Had he described Hugh Shipley at all over the past three years, approachable would not have been a word he’d ever have used. But one warm autumn night during his senior year, Ed Cantowitz found himself grabbing Hugh Shipley’s arm in front of Lamont Library the way he might otherwise grab a Budweiser at Cronin’s. They were not friends; they’d spoken only in passing this year, and mostly after the Shakespeare seminar in which they were both enrolled, but Ed Cantowitz was not thinking of how Hugh Shipley might find him off-putting or offensive, because, as usual, Ed Cantowitz was thinking about himself.
“Keep walking,” muttered Ed, and that’s what Hugh Shipley did. He walked as if he hadn’t even noticed the interruption, didn’t so much as slow the trajectory of his cigarette from hand to mouth. Ed watched the cigarette and the dry fallen leaves on the ground—anything not to turn around and stare at the girl. “Do me a favor and keep walking and don’t turn around. Do yourself a favor and just look straight ahead.”
Shipley nodded. “Might want to take your hand off my arm,” and Ed released his grip before offering a crazed smile as an afterthought, if not an apology. He knew he had a menacing voice, not to mention truly dark stubble (he’d forgone his much-needed second shave of the day), and his husky voice and bulldog build lent him not only an unsavory but even vaguely criminal air. Ed usually alternated between being pleased by these qualities and ashamed, but at the moment he was so focused he didn’t care what Shipley thought. The two young men walked down steps and past a stand of pine trees, kicking crabapples out of their path, and Ed talked. “This girl,” he said, and Shipley nodded again. Ed didn’t sound embarrassed, because he wasn’t embarrassed. This, he believed, is what men did for one another, all kinds of men, he didn’t care who; in the face of beautiful women, men were allied soldiers, at least until proven otherwise. “I can’t stop staring at this girl, but I’m under no illusions that I don’t need strategy. You? You don’t know a thing about strategy, am I right? Because you don’t need it. I need strategy—and make no mistake about it, strategy does work—but when I held open the door for that girl just then, I knew if I let myself do something about her, it would have been the wrong thing. I needed to save myself from myself, as they say. Listen, can you tell me if she’s still there behind us? Petite girl, big eyes—she’s actually kind of cross-eyed—really really really nice knockers?”
Hugh Shipley looked slyly right behind them. He reported that he no longer saw the girl. “Hadn’t noticed she was cross-eyed.”
“Slightly,” said Ed, stopping suddenly, short of breath. “Only if you look closely.”
“Well,” said Hugh, “glad to help.” He sounded sincere, but Ed knew he might have missed the sarcastic edge. It wouldn’t have been the first time. Ed was not a nerd—no, sir—but at this point in his college career, he had to acknowledge that he was—to put it kindly—an outsider. Being at ease around groups of other people—especially lighthearted other people—was not his strong suit.
He’d barely spoken to Shipley in the three years they’d been classmates; they’d had no reason to speak. Ed was on scholarship and was a rigorous and nakedly ambitious student with a government concentration and a gift for statistics. He was preparing to write his senior thesis on how China would dominate the twenty-first century. Hugh, on the other hand, skipped classes, often smelled like whiskey, and was rumored to be working with a lapsed graduate student on some kind of anthropology film project. He towered over Ed at roughly six foot four, and he was, of course, a Shipley, which lent everything he did a kind of simultaneous legitimacy and scandal. He’d grown up in the famous Brookline home of Clarissa Cadence Shipley—a ubiquitous stop on any Historical Homes of Boston tour. Ed had no idea how he knew this; the family was exactly that famous—one simply knew these things. One also often saw Hugh carrying a camera tripod and wearing dungarees as if he were headed off to the African savanna instead of crossing the street between classes, but—and this was the salient point—there was nothing comical about him. He looked as if he might, in fact, be more comfortable amidst a pride of lions.
“So it’s Friday,” Ed declared. “Friday night.” He tried—unsuccessfully—not to laugh, which he often did when he had excess energy, which he certainly did just then. Sometimes his laughter came from shortness of breath, sometimes it even came from anger, but Ed was—as the expression went—quick to laugh. He was quick, in fact, with everything except a joke. Jokes he hated; they were never funny.
“I’m sorry I’m laughing,” said Ed. He understood that he seemed strange, even vaguely crazy, and promised himself he would not be surprised if Hugh walked away right then.
But Hugh only nodded, as if he was waiting for Ed to stop. Then he stubbed out the cigarette on his shoe and began to strip it down. The wind carried the filter away and Ed stopped laughing.
Hugh grinned and shook his head. “Some strategy.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, after all that bluster, you’re without a date on a Friday night.” Hugh opened and closed his hands as if they’d been aching. “Maybe you should have figured out a strategy while you actually had the chance.”
“Hey,” said Ed, nodding toward Hugh’s hands, “you got circulation problems or something?”
Hugh looked at his fingers as if he’d noticed them for the first time. “I guess.”
“It’s the smoking. Something about the tobacco. I read it somewhere.”
Hugh’s fingers were long and lean, aristocratic yet manly, and they impressed Ed more than the expensive clothes, carelessly worn, that signaled a prep-school past or the athletic gait and suntanned face. It was Hugh’s hands that evoked in Ed Cantowitz a rare feeling of intimidation, but just as he was prepared to give over to the feeling, to acknowledge and make room for its uncomfortable presence, the intimidation was gone and what was left in its place surprised him: interest, plain and simple. He was rarely truly interested in other people, and, when he was, it was as if he had an intellectual obligation to follow through on it.
