The Heirs by Susan Rieger

Author:Susan Rieger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2017-05-23T04:00:00+00:00

When she first saw the five Falkes boys, standing in front of the Hotel des Artistes, Anne Cardozo knew Jim was their father. They looked so much like him. Eyes didn’t lie. She started to hyperventilate.

The little boys were jostling each other and pulling on their mother’s arms; the bigger ones were trying to talk to her. Rooted to the sidewalk, riveted and winded, Anne struggled to regain mental footing. She hadn’t been expecting five children, five boys. She had imagined two, maybe three. People didn’t have five children anymore, not since the pill. She took in a deep breath and held it for ten seconds. They couldn’t be Jim’s, she told herself. Eleanor might have had one child with Jim, the first out of anguish or the last out of nostalgia, but not five, not in her world. She watched the older boys walk down the street. Could those two, the oldest two, be Jim’s sons? The resemblance was spooky. She felt light-headed and panicky. Am I losing my mind? she wondered. She had a sudden vision of her brain cells, resolving into sand and sliding down her spinal column. Education was useless, she thought. Being a neurobiologist had given her no special understanding of her thoughts, feelings, or perceptions; all it had provided was a topographic map of an overactive brain. She leaned against a parked car. It was an old story with her, the triumph of the amygdala over the cortex. The first time she studied the cerebrum and its hemispheres at Vassar, she thought she heard the professor say that the two halves “commiserated” with each other. When she realized, reading her notes, that he must have said “communicated,” she was disappointed—in the professor, in the course, in science. Barely into her major, she already suspected that Freud was more interesting than Broca. There was elegance in science but no poetry. Ten years later, she thought she might benefit from therapy if her Germanic upbringing and her scientific training, a practical redundancy, had permitted it. Her internist prescribed Ativan.

After weeks of spying, on and off the tennis field, Anne was forced to reject theories of Cardozo paternity. In the ways the boys looked like Eleanor, they looked like Jim, at least from a distance, staring into the sun. In the ways the boys didn’t look like their mother, they didn’t look like him. They were not Jewish children. They were Lapp or Cossack. They had high cheekbones and Tatar eyes, lending them an exoticism beyond the genetic possibilities of the Cardozos. These must be Rupert’s contributions, his phenotypes, she decided.

Anne didn’t remember meeting him at her wedding; she barely remembered anything of the day. Had she danced with Jim? What music did the band play? Had she eaten? She didn’t remember having a good time. She remembered that her feet and head hurt. It was a late-morning wedding with lunch. She and Jim left at five, the band played until six, then packed up and left along with her parents.

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