother, then with his mother-in-law. The best man, an orthopedic surgeon, made a toast that some people thought funny, others vulgar. The waiters cut the cake. He and Anne slowly made the rounds of the tables. As they approached the table where Eleanor sat, Jim’s pulse began to race again. The Falkeses were surrounded by Strauses and Javitses. They had all pulled their chairs out so they could talk together. The other guests at the table sat silently, watching the A-listers with the grim stares of lifeboat survivors. As Anne leaned over to kiss her uncle’s cheek, her aunt Pauline beckoned to Jim.

  “Thank you for seating us here.” She spoke very softly so no one else might hear. “The Falkeses, Eleanor and Rupert, are the most charming people. I asked them their connection to the bride and groom. I didn’t recognize either of them. Eleanor said laughingly she was an old girlfriend of yours, ‘five small boys ago.’ I don’t know why you let her get away. Lucky for Anne. And the rest of us.”

  For months after the wedding, Jim found himself thinking too often of Eleanor. He would buy flowers for his studio in the brilliant hues he knew she liked. For her twentieth birthday, he had taken her to a flower shop on Madison Avenue to buy her a dozen roses
. He had pointed to some pale yellow ones. “No, no,” she said, laughing. “Those are flowers for good girls. I’m a wild anemone girl.”

  When she called him, more than a year after his wedding, he found himself getting agitated. She wanted the name of a cardiologist. Her mother had had a silent heart attack and wasn’t doing anything about it. “She said she’d trust your recommendation,” Eleanor said. Jim gave her a name and said he’d call him for her.

  “I can’t thank you enough,” she said.

  “How about a movie?” he asked.

  Eleanor paused. “I only go to movies in the afternoon,” she said.

  “I can do that,” he said.

  They made a date to see The Story of Adele H. the following Tuesday. They would meet at the theater.

  Jim was early. When he wasn’t in surgery that week, he had thought of nothing else. “Do you ever think of the old days,” he asked her as they settled into their seats. “Who has time?” she said. “I’m up to my eyebrows in boys. Tell me about your work.” Jim shrugged. “Heart repair.”

  After the movie was over, Jim suggested a quick supper. “Not possible,” she said. “Dinner is a command performance, for everyone, including Rupert.” She gave a half smile. “The boys sometimes compare me to their grandmother.”

  “Let’s do this again sometime,” Jim said.

  “Yes,” Eleanor said. She turned and walked away.

  Six months later, Jim called to find out how Mrs. Phipps was doing. Did she like the cardiologist he had recommended? Eleanor apologized. “She died a month ago. Suddenly. She saw your colleague, Dr. Schwinn. He said she had a congenital defect. She could go anytime. I should have let you know. I’m sorry.” Jim didn’t invite her to another movie. He stopped buying flowers for his studio. Eleanor made a donation in Jim’s name to the Cardiac Center at Presbyterian Hospital.

  —

  Nathan Isaac Lehman Cardozo was born on Thanksgiving Day 1977. He had Jim’s dark hair and eyes and Anne’s sturdy build. Nate excited feelings in Jim he didn’t know he had; life took on meaning outside the operating room. He would die for him; he would live for him. Nate laughed whenever he saw his father, his whole body crinkling with happiness. Holding Nate to his chest, Jim would feel his heart miss a beat. Until Nate, he had disliked the overworked “heartfelt” metaphors his patients bandied about in the examining room, playing down their panic. Their “hearts in their mouths,” they spoke jokingly of themselves as “brokenhearted,” “heavyhearted,” “fainthearted,” “lighthearted,” “halfhearted.” Jim would nod and half smile, thinking, The heart is a muscle; if you want love, look to the brain. Nate upended his scientific literalism; he had stolen Jim’s heart.

  For Nate’s first birthday, the Lehmans threw an afternoon party for all his aunts and uncles and cousins. They invited Jim’s parents. Mrs. Lehman insisted. “It’s practical good manners. If we include them, as we should, you may not have to see them again for two months.” Many small children cry at their birthday parties. Nathan, holding on to his mother’s hand, wobbled about the room, beaming and chirping, happily accepting coos and kisses from relatives. All the Lehmans agreed: Nate was the most charming baby they’d ever seen. Jim wondered if he too might have been that way had he been raised with different parents. He looked at his wife, beaming as brightly as her baby. He needed to thank her.

  “It’s too bad Nathan isn’t blond and blue-eyed like his mother,” Mrs. Cardozo said to Mrs. Lehman as they watched their small grandson on parade. “He should have had Anne’s coloring and Jim’s body type. He’s so plump, don’t you think? And a bit plain.” Mrs. Lehman stiffened. It was a family rule: all babies were beautiful, all grandmothers doting. “ ‘Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.’ David Hume,” she said. Her tone was brisk but not openly hostile. “Also Shakespeare: ‘Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind.’ ” She smiled, showing her teeth. Mrs. Cardozo fumbled with her hanky, coloring with anger at her hostess’s correction. She always felt at a disadvantage in the presence of the Lehmans, her Sephardic pedigree no match for their German pile. Blowing her nose, she massaged her grievance against the Lehmans. Arrivistes, thinking money was the same thing as class. She signaled to her husband it was time to leave. They missed the cake and candles.