And something was nagging at him. He kept thinking of the Shakespeare seminar that Hugh and he were both taking, and how—maybe because Ed was alternately too willing to acknowledge that he understood little of what Shakespeare was talking about more than half the time or was overexcited about how much he did understand, and maybe because, okay, he tended to speak up more than most of his fellow students—Ed was laughed at, and often. He was used to being laughed at in class and didn’t act offended—never looking away, preferring instead to look around at all the laughing faces—but of course he was offended. And when he looked around the room, there was one face that was never laughing, and that was Hugh Shipley’s. Hugh always sat in the same aisle seat, his legs outstretched and inadvertently tripping the professor, who was fond of pacing as he taught. Hugh Shipley never laughed at Ed. And this fact was nagging at him and making it somehow essential that Hugh not walk away. He also wondered, as he always did when standing beside another man, whether—though Shipley had a good eight inches on him—he could take him in a fight.
“Ever boxed?” he asked.
Shipley shook his head. “I probably should,” he said, in a way that suggested to Ed that this answer was more of a personal aside, alluding to a different, more complicated question. He offered Ed a cigarette, which Ed declined. Hugh shrugged again and lit up, squinting as the lamplights came on. Young men were illuminated up close and in the distance; young men were in a rush toward rooms and drinks. In groups and alone, they were saddled with bags—all canvas and army green—full of books, and books and books weighing them down but not holding them back. The whole scene struck Ed Cantowitz, as it often did, as somewhere between funny—a bunch of pack mules!—and poignant, even heroic. Harvard. He’d gone to Harvard. All of these mules and Ed was one of them.
He wondered if being out on the streets on a Friday night would always bring on this unmistakable charge, as if he were about to get caught for every dishonorable act he’d ever committed, every lie he’d ever told. He also wondered if he’d ever stop picturing his home, with his mother still in it, with the Shabbos table set and the smell of burned chicken and the ironed white cloth with the ghost stains of Shabbos past, stains that—like the people who’d spilled the wine and gravy, the too-salty chicken soup—were never completely gone. All those people no longer crowded into his parents’ dining room, bearing poppy seed cakes and starting in with ritual complaints about their health and the changing neighborhood, the abandonment by their rabbi, the disintegration of their shul. They no longer clamored to compare statistics of how many Jews were left in their community or the steep increases in crime. There was no more lamenting how the schwartzes were moving in and taking over, dragging the neighborhood down. “It’s inevitable,” yelled Uncle Herb, though he tended toward yelling as a rule, making little distinction between his civic frustrations and “This chicken is very tender.”
They no longer sat around the table hollering and commiserating, drowning out his mother, who said little more than “Murray—enough,” while busying herself with serving food, and Aunt Lillian with her watery eyes, who cried, “But what about the Jewish commitment to integration?” before blowing her nose and excusing herself. Those people no longer sat there at his father’s table, but only his mother was dead; the others had merely stopped coming. They’d moved out to Mattapan and Sharon and, in one case, Newton. But even if they hadn’t moved, or even if his father had moved along with them, Murray Cantowitz had stopped observing not only Shabbos but all of the holidays, even the High Holy Days, and there was no longer any God-given reason to gather together.
Murray Cantowitz had adored his wife. Ed, even as a child, had known his father was the kind of man who had enough love for only one person in this lifetime, and his mother was that one person. When he lost his wife, Ed’s father had also lost whatever decency she had inspired. At first people said his incessant bitterness made sense; it was the grief, poor man. But after about six months they said nothing, because they stopped coming around, and Ed, age sixteen and then seventeen (what a birthday that was), was left alone with him. No Shabbos, no God, no mother. Only studying. Because he was—thankfully, although he’d never thought to be thankful about it—seriously smart and could leave this house and this town and never come back, propelled by the sheer force of his studying. He pictured his marks and his scores like the fiercest Kraut-bombing warplane—the North American P-51 Mustang—lifting him up to where he could see their building far below, until he was too far away to even tell the difference between the tenement where he had spent his youth and all the other tenements in Dorchester.
His mother had looked like an Italian film actress, with thick black hair shot through the front with a dramatic white streak. She moved slowly in the morning, regardless of how big a rush his father insisted he was in, no matter how early Ed needed to be at school. It was because of his mother that he’d attended Boston Latin, after one of his determined Irish teachers marched over to the Cantowitz home one spring afternoon and suggested—after impatiently refusing a cup of tea—that if Mr. and Mrs. Cantowitz did not pursue Boston Latin for their son, then Edward was sure to become bored and superior and make a mess of his life. His father had only scoffed, wondering aloud what Ed had done to both impress and annoy his teacher, but Mrs. Dora Cantowitz had taken Mrs. Patty Delany’s words to heart and made sure her son took the necessary steps to follow his teacher’s advice. No one would have mistaken his mother for an intellectual, but she had also been an elementary school teacher for a few years before marrying Ed’s father, and she had a fierce, if sentimental, regard for education. She had been a beloved teacher, one whose students, years later, wrote her appreciative—nearly amorous—letters. After reading a letter aloud to Ed and his father, she would place it in a blue folder, kept on the top shelf of her modest but mysterious closet. Ed was jealous of these children; how could they have known her back then? Back when she was Dora Markov being courted by Murray “the Curl” Cantowitz, welterweight?
She’d seen him buying an orange at the fruit stand and said, “Good luck with your next fight!” the way kids did at the time. “It’s gonna be a tough one” is what he supposedly replied. “Sure would be nice to see you in the crowd.” “Oh,” Dora had demurred, “my mother would never allow it.” “I’ll tell you what,” said Murray. “See this orange? I bet you I can peel this orange in a perfect circle without even nicking the skin. If I can do that, you come to my fight. Leave your mother to me.” They leaned against a liquor-store window as Murray unpeeled the orange and asked Dora for her arm. He squeezed a bit of the juice onto Dora’s outstretched wrist. “Better than any perfume,” he declared, and—as his mother used to say, quite cryptically—she was finished.
