Fortune's Daughter: A Novel

by Alice Hoffman

  All the time Lila had been away she had imagined New York to be exactly as she had left it. Pigeons still sat on the ledge outside her bedroom window, her mother made pot roast every Friday night in the cast-iron roasting pan she had inherited from Lila’s grandmother. At night the sky was inky, apartments were always overheated and hallways much too cold, and on Third Avenue, at the rear table, you could find out everything you had ever wanted to know for fifty cents. It was almost as if Lila had truly believed that she could be eighteen again, and that one ticket on a jet from Los Angeles to New York could buy back all the things she had lost. There was only one more address that might be worth something—her aunt and uncle’s apartment on 86th Street. They were her cousin Ann’s parents, and by now they’d be quite elderly. Lila had spent holidays at their apartment. The adults had always sat in the living room, drinking wine and eating small apple cakes. The children had been relegated to the bedroom, where they could make as much noise as they liked.

  Ann, older than the rest of the cousins, would lock herself away in the second, smaller bedroom. They could hear her radio through the bedroom wall, always the same thing, Frank Sinatra, and the cousins made fun of her behind her back and called her Frankie’s girl. Once, when the cousins were being particularly obnoxious, opening the windows and tossing crumpled newspapers onto anyone who happened to walk by, Lila had gone out into the hallway, pushed open her cousin’s bedroom door a bit, and looked in. The radio was on and Ann was lying on her bed, writing in her diary. When she saw Lila at the door she rushed over and slammed it shut, so hard that it made Lila jump. Lila was twelve years old, and because she felt that nobody wanted her, she stayed right there in the hallway. Then and there she decided that she would never come to another family get-together again, and when her parents were ready to go and called out her name, they were surprised to find her waiting by the door, already wearing her coat and her hat.

  She had never gone back to that apartment again, although when the driver now pulled up it seemed as if she had been there only days ago. She went in through the first set of doors. It was dark in the foyer, just as it had been the last time she’d been there, when her hair was so long it fell to her waist, even after it had been braided. Her parents had been arguing, so Lila was the one to ring upstairs, and she’d stood on tiptoes to reach the buzzer.

  All morning Lila could feel the chances of finding her daughter slip away; and there were times, when the taxi was stalled in traffic, when she could not quite remember why she had come back in the first place. Here in the foyer, the black-and-white tiles echoed when you walked across them. The glass shade that covered the overhead light made things seem fuzzy and shapeless, and Lila had to look twice before she allowed herself to believe that the name Weber—her mother’s maiden name—was still on the tenants’ directory. She had found someone.

  She rang upstairs; there was the sound of static as someone on the sixth floor picked up the intercom.

  “Yes?” a woman said.

  “It’s me,” Lila said, right away, as though she’d been expected. “Lila.”

  There was static over the intercom, and then suddenly, the buzzer rang. Lila grabbed the door open and ran all the way to the elevator. She went down the long hallway on the sixth floor, and then knocked on the door, once. She could feel her heart racing, and when someone came to open the door Lila could feel the click of the lock inside her own body, like a bone breaking.

  There was a chain inside the door, and a woman looked out, examining Lila. For a moment Lila recognized her aunt; she was just as she had been when Lila was twelve years old.

  “It is you,” the woman said.

  It was Lila’s cousin, not her aunt, and for the first time since she’d come to New York Lila felt that same sense of expectation she had had when she had begged Richard to drive into Manhattan one last time. She could actually feel herself getting closer to the past when she walked into the apartment, and if her teenaged cousin had run past them, to lock herself in her bedroom and listen to records, she wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised.

  “I guess I must look old to you,” Ann said. “You get this way living in Manhattan, but when my parents moved to Florida I couldn’t pass up a rent-controlled apartment, so I moved back here.”

  Lila tried to listen to her cousin, but she couldn’t. Again and again she reminded herself that she didn’t have to scream—all she had to do was ask; she simply wanted a name or an address. She wanted her daughter.

