Property Of, the Drowning Season, Fortune's Daughter, and At Risk

by Alice Hoffman

  “Don’t say that,” Esther the Black said, because Lisa cooked all of the family’s meals, except on Friday night, when Esther the White honored them with her cooking. “How could anyone eat frogs?” the girl said.

  Lisa, who still considered herself to be Viennese, although Max had brought her to America years before, wrinkled up her nose and sniffed. “Shows how much you know, miss,” she said. “It’s a delicacy. Anyone in Europe would know it for a fact. In Europe they know what to do with frogs who scream.”

  Esther the White touched a white linen handkerchief to her forehead; she did not want to hear her sister-in-law’s thick voice when the day was so hot, and the shells of false angel’s wings littered the green stone beach, and the pain in her side which had begun last winter was strung tightly, a sharp wire somewhere beneath her skin. “Stop that,” she told Lisa. “I’m not interested in your recipes for water frogs.”

  “Oh, well,” Lisa glared. “Pardon me.”

  “What nonsense,” Esther the White murmured.

  “I do beg your pardon,” Lisa hissed.

  “Talk, talk,” Esther the White said, wishing that she had gotten a larger prescription of codeine during her last doctor’s visit. “That’s all either of you can do.”

  Esther the Black turned, and when she thought the old woman had looked away she narrowed her eyes at her grandmother.

  “I saw that,” Esther the White said. “Don’t think I didn’t see the face you made. Don’t think you’re so smart.”

  “Such a lovely family,” Lisa sighed. “But you’ll excuse me if I don’t stay for the arguing. Because today I’m making pies, and your arguing I need like a hole in the head, like a flea on the skin.” She walked around to the kitchen door.

  “You too,” Esther the White said, hoping that she would be able to walk up the stairs to her own room, thinking of what lie she might tell if someone found her doubled over in pain on the stairway landing. “Go,” she told her granddaughter. “Get out of here. I have no time for you and your dirty looks, or your smugness.”

  Esther the Black edged off the porch steps. Her face grew hot, her veins moved like seas. “Who do you think you’re talking to?” she said to her grandmother.

  “You,” Esther the White said. “You, Esther the Black. Go away.”

  Esther the Black tilted her cap over her eyes. “I was just going,” she said, more determined than ever to find a job and escape. “I don’t need you.”

  “Good,” Esther the White shrugged as she watched Esther the Black drag her feet through the dust.

  Esther the Black’s shoulders were still shaking with anger when she reached the circular green; the lawn beneath her feet was thick, well kept by Cohen, who was not only the Compound guard, but its landscape artist as well. She carried a pair of leather sandals in one hand, and she smiled when she saw her father, even though her view of him was ghostly across the stream of moving, mounting heat. The smell of honeysuckle had gotten stuck, it hung in the air. Phillip rested his head against the back of his lawn chair, his eyes gazed calmly upward. He was in his early forties, and the beard which grew in haphazard patches on his jaw was already gray.

  “Going?” Phillip said to Esther the Black as she neared him.

  “Only to St. Fredrics,” Esther the Black answered, thinking that she could not stand one more summer of silent heat, of orders and advice from Esther the White. Esther the Black had decided to search the shops for a job; like everyone else in the Compound, except for Mischa and Esther the White, she had no money of her own, only a weekly allowance. Her own money would mean a chance to escape from this place where the honeysuckle had simply taken over, even though Phillip had ordered Cohen to plant nothing but white flowers. Gardenias were fed nails, and still they withered. Lilies grew like wax, odorless and still. Bridal wreath, begonias, small white roses with yellow centers all grew like ice. The Compound was simply not the right climate.

  “Damned heat,” Phillip said lazily, although he sat in the shade of a birchwood tree. His hands rested in his lap like white gloves. “What do you say,” Phillip smiled, “that we go for a walk later on today?” He winked at his daughter like a loser at the track.

  Esther the Black told him no; she was afraid to break the rules of Drowning Season, and the family had long ago declared that walks were off limits for Phillip. For him a walk only meant a scramble over the sea wall, over the green stones, which could so easily cut bare feet. A walk into the water, water which moved so slowly that it seemed to have no tide. A sea desert, a harbor thick with mirages.