She was from truly poor Russian Jews; Cossacks had murdered her father while he was working in the fields outside Kiev, and her newly pregnant mother had somehow cobbled together enough money to get a passage to America with her sister’s family. They had all raised this American-born daughter for something better than a welterweight, no matter how promising Murray Cantowitz’s career looked at the time, and Dora had retained that idea that she was meant for better things, even after she had made her choice. She was a snob about manners and grammar and was prone to expressions like I would never stoop so low and I never cared for her. And she was superstitious. With all of her manners, she was not above throwing salt over her shoulder even while eating in a restaurant (which she generally treated with great seriousness) or spitting three times in the middle of the street if she saw a black cat or stepping on the foot of a person who’d mistakenly stepped on hers, nor would she utter the word cancer—even after it ravaged her body, even as she prayed for death itself—for fear of taunting the disease.
By age seventeen, there was no Shabbos, no God, no mother, but there were, finally, girls. After all of that time spent wondering over what they wanted, what they liked, it was finally clear: Girls liked grief. They liked when, after admitting that, yes, it was still difficult to talk about his mother, Ed became so sad, so overwrought, that his desire approached desperation. They liked how he gripped their hair and faces and breasts as if he were suddenly terrified that they, too, might drop dead. And if they weren’t going to die in that moment, Ed made them feel that they would one day, and that Ed would, too, that they all would die, every last citizen of Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan, and that they—a girl and Ed Cantowitz—they were breathing (Can you hear my breath? I can hear your heart. Feel that. Come closer; no, closer), they were alive. It was as if Ed, with his recent status of mourner, had been given permission to act out each year of pent-up sexual frustration and, with this permission, his very own seduction style had emerged. If he’d been more of a cynic, he might have called it the Death Threat, as if it were a new dance; he might have boasted of his technique to the guys at Sam’s, who placed bets on the number of spares in a bowling game and played pool on one of the eight backroom tables on any given night. He might have bragged to the boys who won their cigarettes during poker games, boys with no one waiting at home for them, making sure they weren’t ruining their precious young lives. But Ed wasn’t that kind of cynic. Though sometimes he played pinochle until he couldn’t see straight and none of his hard-earned money from working for his father remained, he wasn’t that kind of boy. It was true that at some point he’d become conscious of what he was doing with these girls and began performing just a bit, but by then he was too grateful for his success to return to behaving with any measure of self-control. His mother would have called these aspiring young gamblers and such boasting low class, and he’d loved his mother without reservation. They had joked around together in their pajamas up until the very end—Ed lying at her side under rosebud-patterned sheets, under ugly blankets crocheted by the Sisterhood, while his father cursed doctors on the phone by day and friends in the kitchen by night. “Why didn’t you have more children, Ma?” Ed had asked her once (only with hindsight did such a question seem cruel), as he dared to imagine a world with only his father for family. “Oh, Eddie,” she’d said. “Who was going to come after you?”
Ed’s thrill with girls was not about conquest, but it was a thrill and as real as his very real fear of dying. Which was, of course, exacerbated when he was that close to a girl, because he felt like he really really really didn’t want to die. Not when such happiness was possible.
There was Marla with the red sweater, who offered him a turn on her new bicycle, to take a spin through Franklin Field. They coasted down a hill and into a patch of sunlight. He told her he hadn’t kissed anyone since his mother died. It was so easy; it was true. To feel her small lips parting, her squat hand in his hair, to tumble down behind the oak trees. When she left that summer to be a counselor at a girls’ camp, he spent the better part of a Sunday wandering through the zoo, because taking a good look at the monkeys could usually cheer him up, but nothing did the trick until Peggy asked him the time in front of the antelopes and the camels. Peggy had been quick about it; the word efficient came to mind. Then one day Carol sold him an orange Popsicle. Carol had watched him lick the Popsicle and told him when she got off work, slipping him another Popsicle free of charge. Sarah Jane was covered with mosquito bites and was going mad with itching when she came into Twinies, where he was buying his father cigarettes. These were neighborhood girls; he had seen them all before, but he wasn’t sure where. It could have been anywhere—the Wall on the High Holy Days amidst a sea of teenagers angling to show off their best-dressed selves, or maybe the Chez Vous roller rink, where he would’ve no doubt been too busy looking at their legs as they laced up their skates to remember their faces; he could have seen them while waiting on line to buy candy or comics. But never had he imagined how these girls—the very same ones who bought their parents Geritol at Twinies and challah and half-moons at the bakery and chatted with the cobbler about which shoes were theirs even when their ticket was nowhere to be found—would follow him to secluded spots or in some cases (Peggy!) lead the way. When he’d told his story of grief and loneliness, each one had offered him such succor. Sarah Jane had heard of him—heard that, though he was smart, some people worried he’d get into trouble now that his mother was gone. Marla had told him to lay his head on her thighs. She had stroked his head and said there, there as if he wasn’t full of anger and hunger but instead was only a girl from her camp, someone longing for home.
Unfathomably (Ed couldn’t help but think), Hugh didn’t seem to be making any move toward wherever it was that Hugh Shipley went on a Friday evening. They both still looked on as students rushed about in the twilight. Hugh lit up another cigarette.
“So what’s on your agenda this evening?” Ed finally asked.
Hugh shrugged. “You?”
“When?”
“Now,” said Hugh. “Where are you headed?”
“I’m not sure,” Ed admitted. “Maybe go get a drink? You want to get a drink?”
