Property of / the Drowning Season / Fortune's Daughter / at Risk

by Alice Hoffman

  “Pagan,” Esther said, “I never listen to the radio.”

  He sighed. “Esther the Black, on the day you come back, we’ll fly down the alleyways on the wings that I promised you, like we used to do so long ago.”

  “We never flew down alleyways,” Esther interrupted. “You never promised me wings.”

  “Oh, Esther,” Pagan Rath said, “it’s only a song. It’s poetry. What do you want?”

  “I’ll let you know where I am,” Esther the Black said.

  “Do you have the telephone number of the hotel in L.A. in case you change your mind?” Pagan said mournfully.

  “Yes,” Esther said. “Just in case,” she smiled.

  The Quick and the Mad were now flying in the night toward Los Angeles. Each time a jet passed over the harbor, Esther the Black looked up; as she sat with her grandmother in the dark, Pagan Rath was drinking a tall glass of Dewar’s in the first-class section of an American Airlines 727 jet. Esther the Black imagined herself in the first-class cabin, drinking a Tequila Sunrise with the headphones screwed into her ears, and Pagan staring at her with his soft, watery eyes. She laughed out loud, and breathed in the night air.

  “Tell me, tell me,” Esther the White now asked her, in a soft, slurred voice, “exactly how old are you?” She was remembering their Notting Hill flat. “How old?” she said.

  Esther the Black sighed. “I told you, eighteen.”

  “That’s all,” Esther the White mused. “That isn’t so much.”

  A group of fishermen had gathered in the center of the Compound lawn. They raised their fishing nets in the air, and walked down to the harbor.

  “They keep the Compound alive,” Esther the White said, nodding. She ran her fingers over a rough block of sandstone. “Maybe the reason I sleep well at night now is that I hear their voices.” She turned again to Esther the Black. “I asked you before how old you were because my memory tricks me, I get confused, and I don’t want to be confused.”

  Salt air stuck to Esther the Black’s eyelashes; she remembered Esther the White staring at her when she was a child, she stared right through her, with eyes like ice.

  “Why are you so interested, all of a sudden?” Esther the Black demanded. “Just because you’re sick you think everything’s changed? You have cancer, so am I supposed to erase my memory?” She remembered Esther the White standing on the porch, in a Drowning Season long before. Esther the Black wanted to know where Cohen was; she was ten, and there was no one to talk to. Esther the White might not have heard her; she didn’t answer, she looked out at the wide cool lawn and ignored her granddaughter. “Why didn’t you talk to me then?” Esther the Black said.

  They sat together like stone, women carved into the sea wall. Esther the Black remembered kneeling on the dark earth as Rose planted sunflower seeds. Esther the White walked past, not speaking, not looking. Esther the Black watched her grandmother’s pale hair move in the wind.

  “Don’t look at her,” Rose had warned.

  Esther the Black watched as the earth was turned. “Why not?”

  “Don’t look at her, and don’t bother your grandmother.”

  Esther the Black watched her mother’s hand toss seeds, in a row, into the dark, moving earth. And as they walked on, the bluejays followed like vultures.

  “What do you think?” Esther the Black lit a cigarette, and the match sizzled. “You give me one gift, and everything else doesn’t count? Every other memory of you is wiped away?”

  Esther the White watched her granddaughter: her face was as smooth as sculpture.

  “I don’t know why we’re sitting here. You have nothing to do with my life. I don’t even remember you,” Esther the Black lied.

  Esther the White felt feathers in her throat. Perhaps it was only from the medication, some side effect—but it seemed as if she had swallowed a dove, a pigeon, or a hawk.

  “Esther,” she said to her granddaughter.

  But Esther the Black shrugged. “You’re not in my life.”

  The feathers were rising up in Esther the White’s throat, covering her tongue with soft down. “Then I will be,” Esther the White said.

  “No,” Esther the Black insisted, as she listened to the cries of the fishermen from the harbor. “Let’s go back to the house,” Esther the Black said. She did not want to know her grandmother. She was afraid to.