  Phillip nodded at his daughter’s answer. His eyes were closing. “Damned heat,” he said again of the season which belonged to him, which had been named for whatever it was that drew him to the water. Closer and closer; any harbor or stream would do. This need, or habit, or odd desire had begun in the summer of his sixteenth year. The family, Phillip and his parents, had lived in London, moving from house to house, although Esther the White was itching to get to New York. They lived in a house or a flat for only as long as it took Mischa to strip the wallpaper, to stain and wax the floors, install new plumbing, and sell at a profit.

  The first time Phillip’s desire struck, the wallpaper applied in the new flat was large pink flowers splashed onto cream-colored silk. The water he walked into was the Serpentine. The lake reached his knees, his waist, his chest. Before long the water had risen to his neck.

  A rower in a rented boat called out and pushed an oar toward Phillip. Two policemen ruined their summer uniforms. A duck’s wing was stepped on and crushed by a panicked onlooker who wore a black linen suit. When he was bodily returned to the renovated Notting Hill flat, Phillip gave no explanations for his act.

  Esther the White had shrugged. “He wanted to drown,” she said.

  “He didn’t know what he was doing,” Mischa insisted, as he angrily threw a peppermint into his mouth and stared at his son. “Look at him,” Mischa demanded. “Does he know what he’s doing?”

  Phillip was dripping lake water onto the highly polished floor. One pants leg was rolled up to his knee. He smiled slightly.

  Esther the White looked him up and down. “He wanted to drown,” she repeated.

  Later, they discovered that Esther the White had been right from the start. There was a new attempt every summer, and once Esther’s beloved passage money, which was to take the family to New York, was spent so that Phillip could spend the summer at a private clinic, where he managed to keep his head in the sink long enough to pass out. By the time Phillip was twenty, no one called July and August summer: the season had found another title.

  It was habit for every member of the family to daily persuade Phillip not to leave the Compound in July and August, the hot months when the water called. On mornings when Phillip sighed and tremors ran through his pale hands, he was locked in the smallest pink cottage, reserved for Drowning Season, this year and forever. A padlock was placed on the door, and Phillip was served jasmine tea with honey, Valium, Thorazine, and cinnamon toast.

  And now there was that rumor, begun by the fishermen, that a watery curse surrounded the harbor. Strangers whispered about her father when Esther the Black walked through town, and Phillip’s medical history was legend at the local hospital. Occasionally tourists who had rented fishing boats in St. Fredrics, and who had heard of Drowning Season, moored at the very edge of the harbor; but through their binoculars all they could see was the fading group of pink houses, the thick lawn, and the deserted beach. No one had drowned in the harbor for more than five years, when a young fisherman was washed up onto the green stones during an unseasonable storm. But the fishermen continued to whisper, in their wooden squatters’ shacks and in dark doorways in St. Fredrics, that the harbor would continue to drown innocent men and women until it found the one it searched for. And they refused to call Phillip by his name—instead they referred to him as the Drowned Man. Yet, many fishermen had been lost in the harbor, in storms or summer gales, and Phillip, the Drow
ned Man, continued to sleep in the sun. He slept each summer through, dressed in a thin blue bathrobe, his mouth dry from the tranquilizers he swallowed each morning, his eyes staring at the sky.

  Now, he spoke absently. “I’m waiting,” he said to Esther the Black.

  “I’ll be back soon,” Esther reassured him, but Phillip had already turned from her. He didn’t listen, didn’t care, for he hadn’t tricked her into helping him walk away from the Compound.

  Esther the Black cut across the Compound lawn, and as she did she imagined walking along the harbor beach with Phillip. If she had been free to take him there, he would have seen hermit crabs, clear jellyfish, the shells of mussels coated with barnacles which grew in the shape of roses. His eyes would be closed, his feet would pass over the rocky green stones without a scratch. But, Esther was not free to show him any of these things. For years, Mischa had threatened to send Phillip upstate, to cut off Phillip’s stream of analysts and clinics. The old man claimed that there was not the money there had once been; Rath, the accountant, had made some bad investments in a chemical plant in New Jersey, and land taxes were higher than ever, they were killing him. And although Esther the White was still driven to Manhattan regularly to check the books, the last dollars were being drained, cognac was no longer ordered for Lisa and Max in crates, and Mischa had put off buying a new car for so long that the Cadillac was an antique coated with rust.