“Oh,” he said, stretching his fingers again, “I was actually going to see my father.”
“Do you want to go see him?”
“Not especially.”
“Then I’d consider it carefully. Maybe you need a drink.”
Hugh laughed. “You think I need to have a drink before seeing my father?”
“Maybe. Maybe you do. How the hell should I know?” He sounded coarser than he’d meant to, coarser than he was, and as he cursed himself for how this so often happened, how he ruined whatever chance he had to be affable and winning, Ed suddenly saw something on the ground in the distance, a flash of light in the patchy grass, right where the girl had walked. As he crouched down to collect it, he prayed for a monogrammed brooch, a silver hairpin he’d need to return to the slightly cross-eyed, perfectly buxom girl, but it was only a smashed bottle cap, the label worn away.
When he looked up and saw Hugh Shipley’s back to him, and when he heard him beg off while walking away before the night had even started, he vowed to pursue Hugh and keep him interested, at least for the next five minutes.
“Hey, where are you going?” he called after him.
After three years as a Harvard student and four years of no religion, Ed had—just a month ago—decided to say kaddish for his mother. He had made this decision solely because his mother had come to him in a dream. She’d sat on his bed in the room he shared with Stan Landau, his roommate since freshman year (that Jews were assigned only Jewish roommates should not have come as a surprise, but it just so happened that Stan was the perfect roommate). In the middle of the night, with the lights from the river shining through the curtains, with the heft of her former zaftig self weighing down the end of the bed, his mother had stared him down and said, “Just say it for me.” When he’d asked what she was talking about, she looked at him exactly the way she seldom had: brimming with disappointment. And so, though he’d had no intention of doing so perhaps ever again, or at least—more realistically—not so soon after the seventh and hopefully final infernal summer spent working for his father, laying steel pipes in the ground, Ed had gone home. He’d gone home for Yom Kippur. Of course the holiday had fallen on a day of lectures only days before his midterm examinations, and of course he’d had to give the professors a sufficient explanation, but he didn’t apologize. He approached his European history professor and explained the Day of Atonement as if not only this thin-lipped man but also the entire faculty at Harvard had been clamoring to understand. Ed told him, in the loftiest voice he could muster (a voice that he’d learned not from three years at Harvard but from his own dead mother), that the very word atone meant to be at one with God. Then he walked to Central Square in his too-short dark suit, picked up an egg-salad sandwich to eat before sundown, and took the Red Line. He tried not to feel afraid that something would prevent his return.
His father was into a bottle of rye and barely acknowledged his presence. Forget about the fact that his father was drinking hard liquor after sunset on Erev Yom Kippur—that he drank at all was still a shock. Ed had been raised on the story of how, during Prohibition, his father’s uncle—a Brooklyn rebbe!—had been fond of making bathtub gin and how one fatal night he’d mixed the wrong proportions and the rabbi died from drinking bad gin. Ed had rarely seen his parents drink, aside from some Manischewitz on Friday nights and holidays, aside from a glass of sherry for his mother now and then, though he was starting to think that maybe his father had always drunk and had—before his mother’s death—simply done so in secret. The night after Ed’s mother was buried, after all of the mourners had gone home and the house was unbearably quiet, his father pulled a bottle of rye from below the sink and a glass from the cabinet above it. He sat down at the kitchen table, opened the bottle, and filled the glass exactly halfway. He betrayed no awareness that Ed was standing in the doorway, and his father drank from that glass as if the whole action—the retrieval of the glass, the exacting pour—was somehow inevitable.
Now Murray Cantowitz hid nothing. There was piss coating the rim of the toilet seat and coarse hairs in the sink. Well, Ed thought, at least he’s shaving. The amber-colored couch coughed up clouds of dust when he sat down on it, and when Ed rose to get a start on quietly cleaning, his father yelled, “What’re you doing?” as if he were tearing the place apart. “Leave it!” And so Ed headed out the door to a different shul from where he’d been bar mitzvahed, to the shul where most of the old embittered congregants had relocated, having refrained from asking his father one last time if he wanted to come along.
The night was chilly and clear, and as he became just another Jew walking toward the shul, he was stunned by how calm he felt, as if he were suddenly inside a recurring dream, where urgency was replaced by prescription. All he had to do was get from the street to the shul. All he had to do was say the kaddish. There was no reason to think any further than that; the dream didn’t allow for it. The sanctuary smelled like heavy breath, aftershave, and dense floral perfume. He opened a prayer book and felt its crumbling binding, sticking shut for a few final moments by old dried glue. Such humble materials for such supposedly holy words, and as much as he tried to hold the book together, out came the paper bits from the binding, out onto his trousers and reminding him of hay, which was a strange association, but once the thought was there he couldn’t stop it and all the men in their jackets and tallis looked not like men but like horses, stooped and obedient. Enveloped in a not altogether bad smell of age and thoughtful hygiene and this blameless equine image, he let himself rock back and forth, and the keening familiar melody took hold of him and the Hebrew came without thought. Everything over the last four years had been about thought. He stayed inside the shul until the very last prayer. When he’d made his way through crowds of familiar faces—the bearded and the shaved, the powdered and the rouged—and their questions, so many questions, not only about Harvard but about his unfortunate father, after he’d been kissed and slapped on the back and when he was out the door and taking off his yarmulke, grateful to feel the air again, he saw Marla of the red sweater standing on the curb, evidently waiting for a ride. Without her red sweater she looked much more ordinary than he remembered and also, somehow, more appealing. He thought of saying hello, of asking what she was doing these days, if she still had that bicycle, but it was as if he’d turned into one of the horses he’d imagined while inside the shul. He watched in silence until saying hello became inconceivable, until a car pulled up and she looked both ways before getting in and taking off.
