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

navy cashmere sweater he wore at the start of every goddamn day, he mumbled to Ed about how he’d read all night long, how he hadn’t slept until the sun came up. “Do you know that the Nuer people in Africa, as studied by Evans-Pritchard in the beginning of the 1940s, barely spoke of their lineage?” he asked.
    “No, Hugh,” Ed said flatly. “I did not know that.”
    “Bet you can’t imagine a world where lineage was irrelevant.” He looked under his bed and came up with two socks—not matching, not clean. “For the Nuer,” he continued, while pulling on the socks and lacingup a pair of tennis sneakers, “any divisions between men had nothing to do with lineage.”
    Ed fought the urge to sigh. “Maybe he only meant that the divisions are so fucking obvious. Maybe it is like asking—okay—a fish to describe water. The distinction is so blatant it might not even seem worth mentioning.”
    “This obsession of yours, this focus on our differences—it’s not inherent.”
    “I would hardly call stating the obvious an obsession. And, incidentally, I’m not the one staying up all night reading articles about lineage. I’m not the one bringing it up.”
    “Point taken.”
    Ed picked up a tennis ball from the floor and began to toss it up and down. He wanted to bounce it off the opposite wall, but he knew that Henley, who lived on the other side of that wall, would make him pay. He knew everyone in Adams House now, and he knew that he confounded these people by wearing such consistently crisp clothing (he hadn’t come to Harvard to dress like a bum) and asking forthright questions about anything that popped into his head. He didn’t need to be bouncing balls off walls in addition to acting—so consistently—like himself. He’d once asked a dark-skinned fellow lounging in the common room if he was an Arab or a Greek or what, and when Shipley nearly gasped, with an expression that struck Ed as distinctly matronly, Ed didn’t understand what the great big deal was. He asked people whether they’d been baptized, whether they’d ever met a Jew. He didn’t see the point in pretending that everyone had sprung from these Ivy halls and that everyone came from Shipley-type homes; he’d read up on the statistics of admission and knew this wasn’t the case anymore.
    And yet more often than not he’d felt as if he were on the set of a Hollywood picture, in which everyone was doing his part to evoke a certain collegiate fantasy, and part of that fantasy was erasing all pasts except the popular ones—the houses and lawns and clubs from which Harvard men had originally come and would indeed continue to come for centuries. The way he saw it, he was the one interested in humanbehavior. As it turned out, the dark-skinned fellow was not an Arab nor a Greek but an Indian from Bombay, and they’d spoken at great lengths about the aftermath of the Raj, the disastrous creation of Pakistan, and how he had no interest in returning home, where he was supposed to take over his family’s textile empire.
    “I know that when you talk about our different backgrounds you think you’re simply stating the obvious,” said Hugh now, “but do you ever think about the possibility that what is obvious to you may not be—I don’t know—exactly true? You know it’s very Marxist of you to focus on what tears a culture apart.”
    “I haven’t had a goddamn cup of coffee yet today. Please,” said Ed, “go easy with the rhetoric. And I am, as you well know, no Marxist.”
    “You shouldn’t come here without having had a full meal. Otherwise you remind me of—and I’m sorry to say it—a certain French military leader. A short one—also highly ambitious—”
    “I’m sorry,” said Ed, “but I don’t see the de Gaulle comparison at all.”
    “I’m talking about Napoleon, you imbecile.”
    Ed half-threw, half-pelted, the tennis ball at Hugh, who caught it just in time.
    “Eat first,” he said, tossing the ball back to