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

course he’d really gone to see Helen. He was convinced she knew exactly when he was coming and that she even dressed up in her best clothes, wore her hair loose for him. There she was and there she continued to be: tall and blond, those delicate lips still delicate, and that long nose still bisecting her face in always-surprising asymmetry. There she was behind her desk—long neck, long limbs—still Helen. After all this time and after all he knew or thought he knew, his physical response to her was pitifully unchanged.
    Over the next month, every Thursday afternoon, he was certain they spoke without speaking. He’d stand outside her office door and she’d pretend she didn’t see him. In his mind it was a tentative silent conversation— you look the same, so do you; you seem well, so do you . But as she pretended to type, he began to silently speak about how he’d only found out about her pregnancy through a family friend after they had graduated from their respective boarding schools ( boarding school beinga WASP euphemism for prison , they’d both agreed, laughing, out in the woods behind her school’s gymnasium, Fats Domino on the loudspeaker muffled in the distance, their breath and cigarette smoke mixing in the near-frigid air).
    In the quiet of the Peabody, Hugh silently spoke of that cold spring night when they’d finally talked, after circling each other for years. How their gloved hands had fumbled with cigarettes, how she’d taken him to the inside of a fat hollow tree, how they had urgently come to that tree again and again and nobody had caught them. How they had always kept their relationship a secret, without asking each other why. Right there in the Peabody, on what he remembered as his fifth visit, Hugh silently said (and, he was sure, Helen silently agreed) that they had kept it secret to ensure it remained untainted by the exclusive society from which they were both inadvertently descended. They’d kept their alliance secret to protect it from all the loathsome rules and expectations that had so plagued the two of them before they’d found each other. They were two tall kids who’d always liked hiding anyhow, but now they had each other. They had their tree.
    In silence, as Helen sat behind a typewriter, Hugh spoke of how the Shipley family friend had been gossiping at the very dining room table where Hugh had grown up learning about soup spoons and what it meant to be a traitor to one’s class and how to properly debone a fish. Hugh had not—surprise—been paying attention to the luncheon conversation, when suddenly, incredibly, he heard the name Helen Ordway : Helen Ordway whom he loved and who had not returned a letter or telephone call since the last night they’d spent together, the night of the Last Hurrah, which they had each taken special precaution to ensure they could not attend. While their classmates donned tulle and tuxedos, they’d reiterated their elaborate excuses to the only ones left in their respective dorms that night. Hugh had not gone on the bus with the rest of the boys from his school but had instead waited until they’d all gone, and he’d hired a taxi to take him to the very same campus, only when he arrived he’d bypassed the festive decorations and golden light and made his way through the graveyard and toward their hollow tree.
    The gossiping family friend asked Hugh’s father if he’d heard about a recent situation with Helen Ordway—as in the daughter of Guy and Virginia Ordway—as in can-you-imagine-if-the-papers-got-a-hold-of- that -story Ordways—and though Harvard-bound Hugh had nearly retched as this family friend carried on about no one knowing who the father was, or who had done this to poor Helen (who’d always seemed a touch off somehow, no?), and how Helen Ordway had refused to say—even after she was shipped away to heaven only knew where for the summer—Hugh had not retched, but he had left the table, and though he’d lacked the