For years he’d dreamed of the much-heralded mystery and majesty of shiksas. But now that he was surrounded by Radcliffe girls on a daily basis—adorable ginger freckles, startled blue eyes—now that he was no more comfortable talking to them but almost accustomed to their extensive knowledge of not only tennis and Europe and oystering on private islands off the coast of Maine but also Aristotle and Freud and Keynesian economics, goddamn it all to hell, here he was in front of a synagogue, nostalgic about Marla and all of the others, the girls he hadn’t called.
—
In Harvard Yard, Ed not only caught up with Hugh but within minutes he was buying drinks at Cronin’s. “To make up for my accosting you,” Ed had insisted.
“You did kind of accost me.”
“Yes,” said Ed, “and I’d like to make up for it.”
“In that case I’ll have a whiskey as well.”
Ed suggested they share a ham sandwich. “I’m not the religious kind,” Ed announced, and, though Hugh nodded, it was clear he had no idea to what Ed was referring.
“I don’t really have any Jewish friends,” Hugh explained, lighting up another cigarette. He didn’t look uncomfortable, only direct.
“I don’t really have any Shipley friends.”
With his arm outstretched atop the booth, as if to claim a phantom girl, Hugh said, “You haven’t been missing much.” He was both plain-spoken and distracted. He was always looking around. Ed watched how his gaze followed the waitresses, the cooks in the kitchen, the salt and pepper on the table, and finally a pair of twin girls and their tense-looking dates who passed through the bustling doorway.
Ed finished his beer. “Would you look at them? They’re identical.”
“They’re not.”
“Of course they are. Imagine being one of those poor schmucks. Never knowing which one was yours.”
“You’d know.”
“You can’t tell me you’re able to see a difference.”
“Of course.”
“How?”
“Anyone can see they are different,” said Hugh. “One has a scar on her forehead, and the other one’s chin is more pronounced.”
“They look exactly the same.”
“You aren’t looking in the right way.” Though by all rights this was a condescending thing to say, Ed didn’t feel particularly condescended to. Hugh just seemed as though he really cared what Ed did or didn’t see.
“I’m an observant bastard, okay? Make no mistake about that. Listen, who noticed that the girl from the library—my girl—is cross-eyed.
Who saw that?”
“Oh, she’s your girl now?”
“Well, she’s not yours, that’s for sure.”
“What’s her name?”
“Oh, I have no idea,” Ed said, able now to laugh at himself, at how his ardor seemed suddenly comical.
When the ham sandwich arrived, Ed grabbed his half quickly. He was, as usual, hungrier than he’d realized. As he savored the salty ham, the slightly stale bread, he looked at the twins and their dates waiting for a table. What was Shipley talking about? He saw no pronounced chin, no scar. The only difference occurred when one lit a cigarette, when the fact that her sister had not lit a cigarette made them both that much more exciting because they had made different choices. Her smoking style bordered on theatrical, and Ed wondered if he might have seen her in a Harvard Drama Club production. He had become an avid theatergoer. At first it had been to impress Radcliffe girls, but sometimes he went alone if there was no one with whom he really wanted to watch and (inevitably, afterward) discuss. This semester he’d seen a steamy Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Little Foxes, a terrific Pajama Game; he wanted to go to England and meet Harold Pinter and personally thank him for The Caretaker, which he’d recently seen at the Loeb. Though last week’s offering was melancholy nonsense. He’d taken a troublingly tall date to see a play by García Lorca. Everyone had been dressed up like leafless trees, and a screechy cello droned on for hours.
“I always wanted to be a twin,” said Hugh, who had moved on to a third whiskey. “Ever since I can remember.”
“Oh God, no, nothing worse—another Hugh Shipley?”
“It wouldn’t be another of me,” Hugh quietly insisted. He apparently had no interest in lightening up. Did he speak this way with everyone? “It would be the other part, the missing part. Don’t you ever feel like you’re, I don’t know, missing someone?” He looked up from the bright table lamp and squinted into comparative darkness.
“Yeah,” Ed said. “I miss my mother.” It was an absurdly weak thing to say. He wasn’t sure why he’d said something so personal that it approached transgression, but he imagined it was because Hugh Shipley seemed to have forgotten Harvard’s unwritten rule about maintaining a modicum of sarcastic affectation, or at least until one was properly drunk. And he also sensed that Hugh had chosen to confide in him and he wanted to offer something in return.
Hugh nodded. “When did she die?”
“Four years now.”
“I’m sorry.”
Ed poured another sugar into his coffee, though he had no intention of drinking another sip. He nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, thanks.”
The twins and their dates were seated at the next table. It was difficult not to stare. They had the same auburn hair parted to the side, the same pearl earrings and cherry lipstick. If there was one girl, she would have been noticed solely for her solid good looks, but their twin-ness was even more striking than their prettiness. The smoker laughed and the other did not. Ed wondered if a joke had been made at the un-laughing un-smoking one’s expense, though neither of their dates was smiling.
“In Mali,” Hugh said, “twins are the only ones who are considered complete. The rest of us, we ‘re walking around as halves. We ‘re half people, all of us. No wonder we ‘re all about to be destroyed by nuclear bombs.”
“Goddamn right. I keep thinking I should follow every urge, every stupid idea in my head. Because who knows, right?”
“What is it that you want to do?”
“Oh hell, I don’t know. I’m just talking. It’s a goddamn unsettling thought that there are nuclear missiles off the coast of Florida. Can you argue with that? No news flash there. None at all. Where in Africa is Mali?”
“West.”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s where I’m headed.”
“No kidding?”