  “I was married and divorced and I took back my own name,” Ann was saying. “If I were still living in Connecticut you would have never found me. His last name was Starch, which should have warned me right from the start.”

  Lila wanted to interrupt, but she couldn’t bring herself to speak.

  “It’s just my mother now,” Ann said. “My father died two years ago.” She looked at Lila carefully. “Do you want to know about your parents?” she asked.

  “No,” Lila said.

  The force of that word felt like a piece of glass under her tongue, and when Ann asked if she wanted a drink of water or juice, Lila nodded. While Ann was in the kitchen Lila realized that she was sitting where her mother always sat when they came for a visit. On holidays her mother never had more than two glasses of wine, but that small amount did something to her, and on the way home from this apartment she always told Lila family secrets: how her brother had been in love with another woman but had settled for his wife, how her father had been such a big drinker they used to hide the wine in a boot kept in the front closet.

  “Are they alive?” Lila asked when Ann came back with tall glasses of orange juice.

  Ann shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  There was a plate of cookies on the table, and that reminded Lila that her mother had packed her a lunch to take along on the train out to East China. She had been unwrapping the cheese sandwich that her mother had made in those last moments before they took her to Penn Station when the train reached the outskirts of East China. She put her sandwich down and moved closer to the window and saw the spot where the potato fields begin, where the earth is so sandy you can feel it whenever you rub your fingers together, and at night the sand gets in between the sheets on everyone’s bed, and each time you kiss someone you can feel sand on the edge of your tongue.

  “Cancer,” Ann said. “Both of them.”

  They sat on couches facing each other, a coffee table between them.

  “I know why you’re here,” Ann said. “It was all my fault. When they asked me about adoption I should have kept my mouth shut.”

  “I want her back,” Lila said.

  It was such a simple thing to say that it was hard to believe it could hurt so much to say it.

  “Sometimes I wish I had taken her for myself,” Ann said.

  “I’ve wanted her back from the minute you took her,” Lila said.

  “I thought about keeping her when I had her with me in the cab,” Ann said. “She was wrapped in one towel, and it just seemed so cold that night.”

  That night when she had walked out to the living room both of Lila’s parents had turned away, terrified to look at the baby. Out on the street, she couldn’t get a cab, so she kept the baby warm inside her coat and walked to Eighth Avenue. The baby was crying and Ann could feel her shivering. The ice storm had stopped everything: no buses were running and telephone lines were out. Stores that were usually open twenty-four hours a day were shut down behind iron bars, trucks were abandoned on the roads, pigeons froze in midair, and their shattered bodies lined the sidewalks.

  Some people who were stranded had managed to get cabs, which were driven by only the bravest drivers. They skidded and careened down the avenues, and each time one passed Ann hailed it, but no one would stop for her. She had called Dr. Marshall from Lila’s parents’ apartment and arranged to meet him in his office at the hospital as soon as the baby was born. Now, she wasn’t sure if he’d still be there or if he’d gone home o
nce the ice storm had begun. But where else was there to go? Although her feet were numb and a coating of ice formed around her ankles, she continued walking downtown. After a while the baby stopped crying, and that was what really scared Ann—as long as it had been making noise she knew it was alive. She shook it, but there was no response, and she could tell it was the silence of someone who has nothing more to lose. She had to get to the hospital immediately, and the next time a taxi passed Ann ran out into the street and stood right in front of it. The taxi skidded to a halt when it couldn’t avoid her, and as soon as it had stopped, Ann ran to the passenger door and got inside.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” the cabbie said. “You can’t just jump in front of a cab and get in.”

  “I have to get to Beekman Hospital,” Ann told him.

  Now that she was sitting down she could feel that, tucked inside her coat, the baby was still breathing.

