Free Man Who Was Late by Louis Begley

twins.
    Of Sarah, Ben said that she had done well in college. Now she was out, but instead of going for a graduate degree or getting a real job (the latter not being strictly required from a financial point of view) or having a whopping adventure—for instance, trading in coffee beans in Quito—she lived tranquilly out of wedlock with a Harvard professor of Hebrew studies at least five years Ben’s senior, blessed like Abraham with children from his first wife and not in the least divorced. The wife was to blame—she refused to accept the necessary rabbinical writ from the professor. All this was taking place in Waltham, in the professor’s run-down tenement, within shouting distance of Rachel’s ancestral Brookline. Presumably for part-time distraction, Sarah took the morning shift at the cash register of the corner laundromat. Ben admitted that he was not above enjoying the joke on Rachel—the accusation that he was the old satyr of Porquerolles still burned in his foot like a sea-urchin spine. Less amusing to him was Sarah’s view—perhaps inspired by the professor, perhaps achieved through independent analysis—thatBen was a bad Jew, unwilling to assume his Judaic identity, and therefore unworthy of her affection.
    I asked about Rebecca.
    She has come to believe that I loved only her mother and Sarah, and at best tolerated her. She has no use for me, except as a high-class employment agency. All is as though I had a duty, perhaps in lieu of reparations, to get her the jobs she wants. She has her eye on some curatorial position with the Victoria and Albert in the glass department, and, believe it or not, I think I’ll be able to do it! I’ve struck up an acquaintance with Sir Sigmund Warburg and he has been astonishingly kind about helping Rebecca. There is one small hitch: Rebecca will not come to the telephone when I call, and she doesn’t answer my letters. We communicate exclusively through Rachel, which slows things down. My opinion as a banker is that I must write off Sarah and Rebecca. They are bad loans.
    I am wrong to talk about this, he continued, I know my attachment to the girls has been absurdly excessive, but I find it very hard to come to terms with the obvious, fatal truth. The girls can have real or imagined complaints about Rachel—some more awful than anything I have been accused of—and Rachel will tell you and anybody else who is willing to listen that the twins are monsters. Still, in the end, something—genes? glue of family money? Rachel’s being a woman?—makes their relations permanent. They have to work things out and they do. When it comes to me, after years of faithful service in the zoo, at the Museum of Natural History, and at the beach, they retired me without as much as a souvenir silver whistle. All I have left is a bad case ofwomb envy, baby-sitting skills, and a collection of fading snapshots I no longer keep in frames because they have become embarrassing to explain. You probably noticed that there are no photographs in my office in Paris or in the rue du Cherche-Midi. I am more divorced from the twins than from Rachel.
    My own memory of him as a mother hen was vivid; we had held occasional joint picnics on the rocks above Central Park’s East Meadow. Nevertheless, I didn’t undertake to comfort Ben by suggesting that the twins were going through a rough period as young adults and that later their relationship would revive. I too thought that his expectations and the intensity of his feelings were excessive. Those girls were not his children; the circumstance of their natural father’s being dead could not change that. And then, there were too many obstacles: Rachel’s influence—she held Ben responsible for her own disappointments, and this disappointment of Ben’s was a pleasant revenge; the feminist sentiments, which encouraged matrilinear groupings; Ben’s hurt feelings and colossal pride. Besides, he was changing. For all his gentleness with Prudence and