Hugh nodded. “I’m going to take pictures.”
“Well, I’m going to Wall Street,” Ed said, and he couldn’t stop his voice from sounding proud. “Different jungle.”
“I’d say so. Save yourself. Come to my jungle instead.”
“To Africa?”
“Sure. Why not? At least no one is sending nuclear bombs there.”
Ed laughed and drank the rest of his tepid sweet coffee. “What are you after? You want to be eaten by savages, like Rockefeller? You want to—what?”
“He wasn’t eaten by savages.”
“So they say. Let’s put it this way: Such a trip is not in my future.”
“No? What is?”
“I want to make some real dough.”
“Real dough?”
“Yes, indeed. Not a fashionable thing to say around here, I know. But I want to work hard and make money. Money like your oldest, richest Mr. Shipley made.”
He tried not to sound fanatical, he truly did, but when he imagined a day that he wouldn’t have to worry over how many times he could clean his dirty shirts before they fell apart, he tended to sound—he realized this—like an advertisement for the wonders of capitalism. He wanted the freedom to buy a new shirt if he was too goddamn lazy to take his to the cleaner’s. Cardboard strip around the starched front—a new shirt, nothing like it. All that cardboard. He loved tearing it apart like wrapping paper.
Ed asked, “Why shouldn’t I have certain pleasures in life if I’m willing to work harder than everyone else?”
“Why, indeed?” Hugh replied, but this time it was condescending. “But, just so you know, my family doesn’t have any real money anymore.”
“Believe me, your family has money.”
“No, I mean it. It’s all but dried up in our branch of the family. There was some kind of issue with the trusts. I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I mean I don’t care.”
“You might start to care when you get malaria in West Africa and need to be evacuated and flown back to this fine country, threat of nuclear missiles or not. You might care if you need to get a job.” He felt his neck tensing up, and he forced a smile.
Hugh nodded. “I understand.”
“No, you don’t. Not really.”
“Okay, I don’t. I don’t. You got me.”
“That’s right.”
“So will you give me a job then?” Hugh asked. “When I’m hard up and desperate?”
“You think it’s a joke?”
“I don’t think it’s a joke, but I know too many people who have plenty of money, and they’re wretched. They’re also incompetent. Talk to me when you know more people with money.”
“I will.”
“Just so you know,” said Hugh, sitting up straighter, “I hope you do.”
“What about Romulus and Remus?” Ed blurted. “They were twins. No love lost there.”
Hugh took his last bite of sandwich. He was the slowest eater that Ed had ever seen, with the exception of his aunt Lillian. He chewed every bit of that bite and finally, finally swallowed. “They were raised by wolves.”
“Many great men were.”
“Were you?”
“My mother—she was a peach. But my father has some wolflike tendencies, you bet.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, I don’t know—he never wanted to have children, so that probably has something to do with it.” Ed laughed, but he could tell he sounded strained. “He wanted my mother and he wanted to make her happy, but he’s made it clear, especially now that she’s gone, that being a father wasn’t what he was after. And where I’m from, children are everything. It’s all about the children. It’s just what they think about and talk about and live for, and I think all that fuss—it really got him riled up. I only figured out that children were such a focus—who notices such a thing when you are one of those children?—since he would point it out so frequently, deriding this one and that one because they talked, they thought, they bragged, about their kids too much. God forbid someone bragged. It was like his cause, how people gave kids too much attention, and what was implied was that it sure as hell wasn’t going to be like that in our house.”
“Too bad he couldn’t have just come on over to our neighborhood. Don’t laugh. He and my father—despite appearances to the contrary, I’m sure—would have plenty in common.”
“Is that right? Well, I don’t know about your father, but mine didn’t like everyone lavishing attention on the children, because he always wanted to be at the center. See, he’d had a taste of it, a real taste of attention. Worst thing that could have happened to a guy like my father. He was a boxer, okay, and I guess a pretty promising one—”
“Your father was a boxer?”
“That’s what I’m telling you.” Ed tried not to sound frustrated, but he knew that if he didn’t keep talking, he’d lose steam. This was the first time he’d told anyone at Harvard anything about his father. He’d guarded these stories, kept them close. It was as if telling them too frequently would dull their power. To Ed, the very existence of these tales proved that his father wasn’t solely a bitter, drunk steamfitter. That there was some spark to his past. Some interest.
Hugh said, “I’ve never met a boxer.”
“Yeah, well, unfortunately, he got knocked out early in his career. He lost his hearing in one ear and broke a few of his vertebrae, and I guess the recovery really took it out of him and his boxing days were over quickly. He went from being some kind of local hotshot to having not much of an education and a lot of aches and pains.”
Ed thought about stopping, but he couldn’t stop now, not when Hugh looked so genuinely interested. It was as if Hugh was counting on him, relying on Ed to deliver a good, engaging story. What else could he do?
“My mother always told me that was when he changed, although who knows. She met him right before he got knocked out. I guess by the time he was injured, she was sufficiently impressed. He was greeted with respect when he took her out and she was just a kid, she was from an extremely strict family, and when he showed her a night out in Boston—y’know, cocktails and dancing, the whole bit—she was charmed. He was handsome then, even after the injuries, a genuinely handsome man. I don’t look like him—in case you were wondering—though I did get his shoulders.” Ed sat up taller, grinned. “Not too bad, am I right?”
Hugh laughed, as if he couldn’t believe anyone would say something so vain. “Hmm. Especially for your height.”
“Ouch,” he said. “Ouch. At any rate, my mother saw him through his recovery and he never forgot it. He loved to talk about how patient she was and also how tough. And how, after having me, my mother never gave him that kind of attention again.”
“So he’s a real tough guy.”