  But it was too late for Esther the Black to turn away; Esther the White had already begun. She had begun with Cohen and with Phillip, and now with Esther the Black. Esther the White did not move an inch; it was as if the stone had been torn apart, and within it was a bird whose feathers were drifting upward. Bits of stone lodged in her organs and in her skin; all across her ribs, there was a thin metallic line of pain. And as the stone shattered, the pain flew upward. She tried to keep her balance on the sea wall, she listened when her granddaughter insisted that they leave, but Esther the White had begun to cry.

  At first it was only like something caught in her throat, or like the sharp harbor air. Esther the White was confused, uncertain as to what language to speak in. She tried German, but the words escaped her. She tried French, and then English, but all the sounds ran together, a low howling noise was all that she could make, not words at all. Esther the White did not realize that she was crying, until her granddaughter wiped away the wetness on her face with one hand. Esther the White licked her lips; saltier than ocean water.

  “Grandmother, stop it,” Esther the Black whispered. “You don’t have to do this.”

  The girl knelt before her in the sand; Esther the White smiled uncertainly at her, but it was too late, it had already begun: Esther the White was planning her escape from her parents’ house, the jade pendant sewn into her coat. She had already asked one of the loggers in the village how it would be possible to get away from the village now that the river had frozen and rafts from the village were stuck in yards of ice.

  Time shattered slowly inside her, and she traveled in the direction the logger pointed out, over the border, sleeping in the frozen cars of the train; through France with the jade stone in her coat. She tolerated Max, and she dragged Mischa behind her, so that he would not give up and fall into the ice, so that he would not fall back into the village of their childhood. She had decided not to feel anything, and certainly, she had decided that she, herself, would never fall into the ice. Time was shattering like a mirror, and Esther the White remembered how her own eyes changed, how they turned a paler and paler blue, how her skin grew whiter, until she had to cover her head in the sun. She moved through men, watching their eyes change too, from desire to dust, and now, with Cohen, back again to desire. She passed by her own son. Even though strange cells were multiplying in her body, and the pain growing worse, she passed by her own son. She dreamed of a Compound—she invented it, she created a home, and when she spoke, in the darkness, the earth of this Compound rose, sand was carried in the air as she spoke.

  “And even now,” Esther the White said, “I’ll tell you another secret. I’ve waited all my life, watching the night, trying not to be afraid of the dark, and even now, I’m still afraid, because I think I may die before anyone knows me.”

  They spoke almost in unison; Esther the Black tried to comfort her grandmother, Esther the White sometimes forgot words and made only the soft howling noise.

  “Listen,” Esther the Black said, as she tried to find a way to quiet Esther the White, to calm her down. “I want you to be quiet. You be quiet and I’ll talk. I’m going to describe the Compound.”

  Now that Esther the Black realized just how much the Compound meant to her grandmother, she knew just what to say. Esther the Black counted off the lilac, and the wisteria, the purple rose of sharon and the tulips, as if the flowers were a lullaby. Next to her, she felt her grandmother’s shivering lessen, the howling grew softer and softer. Esther the White rocked on the sea wall, threads from her skirt caught on the stone. Esther the Black lit a match and peered into her face, but Esther the White pu
shed her arm away. “Stop that.” Esther the Black put out the match. “I’m perfectly rational,” Esther the White said. “It’s the Demerol that makes me forget.”

  Esther the Black swung her legs onto the sea wall and held her knees. “All right,” she said, “tell me.”

  Esther the White laughed, but no sound came from her throat. “I thought you didn’t want to know.”

  Esther the Black did not answer, but she waited, and, after a while, her grandmother began again, but she spoke only in English now, and she spoke more slowly, following the thread of time, so that the visit to Dr. Schwartz’s office really did happen forty years after she had been in the arms of the tattooed man. And by the time the night was over, and the frogs had stopped their calling, by the time fishermen had begun to push their boats up onto the beach, Esther the Black was beginning to know her grandmother. Esther the White was drowsy, from sleeplessness, from medication. Still she spoke of her life. She spoke in words that were as thin as porcelain, as thick as a stone vase with a circular frieze: around the poured wine, the stored honey, memory had been sculpted.

