The New Inheritors by Kent Wascom

Author:Kent Wascom [Wascom, Kent]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802165695
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2018-07-10T07:00:00+00:00

Two

The Gallery Delpit, where Isaac’s solo show was held in April 1917, was located at the edge of the Quarter in the shabby first floor of a building whose upper stories housed a miracle cure concern. The smell of sour herbs bitter as false hope wafted down through cracks in the ceiling, giving everyone light heads. Kemper held Isaac’s arm (it had taken a week to work him out of his panic, and she had suffered many weeks before that of mania and doubt as he finished his series), watching as the light of attention fled him as the guests—his parents, game as ever, some old teachers—petered out and the wine was gone, and by the end of the night he was like a burnt-out filament beside her. What he still thought of as The Nests hung together on one wall, the individual pieces opposite, all unsold.

Money was the least of this. The shares she’d come into at the age of twenty-one, whose yield Kemper had diverted into stocks, assured they would be free to live however they liked. And she kept to herself the dread that all the joy of their idle, beautiful life together, every loveliness she found in the tasks of their day—washing eggs at the pump or laying bedding for the birds—existed only because of the money. That if they had to do these things in order to survive, that if, like their neighbors, there was consequence pulsing in the stalk of each plant, in the red heart of each egg, then necessity would grind joy down to dust. She didn’t share with him the typed reports she received twice a year from an attorney in New Orleans, her proxy in all dealings as a shareholder in Gulf Shipping, and the guilt, which was of course not strong enough to make her give the money up. It held her as it did all her family, like the gravity of the world the money gave them.

Around this time there was a spate of articles about groups of children who shared the same dreams. Sometimes, she read, the children were found to be half siblings, the products of secret infidelities, but more often no relationship could be determined other than, say, attending the same school, and the mystery of the communal dreams sank into the backpages of the newspapers, unable to hold a public imagination gripped by news of the war. And was the war, which her country now eyed hungrily, the dream or the waking? You heard talk then of renaming streets, villages called Germantown became Washington or Lincoln overnight, things that seemed silly at first, but then there were beatings and the formations of patriot groups that sought to root out dissent as ugliness and outrage went from something that happened elsewhere to a fact of daily life, and the German café where she and Isaac had eaten with Guillory had its windows broken, and vaguely Teutonic families were evicted from their homes. You heard of

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