Ed nodded, grinned. He told Hugh how—after eight straight amateur victories—during his father’s first professional fight in downtown Worcester, he was felled by a roundhouse curse of a punch. How the press clippings stated that he’d been knocked out cold, but this was not the case. How he’d stood up by the count of eight. How those who’d been there that miserable night still sometimes stopped him on the streets of Dorchester to insist that he’d been robbed.
After an appropriately solemn shaking of the head, Hugh piped up, “Did he teach you to fight?”
Ed paused before nodding. “In the basement.”
“That must have been … something.”
“Oh, it was great. It was the best time we ever had.”
He wasn’t sure why he’d said that or how the lie had come so easily. He imagined the basement, where no lessons had occurred. The furnace was in the basement, and it had been Ed’s job to put the hand-painted sign (COAL!) in the window so that the delivery truck would stop. The coal man rigged a series of steel chutes from the truck to the furnace, and the coal had crashed through the chutes and shot its way into the coal bin. He had grown up accompanying his father down to the basement, watching him shovel fresh coal into the steel door, fit the crank into the middle of the furnace, and slam that crank left to right as if his life were hanging in the balance and depended on the force of the slam. His father had brought him down to the basement to ostensibly train him to one day take over the task of the furnace, but Ed always felt that his father relished doing it himself and the real reason he wanted Ed to watch was to demonstrate just how strong he still was, despite his life-defining injuries. His father slammed that crank until the ashes of the burned coal came through the grate, onto the furnace floor, and, as soon as Ed could sweep, it became Ed’s job to sweep the ashes into the ash can. Several weeks after Ed’s bar mitzvah, his father had sent him down to the basement to get ash for the icy sidewalk. When he’d come up with a bucketful and stood at the top of the dark moldy stairs, the door had been locked and no one would answer. At first Ed thought his father had locked it out of habit, by mistake, but he soon realized his father was playing a joke on him, the kind of behavior that would come up with more and more frequency until his departure from home, and Ed would always be left to wonder just what was it that he had done wrong. But his father wouldn’t admit it was a punishment. “It was a joke,” he’d said. “You gotta learn to lighten up.”
His father had not taught him to box—not in that basement, not anywhere. Ed had asked his father to do the honors, and at first he’d said of course he would, but after asking repeatedly and having his father say he was tired or in no mood or watching the game, it became clear that, for whatever reason, his father didn’t want to. Ed had learned boxing from other teachers; they were never hard to find: his gym teacher Mr. Coleman; “Big Sully,” who cleaned the monkey house; his gambling friend Schwartzy, who had good form as a boxer but lacked the nerves to compete. Ed was a good student in general; he knew this now. He was certain his ability to learn quickly was going to help him later in life, and more than boxing ever had. When his father was in his prime, he’d saved three Jewish boys from a bunch of Irish thugs. People had said how brave he was, how he looked out for his own, how he’d always be known as a hero. But this was no longer.
“My father’s a decent man,” Ed said, as if it was pity and not anger that consumed him.
The waitress cleared their plates away and Hugh said he’d pay.
“No,” Ed insisted. “I offered. Besides, I thought you didn’t have any money.” With whom, Ed couldn’t help but wonder again, did Hugh usually spend his time?
“I said real money. There’s still a bit. The dregs. I’ll buy you beer, coffee, and half a sandwich with the dregs.”
“No,” said Ed. And that was that.
They went to Adams House and drank gin with limes, and Ed met the head of the drama club and a Crimson writer whose work he admired. Ed watched as girls approached Hugh and Hugh ignored their not-so-subtle invitations. Ed marveled at how, like preening birds, they offered their pale necks, their bosoms, arranged their jewelry to catch the light as if lighting were the issue. He knocked back more gin; he drank until he forgot to add the lime. Ed and the girls listened as Hugh spoke softly about the Dani tribe of West New Guinea, how their culture was based on a never-ending war between neighboring clans, an ongoing quest to avenge the fallen, to pacify ancestral ghosts. Hugh talked about how human cruelty was paralyzing but compelling and that maybe these specific warriors could be seen as a microcosm for all warriors and that maybe, if people really paid attention to them, some positive change for our own culture—no matter how small—might just result from it. When Hugh was done speaking, the girls didn’t stop listening. They listened to Hugh’s silence and eventual progression into playing impenetrable jazz piano, which only invited them to settle in. One of the girls started listing all of the jazz greats who’d been taken from this life too early, who must have been too pure for this world.
“The fact that they were drunks might have also had something to do with it,” Ed pointed out, and there was a collective sigh of indignation, though one of the girls did laugh before running out of the room to be sick.
“Let’s go,” Hugh said. “I need some air.”
And on the banks of the Charles, Ed asked Hugh if he meant what he’d said about bringing change to America through studying savages in New Guinea. “There aren’t any Negroes in Fenway Park. Hitler almost succeeded in wiping Jews off the planet. Do you actually think people are open-minded enough to see themselves reflected in completely primitive people? Do you think you are?”
“I’m not sure,” said Hugh after a moment. “But, yes, I do think so.”
“Okay,” Ed said, skeptical. “We’ll see.”
“I know you think it’s ridiculous,” Hugh said, but not as if it really mattered.
“Look, I have another question. Why did you ignore those girls? Why did you seem so hell-bent on ending up alone or—worse!—still talking to me when you could be off seducing any one of them?”
Hugh picked up a stick and hurled it toward the tar-colored water. He tried to light a cigarette, but his lighter was jammed. “My heart’s bashed in,” he said.
“Your heart? Your heart is fine.”
“What do you know?”
“Your heart is fine.”
“You don’t know.”
“Hearts are very resilient.”
