A Dual Inheritance by Joanna Hershon Read Free Book Online Page A

bushes and that slight breeze, which would soon carry the official whiff of gin at precisely five o’clock. “If you think that changing some policy is going to alter the essentially tribal nature of society, forgive me, but you need to reexamine your expectations.”
    This club president—who was in fact Hugh’s grandmother’s second cousin, a man named Tribby Eaton, a man Hugh had loved and admired as a child, who had once given him a bowl of peanuts and a Coke afterhe’d lost a sunfish race—was not stooped nor was he bent; he had a full head of white hair and the shoulders and hands of a man who knew how to sail under inclement weather and return a killer serve. “This is where you come from,” he said, and again his voice was kind.
    In Hugh’s mind he was raising his own voice, telling the old man to go stuff it, to stuff the traditions and the island and all of his justifications, that all of those justifications came not from pride but from fear. But as Tribby Eaton showed him the door, Hugh couldn’t help noting that the older man looked sad. And when Hugh told him that he wished to revoke his membership, there was none of the victorious feeling he’d anticipated. None of the moral clarity he enjoyed when he played out the scenario either before or after this moment (as he would go on to recount it more than a few times over the years). But the point had been made and it was he who had made it, and that meant more than anything else. Didn’t it?
    So he was feeling really good about his decision to never return to the yacht club, feeling good and highly principled, when he’d returned to the Peabody the first week in September of his senior year with a glazed donut and a bottle of Coke, only to find Case’s office vacant. As he held on to his intended gifts, he also tried holding on to his burgeoning sense of hope and purpose, and he’d run through the halls in search of Case, or at least some voice of authority who might explain Case’s whereabouts. And as he jogged by the offices on the fourth floor, where he had never been, as he began to sweat through his shirt and started to panic about panicking—he saw Helen.
    She was sitting behind a desk and talking on the telephone .
    He would not have been more shocked if he’d wandered into a burlesque show in the middle of the day and she’d been the main attraction. There was Helen for the first time in almost four years, and instead of walking straight in to the office and demanding an explanation for her past actions or throwing her over his shoulder and carrying her away or asking what she was doing in the Peabody Museum, apparently employed , he’d continued to run, and as he ran, he felt it all disintegrate. All of those notions about the world conspiring to support him and theweather matching his mood and all that crap—they were gone. But they weren’t just gone—it was as if someone had ripped a rosy poufy opera scrim from his intractably gray brain. It was as if, when he sat down on a bench in the Yard and (as if trying to conceal some kind of evidence) wolfed the jelly donut and the Coke he’d brought for Case, everything went dark. There was Helen and he couldn’t even bring himself to speak to her.
    She’d acted so focused on her task, as if she were terrified to look past the ink ribbon on her typewriter. She had seen him; he felt sure of it. They had seen each other.
    And he continued to peer into that office on the fourth floor during the subsequent trips he had made to the Peabody. Though he concealed himself behind a column, he was certain that she saw him, sure that she was participating in the same elaborate charade. He told himself he was going back to the Peabody to learn more about Charlie Case, although he’d learned very quickly that Case was hardly missing—he had simply gone to Hollywood to speak to producers about perhaps taking a more commercial direction with the film (and hadn’t thought to let Hugh know).
    But of