A Dual Inheritance by Joanna Hershon Read Free Book Online

marriage and the way that women linked society together all across the world regardless of whether they wore rings through their dark noses or around their snow-white fingers, with his developing urge to analyze life’s basic structures—structures to which he’d never previously given a thought—there emerged a curious freedom. He wasn’t entirely sure what he felt while watching dark naked children rub clay around their eyes so that they might resemble birds or while watching people playout their lives under a belief system in which ghosts exist without a trace of kitsch but instead are more real—hyperreal—than anything, but he couldn’t deny he was energized. He was also no longer consumed primarily with the blank expanse of the day—the hours and hours after waking and how he had to fill them. He no longer devoted the majority of those hours to thinking about Helen and wondering what had happened to her.
    That springtime of his junior year he had been on some sort of full-fledged upswing, where the very weather seemed to support his plans and his mood, and this stirring feeling lasted throughout the summer, when he had worked (vowing it would be the very last time) at the yacht club on Fishers Island, where his ancestors had been founding members and where his two older half brothers still raced their boat. He vowed not to work at the club ever again—not because he didn’t love sailing or even many of his cousins and crewmates (if not exactly his own brothers), but he knew it was a disgrace to belong to a club with discriminatory policies against Negroes. Jews, too, of course. Likely Catholics—who knew what the actual bylaws said? If he wasn’t going to board a bus and march down South anytime soon, he could at least—for Christ’s sake—forgo his favorite goddamn sport. Even if it was the only sport that he was not only good at but also actually loved. Even if he would miss how being a good sailor was about instincts and decision-making more than about any physical advantages that he also just so happened to possess. He would sail again, he told himself. He would sail not as sport but to get to where he needed to go.
    He had gone so far as to arrange a meeting with the club president (an elderly distant cousin) to explain his feelings on the matter of discrimination, and, after a hand-folding pause, the president/cousin replied in a disturbingly kind voice, “I’m glad you have told me your feelings on this matter, Hugh.”
    “You are?”
    “Of course. My door is always open. You know your family plays an important part in the history here.”
    “To be honest, sir, I don’t care about my family’s important history as much as I care about what is going on right here and right now.”
    “Yes,” said the president, “I see.”
    “You see?”
    “I do. Are you sure I can’t get you something to drink?”
    “I’m sure,” said Hugh, desperately craving a beer. “Thank you.”
    “You know,” he said, as he stood up and fixed himself a finger of gin on ice, “man is tribal.”
    “Yes, sir. That I know. Anthropology happens to be my concentration.”
    “You don’t say.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “And you’re a Harvard man, too, just like your father. So you are the last person I need to explain this to, I’m sure.” He looked Hugh in the eye and smiled. “We are tribal by nature.” He wouldn’t quit smiling. “And this, Hugh, is our tribe.” He took a slow sip of his gin. If this man were a different kind of person, he would have shrugged his shoulders sheepishly. But he was not that kind of person, and, for this, Hugh was glad.
    “It’s hardly that simple,” Hugh tried.
    “Young man, this is our home. We have a right to choose who enters our home.”
    “But it isn’t a home,” said Hugh.
    “Look,” he said, with only the slightest hint of impatience, gesturing out the open window toward the blue sky and sea and rolling green hills and the freshwater ponds and hydrangea