“I’m sure yours is.”
“That’s true,” Ed said. He was thinking not of Marla or any number of missed possibilities but of a girl he’d met in New Haven while tailgating two weeks ago; they drank bourbon from her brother’s flask. “It is.”
Hugh finally lit his cigarette and seemed marginally less pathetic. “Every now and then I’ll take a girl out, even go to bed with her, but it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference, no matter who it is. I’m all broken up. Have been for years.”
“I see that. So who did this to you? Who bashed Hugh Shipley’s weak and feeble heart? I’ll change her mind.”
Hugh started laughing, a great unruly laugh, the kind that can change a mood entirely and stop a night’s potential downslide. “I bet you could,” he said.
Ed jumped up on a bench and jumped off it, up and down until he was out of breath. “Tell me something funny.”
“Funny,” Hugh said, as if he was about to recite a dismal poem. But when he spoke up again, he was animated, maybe more than he’d been all night. “All right. I was sent to an Episcopal boarding school when I was eleven.”
“Eleven? Jesus, I said funny—not Dickensian.”
“I’m getting there. At this school—where, by the way, I refused to take communion—I was … exploring the storage room in one of the main buildings and of course I was smoking and I opened up a can of potassium sulfate or nitrate—I still can’t remember which one it was—”
“I’m guessing nitrate.”
“Right. And it exploded. Not supposed to be combustible, but I’m telling you I nearly burned the school down. This was unintentional and unconscious, until I read all of Freud during the summer of my senior year and had some fairly major revelations about unconscious desire.”
“I’m still waiting for the funny part.”
“So there I was, running up the stairs with this impromptu bomb, and I threw the bomb in the toilet. Clouds of smoke billowing, I was coughing—terrified—but what happened when I had the opportunity to let it all burn? That school that I hated? That venerable institution where my father broke all the records for athletics, including my grandfather’s? Did I let it burn? Of course not. I saved it!” Hugh was laughing now, and Ed tried to but couldn’t stick with it.
“I saved the school. I did. That’s the way I saw it, at least. After the smoke cleared—so to speak—the headmaster took one look at me and said, ‘Now I know I’m going to be able to kick you out of this school.’ He was thrilled to finally have a good enough reason. But in the end—here’s the funny part—he couldn’t because my father was, and still is, an important trustee. Ridiculous,” he said, laughing again. “So completely ridiculous. I nearly burned their school to the ground and still they kept me around.”
“What did your father say?”
“Well, I’m fairly certain he was just relieved that I wasn’t coming home. One of my father’s favorite routines was to talk about how boring children were and to construct the kind of conversations he wished he could simply have had with the help, with regard to looking after me when I was a child. See that pile of money over there, he would say, go on, over there, that pile in the corner—take it. Yes, the PILE. Take the PILE, just take care of the boy and for God’s sake don’t tell me about each sneeze!”
“I’ve never met him, but you’re a pretty good mimic,” Ed admitted.
“The man can still make me laugh even though I basically hate him.”
“I don’t hate my father,” said Ed, not because it was true but because he could never imagine saying so, certainly not to Hugh Shipley, not to someone whose father didn’t understand what it meant to do any kind of work, not to mention the kind of backbreaking work that his father still did as a steamfitter, laying pipes in the ground, getting coated with dirt and unspecified grime, often narrowly escaping electrical fires because of what he called Depression cheapo wiring.
“That’s good,” said Hugh. “I’m happy for you.” He tossed his cigarette and sat down on the bench.
“Is your mother funny, too?”
“My mother’s dead.”
“Oh,” said Ed. “Oh.”
“A long time ago,” said Hugh, as if Ed had asked. “I barely remember her.”
The river and the sky were far off in the distance, and all that felt real was the bench where Hugh was seated and the stubble of grass underfoot. Ed sat down on the bench, too. He wanted to say something, if for no other reason than he was uncomfortable with silence. He hated to sit in silence with anyone. He hated hearing other people’s uncomfortable sounds—their toe-tapping, their throat-clearing, their quiet cracking-of-knuckles. He hated how driven he felt to make the silence stop, how a roar of discomfort filled his own head like a giant wave crashing to shore. Every few summers, his mother had prevailed and borrowed from the credit union so that they could go to Nantasket Beach, and that cold Atlantic once gave him the tossing of his life; he’d never forgotten the roar of it as the wave drew him up and over. The more he didn’t say to Hugh, the more he withheld words of kindness or humor or whatever the hell he was supposed to say, the more absurd it felt to be there, hearing that ocean’s roar. Why couldn’t he simply say I’m sorry, the way that Hugh had done earlier this evening? I’m sorry. Hugh had said it strong and clear, and here Ed was, unable to say a word. They were strangers, he thought. They’d remain so.
But then whatever profound awkwardness he’d been feeling, whatever definitive wrongness, mysteriously tapered off and, like the halting of a violent storm, what was left felt akin to good fortune. As Saturday’s rising sun became a sudden and tremendous possibility, what remained was nothing more extraordinary than two grown motherless sons.
What also remained was this: They were—despite sharing not a single interest or goal—going to be friends.
I grabbed Hugh’s arm. I said, “Just keep walking.” I must have been out of my mind, okay? But that’s exactly what Hugh did.
I felt this … grip … on my arm, and what do you know, it was Ed. I thought, My God, this fellow is in some kind of state.
When they told this story many years later, both men said they could never remember how they’d gone from Ed’s tight grip to sitting in Cronin’s sharing a ham sandwich, but that wasn’t true, because Ed had always remembered. He’d followed Hugh; he’d dropped a squashed bottle cap, brushed grass off his trousers, and run after him. He never forgot.