Fortune's Daughter: A Novel

by Alice Hoffman

  As she waited for the water in the teapot to boil, Lila tried not to think of the old fortune-teller. She watched through the window as her husband climbed down from the stepladder, but all she saw was moonlight, all she heard was the sound of cats’ claws on the fire escapes, and the cool, damp air left her shivering.

  Outside, Richard turned on the sprinkler. Now that the heat wave had passed, the city had lifted all water restrictions, and in every backyard there was the smell of damp earth. It was a heartbreaking scent, one that left you longing for everything you once had and lost. And although the tea was ready to be served, and Rae was waiting, Lila was really too cold to go back into the living room. Twice Lila had read for pregnant women; both times a small, still child had risen to the surface, before being pulled down into the center of the cup. She had lied, of course, and when she wept her clients had thought it was their good fortune that affected her so. If the symbol appeared a third time, Lila would again fail to mention that the child she saw was not moving, that it did not breathe or open its eyes. Whatever the shape of the tea leaves, Lila would advise Rae of her pregnancy, and tell her nothing more. She would fold her twenty-five-dollar fee into her pocket, and then, after Rae had left, she would stand with her back against the front door and cry. But there was never any hurry when you were about to tell someone that her life would be changed forever, and because the sunlight in the backyard was so warm and bright, Lila slipped out the back door, and she ran across the patio to throw her arms around her husband.

  After the reading, Rae had no one to talk to. Jessup had never believed in friends.

  “What’s the point?” he had always said. “You get yourself a friend and the first thing they want is to borrow something from you. Next they want to tell you all their troubles. Then look out—because then they’re mad that they owe you something, plus you know all their secrets, and they’re not so sure they want you knowing so much after all.”

  What Rae wanted more than anything was a friend, a woman who would tell her that Lila’s prediction had been all wrong. But when she really thought about it, she had to admit that there wasn’t a friend on earth who could have convinced her that her swollen ankles and the wire stretched tight inside her stomach were anything other than signs of pregnancy. Her period was four weeks late, and she had lost her taste for coffee. What frightened Rae was not being pregnant, but having to tell Jessup about it. Jessup didn’t even like to be in the same room with a child. He referred to children as midgets, and he had often suggested that orphans be put out on ice floes and left to drift into the cold, blue sea.

  Once before Rae had thought she might have to tell Jessup he would be a father. They were living in a garden apartment in Maryland and it was so hot that September that you never saw any people—everyone stayed where it was air-conditioned. It was their first home and Rae wanted it to be perfect. She taught herself how to cook, which was a real accomplishment considering she had learned nothing from her mother. Any time Carolyn started to cook she began to cry—just cutting up a leek or reaching for a bottle of olive oil was enough to set her off. She would have been astounded to discover that her daughter bought fresh blueberries for jam, grew her own tomatoes for gazpacho, melted bars of imported chocolate for mousse. By the time Jessup got home from work the table was always set and candles had been lit. But before she brought the meal to the table, Rae had to wait for Jessup to get ready. He was working with a construction crew building an addition to the local high school, and he came home caked with red dirt. Every evening, while Jessup soaked in the tub, Rae watched the candles burn down and she worried about the high-school girls Jessup was bound to meet. She was sure that if she ever lost him she would stay locked up in the air-conditioned apartment forever; and she always had the feeling she was losing him, no matter how hard she tried to please him.

  One night, as they sat down to scallops and fresh string beans, Jessup picked up his fork and moved and the food around his plate, as if he didn’t know what else to do with it. His skin was dark from working outside, and his eyes were bluer than ever.

  “Boy,” he said as he touched a bean with the prongs of his fork, “you really go for this stuff, don’t you, Rae?”

  Rae had spent the morning searching for scallops; a raspberry tart was still baking.

  “I thought you’d like scallops,” Rae said shyly.

  “Me?” Jessup said, surprised. “I’d rather have hamburgers.”

  Jessup ate a scallop, but Rae could tell he was forcing himself. She never used a cookbook again—after all, there was no point in cooking for someone who couldn’t tell the difference between a gâteau au chocolat and a defrosted Sara Lee cake. But once she had stopped cooking there wasn’t much for her to do but watch the clock and wait for Jessup. Each day when he came home after work, Rae was so relieved that she hadn’t lost him that she didn’t wait for him to take a bath—she pulled him down onto the living-room floor where they made love, and when they were through Rae’s skin was streaked with the red dirt Jessup brought home. Afterward Rae stayed in the living room while Jessup went into the bathroom to run the water in the tub. She could never figure out why she felt so lonely, and whenever Jessup called to her, inviting her into the bathtub, Rae closed her eyes and pretended not to hear him. After a while he must have assumed that she liked to be by herself after they made love, because no matter how much he had wanted her, by the time they were through, he just walked away, as if she were a stranger.