  Soon they could hear the tides grow stronger and watch the morning rise over the harbor. Esther the White untied her scarf and let her hair move in the breeze; Esther the Black smiled and smoked the last cigarette in the pack. From a distance, it would have been nearly impossible, in the shadows, in the pale morning fog, to tell the two women apart.

  Fortune’s Daughter

  A Novel

  Alice Hoffman

  PART ONE

  IT WAS EARTHQUAKE WEATHER and everyone knew it. As the temperature hovered near one hundred degrees the days melted together until it was no longer possible to tell the difference between a Thursday and a Friday. Coyotes in the canyons panicked; they followed the scent of chlorine into backyards, and some of them drowned in swimming pools edged with blue Italian tiles. In Hollywood the tap water bubbled as it came out of the faucets; ice cubes dissolved in the palm of your hand. It was a time when everything you once suspected might go wrong suddenly did. For miles in every direction people just snapped. Lovers quarreled in bedrooms and parking lots, money was stolen, knives were pulled, friendships that had lasted a lifetime were destroyed with one harsh word. Those few people who were able to sleep were haunted by nightmares; those with insomnia drank cups of coffee and swore they smelled something sweet burning, as if a torch had been put to a grove of lemon trees sometime in the night.

  It wasn’t uncommon to have hallucinations in weather like this, and Rae Perry, who had never had a vision in her life, began to see things on the empty sidewalk whenever she took the bus home from work: a high-heeled shoe left at a crosswalk, a wild dog on the corner of La Brea, a black garden snake winding its way through traffic. Hollywood Boulevard seemed to move in waves. And at home, the white stucco walls in Rae’s apartment shifted as if they were made of sand. It wasn’t just the heat that was affecting everyone, it was the strange quality of the air. Every breath you took seemed dangerous, as if it might be your last. Even in the air-conditioned office where she worked for an independent producer named Freddy Contina, Rae found she had to take several deep breaths before typing a letter or answering the phone. Toward the end of the day the light coming in through the windows was a sulky amber color that made you see double. It was the season for headaches, and rashes, and double-crosses, and more and more often Rae Perry put her head down on her desk at work and began to wonder why she had ever left Boston.

  But after she’d gotten home, and had sat for half an hour or more in a bathtub of cool water, Rae knew exactly why she had run away two weeks before her eighteenth birthday. As soon as she heard the Oldsmobile pull up, she ran to get dressed and open the front door. Sometimes she swore she was under Jessup’s spell. He didn’t even have to snap his fingers to get her to jump. All he had to do was look at her. Even in this weather Jessup seemed different from everyone else, as if he were above the heat. He had the kind of blue eyes that were transparent, and so pale that his mother had thought they were bad luck. For several summers she had kept Jessup out of the sun entirely, for fear his eyes would be bleached even lighter. But as soon as you touched Jessup you knew how deceiving his appearance was. He might have looked cool, but his skin radiated heat, and it got so that Rae had begun to wait for him to fall asleep so that she could climb out of bed and sleep alone on the wooden floor.

  Since the time they’d run away from Boston, Rae had been afraid that one day Jessup would change his mind and ask her to leave. And the truth was something had been happening to him ever since they came to California. He actually went so far as to get an application to the Business School at U.C.L.A., though he never filled out the forms. He continually grilled Rae about Freddy Contina and even had her steal one of Freddy’s résumés—Rae found him studying it one night when he thought she was still in the shower. It was as if the ghost of some ambition had suddenly appeared to Jessup. He had begun to want things, and it just wasn’t like him.

  In the past, Jessup’s main ambition had been to keep moving. In seven years they had lived in five states. As soon as Rae began to feel comfortable somewhere, Jessup started to talk about moving to a place where there were more options. He never mentioned a new job or more money, just these unnamed options—as if the whole world would open to him as soon as they put a few more miles on the Oldsmobile.