  The Lehman and Lewisohn grandchildren called their grandparents Oma and Opa, in the German fashion. It was an old family custom, going back to 1843, when their forefathers landed in the New World, “on die Maiblume,” Anne told Jim, only half joking. The only exception was one of Mr. Lehman’s great-aunts, who insisted on being called Grossmutter. “She was a Seligman,” he’d say, no other explanation being needed. Like all the old German Jewish banking families, the Lehmans and Lewisohns had married so determinedly among themselves, they’d become unhealthily inbred. By the fourth generation, first cousins who didn’t marry first cousins were the outliers, teased for marrying auslanders and diluting the bloodline. Anne’s parents had been second cousins; her grandmother’s had been first cousins. “My mother is also my second cousin once removed,” she explained to Jim. “That is true of my father as well.” She laughed. “My sisters and brother are also my third cousins.” When her sisters married Hungarian and Czech Jews, Mrs. Lehman was relieved. “Thank goodness,” she said to her husband. “I was expecting the next baby to be born with hemophilia or the Hapsburg lip.” Anne’s marriage to a Sephardic Jew was also regarded as a chromosomal boon, though not so groundbreaking. One of her father’s sisters had married a Mendes. Mr. and Mrs. Lehman weren’t ready yet for a Russian Jew but they knew one was coming. Marriages to gentiles would inevitably follow.

  Money aside, not always possible, Jim’s parents took the position that he had married down. Certainly in the looks department, there was no comparison. “He looks like a Spanish prince, doesn’t he?” his mother would say when anyone told her how handsome he was. “Breeding will out.” In safe company, she’d add, with an air of triumph, “Anne and all the Lehmans are squat.” She asked Jim to have Nathan call her and her husband Grandmamà and Grandpapà, the accent landing on the last syllable, as an English child might say it. Jim agreed, Nathan couldn’t. Try as he might, the best he could manage, accents in place, was Ga-mà and Ga-pà. Jim was delighted. Nathan’s Ga-pà sounded like his marble-mouthed “good-bye.” “That’s my boy,” Jim said to Anne. “He announces he’s leaving as soon as he says hello.”

  —

  Anne wanted Nathan to go to Dalton, the neighborhood school, one block north and one block east, an easy drop-off until he was old enough to dash across Park Avenue without getting run over. A friend whose children went there said it was wildly competitive, “starting second semester first grade,” but Anne didn’t worry about Nathan getting by. He had fierce concentration when he was building with LEGO, and what he might lack in sheer brainpower, he would make up in personality. The most charming baby had grown up to be the most charming child, his parents’ love and devotion having done him only good. He was hugely popular at his nursery school at the 92nd Street Y, everyone’s favorite playdate, and while he would shove and push if sufficiently provoked, most of the time he avoided scraps. “I run faster than everyone else,” he told his father. “They can’t catch me.” He wasn’t a beautiful boy, but his smile was sunshine and he gleamed with sweet self-confidence. He had the vividness and liveliness of a Disney woodland creature, a Bambi boy, soft-eyed and downy. Anne had arranged her work schedule so that she was home on schooldays at four. Nathan would sit at the kitchen counter, eating berries and graham crackers and reporting on his day. She had never known such happiness. He was a confiding little fellow, guileless in the way of only children. She didn’t worry that he wasn’t reading yet or that he still wore Pampers at night. She put no stock in precocity.

  “He’s your child,” Jim would say to Anne at least once a month, marveling at Nate’s sunniness, grateful to her and her sturdy Lehman genes. “He escaped the Cardozo curse, the envy, the grudg
e-bearing, the egotism.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that last item,” Anne would answer, as if they were following a comedy script. “He can be egotistical.” Once, in a sly mood, she added, “But he’s not narcissistic.” Jim tousled her hair, deciding she was speaking generally, not about him.

  Jim wanted Nathan to go to Trinity, across Central Park, on the way to Presbyterian Hospital. “One of us can easily drop him off on the way to work,” he said. Anne wondered if the Falkes connection was behind Jim’s thinking; he gave other reasons. Nate was already showing athletic talent. He had learned to ride a two-wheeler when he was three. He could run fast and jump high. On the soccer field, he always knew where the ball was. Jim thought Trinity’s athletics were better than Dalton’s. He also thought its music program was better; Nathan was agitating to play the upright bass. When Jim asked him, “Why a bass?” Nate said, “It sounds like God.” For his sixth birthday, his parents bought him a quarter-size bass.

  Jim didn’t worry about Nathan getting into Trinity or any other Manhattan private school. There was always an alumnus in Anne’s family ready to write the right sort of letter. Lehmans and Lewisohns, as long as they weren’t sociopaths, were almost always admitted. As years went by, Jim got used to the benefits of being a Lehman—it opened doors everywhere—and he was almost indignant the few times his father-in-law’s secretary couldn’t get them a last-minute reservation at the Quilted Giraffe. “Just make sure you tip everyone and tip big,” Mr. Lehman said. “The celebrities who eat at these places are lousy tippers; they mostly expect to be comped. The rich, like us, are their bread and butter. We pay to get in, every time.”

  Anne didn’t want Nate to go to Trinity. The memory of the months she had stalked the Falkes boys was mortifying to her. She wanted it buried, beyond recall. She checked the obituary notices regularly, hoping to read that Mr. Phipps had died. She didn’t want any surviving witnesses. She tried to talk Jim out of Trinity, without letting on that she knew the Falkes boys went there. She couldn’t, and she caved. Nate went to Trinity, where everyone loved him. By the time Nate started kindergarten, Eleanor’s two oldest boys had graduated and the younger ones were in the middle school. By the time Nate was in the middle school, she could watch a game at the soccer field without her heart pounding.