  It was right about that time that Rae began to think she was pregnant. There were certainly signs: her period was late and she had gained five pounds. But the oddest thing of all was that Rae suddenly had the desire to talk to her mother. One day, while Jessup was at work, Rae called home. When her mother picked up the receiver and said hello, the sound of her voice cut right through Rae, and she had to force herself to speak.

  “It’s me,” Rae said casually. “I’m in a garden apartment in Maryland.”

  “I love it,” Carolyn said. “Your father always insists you’re in California. He’s convinced that people like Jessup always wind up on the West Coast.”

  “Mother,” Rae said, just as if a year hadn’t passed since they’d last argued, “I didn’t call you long distance to talk about Jessup.”

  “I’ve tried to understand why you’d run away with him, but I can’t,” Carolyn said.

  “Stop trying,” Rae said. “You’ll never understand me.”

  “If you would just call your father at the office and tell him you’re sorry. Tell him you made a terrible mistake.”

  “But I didn’t!” Rae said.

  “You’re never planning to come home,” Carolyn said suddenly, “are you?”

  “I don’t know,” Rae admitted.

  “It’s just as well,” Carolyn said. “Your father would never allow it—not unless you proved to him that you had changed.”

  Rae felt herself grow hot. “And you’d just agree with him?” she said.

  Carolyn didn’t answer.

  “Mother!” Rae said. “Would you agree with him?”

  “Yes,” Carolyn said. “I would.”

  Rae could hear the Oldsmobile pull up. She dragged the phone over to the window and lifted up one venetian blind. Jessup got out of the car and took off his blue denim jacket.

  “I have to go,” Rae told her mother.

  “I’m in the middle,” Carolyn said. “Don’t you see?”

  Jessup was at the front door; he knocked once, and when Rae didn’t answer he fumbled for the key.

  “I just called to let you know I was all right,” Rae said, but she wasn’t—she’d never felt more alone in her life. Any second Jessup would walk through the door—if he discovered that she had called Boston there might be a scene. He might tell her to take the bus back home if she missed the place so much, and now Rae knew that she couldn’t—by now they had gotten rid of the furniture in her bedroom, they had probably changed the locks on all the doors.

  “
Is that the only reason you called?” Carolyn said in a small voice, as though she actually expected Rae to say that she missed her.

  “I really have to go,” Rae said, and she hung up the phone and ran to get the door just as Jessup was letting himself in.

  That night she couldn’t sleep. She went into the living room and sat in the dark, the phone balanced on her lap. She dialed the area code for Boston, and then the number for the local weather report. It was much colder in Boston—forty degrees—and by morning a pale frost would appear on the lawns and between cabbage leaves in backyard gardens. On nights when she couldn’t sleep, all Rae had to do was ask Jessup to hold her and he would; he might even sit up with her and watch a movie on TV if she asked the right way. But right then, the only person Rae wanted was her mother. If she closed her eyes she could smell Carolyn’s perfume, she could feel how cold the windowpanes were in her third-floor bedroom on nights when the moon was full and a web of ice formed on the glass.

  Later, when it was nearly dawn, Rae went into the bathroom. When she discovered a line of blood on her thigh, she sat down on the rim of the tub and cried. The sky had turned pearl gray and the crickets were still calling when Rae got into bed beside Jessup. She could tell he was dreaming; he held on to the pillow so tightly that his knuckles were white. As Rae pulled the sheet over them, Jessup woke up.

  “I was dreaming,” he said.

  “I know,” Rae told him. “I was watching you.”

  “It was summer,” Jessup said. “There were a million stars in the sky and I was waiting outside your house, but you didn’t see me.”

  Rae put her arms around him. “I saw you,” she told him, but Jessup was already back asleep.

  After that night, Rae risked the subject of children every now and then, but Jessup’s reaction was always the same.

  “Take a good look at me,” he would tell her. “Do I look like somebody’s father?”

  Rae had to admit that he didn’t. Even when she really tried she couldn’t imagine him getting up at two in the morning, or changing a diaper, or shopping for a crib.

  “All a baby will do is come between us,” Jessup warned her. “Is that what you want? Because if that’s what you want let’s go into the bedroom right now and make the biggest mistake we ever made.”

  But this time there was a difference. This time Jessup wasn’t around to convince Rae that it was a mistake. Jessup was out in the desert where the moonlight turned nights colder than any winter in Boston. He was turning in his sleep, unaware that Rae had already decided. Whether he liked it or not he was about to become somebody’s father.

  Rae took the bus to Barstow on a day when it was impossible to look at the sky and not think of heaven. After a while there was less traffic and the road opened up. Now, each passenger who got on brought some of the desert into the bus, so that a fine cover of sand drifted across the aisles. Even through the dusty windows you could tell how blue the sky was, and all along the roadside there were tuberous wildflowers that were so sweet they attracted bees the size of a man’s hand.