  Whenever Jessup reached for his stack of road maps, Rae had to remind herself that it wasn’t her he was tired of, just the place they were in. This time there had been no maps and no talk of options, and yet Jessup’s restlessness was so strong it had begun to affect Rae’s dreams. At night she dreamed of earthquakes: glass shattered and spilled over the boulevards, the ground pitched and split open, the sky became a sheet of needles. When she awoke from one of these nightmares, Rae had to hold tight to Jessup or else, she was certain, she’d spin right out of the room.

  She had been waiting so long for something to go wrong between them that it took a while before she realized that it already had. Each Sunday they went to the beach at Santa Monica, and as they drove along Sunset Boulevard Jessup’s mood always grew worse. By the time they reached Beverly Hills it was impossible to talk to him. The funny thing was, it was Jessup who always insisted they take the same route. He claimed to hate the palm trees and the huge estates, but every Sunday he pointed them out as if seeing them for the first time.

  “This is truly disgusting,” he would say as they neared the same pink stucco chalet. “Who in their right mind would turn their house into such a fucking eyesore.”

  “Then when you have a house paint it white,” Rae finally told him, and she knew as soon as she opened her mouth that it was the wrong thing to say.

  “Do you have something to say about the fact that I don’t own my own house?” Jessup said.

  Rae looked straight ahead. “No.”

  “You think I’m a failure or something—is that what you’re thinking?”

  “Jessup, I didn’t say one goddamned thing,” Rae told him.

  “You said paint it white. I heard you.”

  “Well, paint it whatever the hell color you want to.” Rae was practically in tears. “Do whatever you want.”

  “I will,” Jessup said. “I certainly will.”

  After that Rae had taken to riding with her head out the window of the car. She told Jessup it was because she loved the scent of jasmine in Beverly Hills, but really it was because Jessup’s anger was heating up the car until the plastic upholstery just about burned you alive.

  On the last Sunday in August they probably should have known enough to stay home. The temperature had risen above one hundred and there was a trace of sulfur in the air. When they pulled into the parking lot at Santa Monica, the asphalt beneath the tires turned to molasses. Jessup wasn’t talking as they walked down to the beach; and when Rae spread out the blanket she wondered if there could possibly be another woman, someone he told all his secrets to, because he certainly wasn’t telling
Rae a thing. She watched him as she tucked her red hair under a straw hat, then rubbed sunscreen on her arms and legs. The water was so blue that it hurt your eyes, but Jessup stared straight at it. He wore a black T-shirt and jeans, and a pair of boots Rae had bought for him years ago. Everything around them shimmered with heat; every sound echoed. If you closed your eyes you could almost imagine that the cars on Route 1 were only inches away, or that the girls who cried out as they dove into the cold waves were close enough to touch.

  Rae was flat on her back and nearly asleep when Jessup finally spoke.

  “Guess how many Rolls-Royces I counted?” he said suddenly.

  Rae had to crane her neck to look up at him; she kept one hand on her straw hat.

  “Go ahead,” Jessup urged. “Guess.”

  Rae shrugged her shoulders. She could barely tell a Ford from a Toyota these days.

  “Two?”

  “Eighteen,” Jessup said triumphantly. “Eighteen fucking Rolls-Royces between Hollywood and Santa Monica.”

  For some reason that number frightened Rae. In the parking lot, their blue Oldsmobile baked in the sun. In the seven years they’d had the car they hadn’t put a scratch on it. In fact, it had been one of the reasons Jessup had wanted to come to California in the first place. A car could last forever in Los Angeles, he had told Rae. No snow, no salt, no rust.

  “I don’t care about Rolls-Royces,” Rae said. “I’d rather have our car any day.”

  She could see the muscles in Jessup’s jaw tighten.

  “God, Rae,” he said to her. “Sometimes I swear you get stupider all the time.”

  He left her there on the blanket, just like that. Rae propped herself up on one elbow and watched him walk down to the water. He stood at the shoreline, looking far out into the Pacific, as if he were the only one on the beach able to see the cloudy edge of China. Rae was concentrating so hard, trying to figure out what was wrong, that she forgot to turn onto her stomach so she wouldn’t burn. By the time they got home, Rae’s fair skin had burned to nearly the same shade of red as her hair, and that night Jessup had the perfect excuse not to come near her.