  In the back seat was a couple who had been stranded uptown; because all the hotels were full, they had offered the cab driver a hundred dollars to take them home to Brooklyn. Ann looked slightly crazy to them—every strand of her hair was covered by ice, and under the yellow light of a street lamp they could see that there was dried blood on her hands.

  “Take her wherever she wants to go,” they advised the cab driver, and that was when Ann considered not giving the baby up, that was when it just seemed too cold.

  Dr. Marshall was asleep on the couch in his office. Ann woke him, then stood by the desk as he called the couple on Long Island whom he’d promised the baby to earlier that night. She didn’t hear a word he said to them; she was listening to the baby’s even breathing from deep within her winter coat. Finally, she handed the baby to Dr. Marshall so that he could examine her and put her footprint on a birth certificate made out in the adoptive parents’ names. He wanted to take the baby upstairs, but Ann wasn’t ready to hand her over. She asked if she could be the one to carry her to the nursery.

  That night there were nearly a dozen other newborns in bassinets, and for some reason none of them were crying. A night nurse sat in a rocking chair, but she had fallen asleep, and when Ann placed the baby in an empty bassinet there wasn’t a sound in all of the nursery. She walked all the way to the apartment she shared with three other nurses. By now, it was a beautiful night, so clear that you could see Orion just above the roofs of the tallest buildings.

  After that night Ann just couldn’t bear to see Dr. Marshall any more. When he came into the emergency room the next morning to admit one of his patients who had gone into labor, Ann hid in the toilet until he was gone. Later, she went up to the nursery, but the baby was already gone. Whatever spell there had been the night before had been broken—all the babies were crying in unison, and the attention of five nurses couldn’t soothe them. A few weeks later, Ann applied for a job at New York Hospital and moved uptown. There were times when she simply refused to meet old friends downtown. And when she got married and was living in Connecticut, she was grateful that she no longer had to walk past the maternity ward or the nursery and feel she had helped ruin somebody’s life each time she heard a baby cry.

  “I need to know their name,” Lila said evenly.

  Ann looked over at her, confused.

  Lila’s voice rose dangerously. “Tell me the name of the people who took her to Long Island.”

  “I already told you,” Ann said. “I didn’t listen when Marshall phoned them. It didn’t seem to matter.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Lila said. “Can’t you remember?”

  “I can’t,” Ann said. “But I know who could—Dr. Marshall.”

  They went into the kitchen together, and Lila stood right next to her cousin as she called Beekman Hospital. Marshall hadn’t been affiliated with Beekman since his residency, but if they waited the address of his private practice could easily be found. Lila couldn’t wait; she went back out to the living room and stood by the window. She was so close that she could hear her daughter breathing, buttoned up inside Ann’s winter coat; she could hear the taxi skidding across the avenue as the driver stomped on his brakes. If she had been the one in that taxi she would have never let that driver stop, she would have persuaded him to drive all night, and by the time they reached New Jersey her daughter would have been sleeping and the ice on the highways would have melted and refrozen into daggers, so that anyone who tried to follow them would have gotten no farther than the first dangerous corner.

  Ann wrote Dr. Marshall’s address and phone number on a yellow slip of paper, and Lila quickly folded it and put it in her coat pocket. When Ann walked her out to the elevator neither woman could look at the other; it was as if what had once happened to them was so private they couldn’t allow themselves to acknowledge it. But when the door to the elevator opened, Ann put a hand on Lila’s arm to stop her.

  “I always wondered if you blamed me,” Ann said.

  “Of course not,” Lila said, and when she kissed her cousin goodbye anyone could tell that the only one she had ever blamed was herself.

  It was late afternoon and already dark when Lila walked back to her hotel. But once she got to the Hilton, she didn’t stop, she continued walking, west and downtown. Each time she put her hand in her coat pocket to feel the slip of paper there, she felt a jolt; she was on the very edge—if she took one more step forward, she could never go back. Each time she tried to imagine going to see her daughter she couldn’t seem to get any farther than the front door. When she reached for the bell she was put off by some terrible heat, and when she finally forced herself to ring the bell it left its burning black imprint on her flesh. She was so terrified of her daughter’s reaction that she simply disappeared, and each time her daughter opened the door there was no one on the front porch, just two black feathers and a rush of cold air.