  At noon the sky turned white with heat, and Rae saw her first real mirage. There was a line of coyotes along a ridgetop, but when she blinked they disappeared. There was nothing in the distance but pink sand and low violet clouds, and of course it wasn’t the right time of day for coyotes anyway. They waited for the temperature to fall before they came down from the mountains. Then they walked in single file, circling deserted adobe houses, making a noise in the back of their throats that made you think they were dying of loneliness.

  When Rae got off the bus the air was so dry that it stung. She found a phone booth and called every motel listed; the film crew was registered at the Holiday Inn on Route 17, but the desk clerk told her that everyone had gone out on location. Rae took a cab to the Holiday Inn. She’d hoped to get into Jessup’s room so she could take a shower and order room service before he got back, but the desk clerk refused to give her the key. After all, what rights did she have—they weren’t even married.

  By the time she had ordered a grilled cheese sandwich in the coffee shop, Rae was furious. It seemed as if Jessup had purposely not married her just so that one day she’d be kept out of his room at the Holiday Inn. She had wanted to get married all along, but Jessup felt it was a meaningless act. What difference did a piece of paper make—he pointed out his own father, who hadn’t bothered with a divorce from Jessup’s mother before disappearing, and then clinched his argument by bringing up Rae’s parents, whom he called the most miserable couple on earth.

  “We’d be different,” Rae had promised. Carolyn had been married in a blue suit, as if she had already given up hope. Rae planned to wear a long white dress.

  “We already are different,” Jessup had said. “We’re not married.”

  After thinking about it, Rae had panicked—if Jessup died she couldn’t even legally arrange for his funeral. Dressed in black, she’d have to stand on a runway at Los Angeles Airport and watch as his body was shipped back to his mother in Boston.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Jessup had told her. “If you’re really concerned I’ll send my mother a postcard and tell her you get to keep the Oldsmobile and my body.”

  Rae left the coffee shop and went to sit by the pool. Had she been allowed up to his room, she would have shown him. By now she would have ordered baskets of fruit and chilled champagne. Instead, she found some change at the bottom of her purse and got a soda from the vending machine. The heat rose higher and higher and no one dared to venture out of the air-conditioned rooms, but there she was, on a plastic chaise longue beside the pool—all because he had never bothered to marry her. The fact that he was out on location was what really upset her, because there was absolutely nothing worse than taking a long bus trip and having it end with no one there to meet you.

  The last time Rae had taken such a trip, she was eight years old. She and Carolyn were going out to a rented summer house in Wellfleet; they had left a few days early so that everything could be in order by the time Rae’s father drove down for the weekend. The trip had been a disaster—Carolyn got sick and the bus driver had to pull off onto the shoulder of Route 3. As the other passengers watched, Carolyn stood on the asphalt and tried to breathe.

  “It’s nothing serious,” she told Rae when she returned, but Rae noticed that her mother was gripping the upholstered seat in front of them, and that her fingers were swollen and white.

  By the time they got to Wellfleet, Rae felt sick, too. Carolyn had misplaced the key and they had to climb into the house through an unlatched window. Rae stood in the middle of the dark living room as her mother stumbled over to the wall to find the light switch. She could actually feel the goose bumps rise on her arms and legs. Later, Carolyn made up a bed for her with clean sheets, but Rae couldn’t sleep. She could hear crickets and the hum that lightning bugs make when they’re trapped in the mesh of a screen window. The walls in the house sagged and creaked, and there was an owl’s nest in the chimney so that a muffled hooting echoed from inside the bricks. Carolyn couldn’t sleep either; she came into Rae’s room late at night and sat at the foot of the bed.

  “It’s not an accident that you have red hair,” Carolyn said. She lit a cigarette, and in the dark the smoke spiraled up to the ceiling. “When I was pregnant with you I bought a pair of red high heels made in Italy. Even though I couldn’t really wear them because my feet had swollen, sometimes when I was alone I put them on and just wore them around the house. That’s the reason you have red hair.”

  “No it isn’t,” Rae said.

  The hum of the lightning bugs was growing fainter, although Rae could still see patches of light caught in the window.

  “I’ll bet you anything it’s the reason,” Carolyn said.

  “What if you had worn purple shoes?” Rae challenged.

  “You would have had black hair that was so dark it would look nearly purple at night.”

  “Green?” Rae asked.

  “Pale
blond hair that turned green every time you swam in a pool with any chlorine in it.”

  By the time she fell asleep Rae had forgotten about the business on the bus, and the sound of the owls had become as regular as a heartbeat. But that weekend, when Rae’s father drove down, Rae could tell that something was wrong between her parents. Usually, they argued—now they just didn’t speak. The silence in the house was suffocating, but then, on Sunday, Rae found something on the front porch that made her think August wouldn’t be so terrible after all. It was a cardboard shoebox, and inside was a pair of ruby-colored plastic beach shoes. When Rae slipped them on they fit perfectly, as if they’d been made for her.