  If she backed off now she could take the limousine back to Kennedy and be home tonight. She could watch Richard prune the rose bushes and then lead him into the bedroom and lie down beside him as though she had never been gone. And so each time Lila passed a phone booth and considered stopping to phone Dr. Marshall she kept on walking, and she knew that once she had her daughter’s address she would have to go on and that nothing would ever be the same again. She walked until it grew too late to call the doctor’s office; the streets became crowded with people on their way home from work, and in apartments above her lights were turned on, and ovens were lit to cook supper.

  Tenth Avenue was exactly as she remembered it; when the wind came up across the river on a dark January evening it was still the coldest place in the city. If you stood on the corner facing west you could be sure your eyes would tear as you felt the pull of the river. It was colder by only a degree or two, but it was enough to make you feel it, enough to make you shiver as you waited for the first stars to appear in the sky.

  If she could have found her way on the cobblestone streets beyond the avenue, if Hannie were still alive, she would have begged the old fortune-teller for advice. She needed someone to tell her what to do: this way hope, this way despair. She stood on the corner for longer than she should have, and when she finally hailed a cab the palms of her hands had turned blue. That night she was still undecided; she phoned the airlines for times of departures to L.A., she took out the slip of paper with Dr. Marshall’s address and looked at it a thousand times. She couldn’t eat dinner, and she was afraid to sleep. But when it was very late she had to lie down, just for a moment, and as soon as she closed her eyes she could feel herself begin to drift. When she dreamed, she dreamed of Hannie. They were two crows, high above the earth. Lila tried to hide it, but the scent of fear was all over her, and she was ashamed for Hannie to know what a coward she was. They were flying over a place where there were black hills; below them women prepared for a birth. From the air they could see that white sheets had been raised on poles to form a tent. There were ripples in the sheets, and the women had left footprints in the earth that looked like marks made by crows. There were more than
a dozen women below them, and even though they seemed not to hurry, they were a hundred times faster than the crows flying above them.

  “I can’t do this,” Lila called to Hannie, but the air was so thin she couldn’t be heard. All anyone could hear was the sound of the wind. In the center of the sky the sun grew hotter and hotter, and the wind began to smell like fire.

  When the women reached the tent, each one knelt on the ground. In the air, Lila struggled to keep up with Hannie. When the old woman flew lower Lila followed her, even though the air currents were against her and she could feel tiny bones in her wings breaking.

  She thought to herself, It’s too late, and she watched as Hannie took to the earth so quickly that her feathers were set on fire by pure speed. The women had begun to sing; the sound was closer all the time, and it went right through Lila. She was falling; it was a drop of twenty stories below her. The tent seemed much more beautiful than clouds, whiter than stars. She just gave in to it then, she let herself fall without a fight, even though the heat was getting stronger all the time. She could actually smell the burning feathers, and then the scent of black earth. Above her the air was cool and blue and so much easier to breathe. But it was such an enormous relief to finally let go that she couldn’t stop herself from weeping as she floated into her own shadow and, once and for all, gave up struggling against the delirious pull of gravity.

  She needed to get in to see Dr. Marshall without his suspecting anything, and because he wasn’t taking any new patients, Lila had to lie to his secretary. She insisted that she had been a patient years ago, that she had just moved back to the city and was desperate: she had found a lump in her breast. She had to wait four days until he could fit her in. She should have been nervous, there was enough empty time to imagine the worst: medical files lost in a fire, doors slammed in her face, a squad car called to oust her from the doctor’s office. But instead, Lila began to feel calmer, and each day she was more convinced that it was only a matter of hours before she would have her daughter back again.