  As Esther the Black walked across the Compound, Dr. Otto, Phillip’s newest analyst, who vacationed in St. Fredrics each summer, drove past in his yellow MG. Esther the Black turned to wave as he sped by her, and it was then that she noticed Esther the White on the porch. She was still watching. She moved in her rocking chair, waiting like a hawk for Esther the Black to be foolish. They stared at each other, but there was no recognition on Esther the White’s face. She sat like a piece of white glass in the sun.

  Even though Esther the Black would have never believed it, her grandmother was then thinking of her as she rocked back and forth in the white wicker chair. There was no doubt about it, it had been Esther the White who had raised the girl. Both of Esther the Black’s parents were incompetent, they had had a child in hopes of pleasing Esther the White, but once Esther the Black was born Rose could not be moved from her TV and gin, and Phillip was busy marking off the days on the calendar till Drowning Season. So, when she was past forty, Esther the White had been handed a child whose very name was an insult; and she had done the best she could, considering she had never liked children, not even her own.

  As she watched her granddaughter leave the Compound, Esther the White believed that she had failed. All of the girl’s training seemed wasted. Again and again, Esther the White had stressed the importance of appearance for a woman who wanted a life of ease, a life without fear; and yet there the girl was, one hand on her hip, barefoot, peering out from beneath a boy’s cap, like a vagabond or a beggar. When Esther the Black was very young, her rebellions were small; and when she was particularly lonely she begged to sit near Esther the White’s dressing table and she would watch with interest as Esther the White knotted a silk scarf in an intricate bow. But now, the two barely spoke; and every time Esther the White felt the brief desire to be close, she could see the girl’s shoulders stiffen, and before she knew it she was reprimanding her posture, and then it was too late. Then, the girl would not listen to anything she had to say, and Esther the White was not certain what would happen if she had had the chance to speak; anything might have risen up—feathers, or words, or tears. Anything at all.

  For some time Esther the White had continued to watch her granddaughter, waiting for a moment which did not come. She put off reaching out to Esther the Black just as she had put off her doctor’s appointment, until the appointment had drifted by with months and forgetfulness, and fear. Esther the White knew that she had to hurry; either that, or fail; and there would be no reconciliation. But where to begin? When the old woman, from the chair where she sat shielded in sunglasses and scarves like a lizard on the rocks, warned the girl against growing too dark in the sun, Esther the Black would sit on the beach until her skin turned the shade of dark, wet earth, until her eyes were ripe. As far as Esther the Black was concerned, there was nothing to talk about; she walked through the iron Compound gates, and as her grandmother’s pale stare chilled her through the waves of heat, Esther decided that she would take any damn job she could find.

  She began to walk down Route 16; a mile or so south of the Compound the road would lead her to St. Fredrics. She slipped on her leather sandals, and listened to the soles scraping through the brown needles of grass along the side of the road. There was little traffic; once a car horn honked at her, and the sound echoed for a long time, like the call of an owl. Each side of the road was bordered by wild orange lilies whose centers were heart-shaped and purple. Esther the Black kept her eyes down; she barely noticed when the town began. She walked past the drive-in movie theater she had never gone to, past the Shell gas station and the McDonald’s where Cohen had once taken her.

  She could no longer bear to live in the Compound, she could no longer behave. Esther the Black soon reached the St. Fredrics docks, where ferries and fishing boats moved on their tethers even when the water seemed absent of motion. Here, alongside a café which boasted the world’s greatest clam chowder, Esther the Black bought a copy of the St. Fredrics Herald at a newspaper kiosk. She walked on to the center of town, sat on a green bench, and unfolded the paper. Behave, Esther the Black thought, as if she were a poor relation, or a bear that danced.

  She had no intention of marrying Ira Rath; she never had. But what could she do instead? If Esther had paid more attention to her grandmother she would have known how to set a table or serve sangría or wear silk pajamas: tricks to catch a husband other than Ira. But she did not even know how to do this. Esther’s uncle Max spoke of managing a circus in Europe, and Esther the White balanced the books, but Cohen was the only one who seemed to work, and from him Esther the Black had learned a great deal about gardenias and strawberries, fertilizer and mulch. But she doubted that anyone would hire her as a landscape artist, she was not a man and she had no references.

  Esther sighed and shredded the classified section; buses came and went, but she stayed on the green bench. Across the street were a coffee house, a bait shop, and a shell store which fooled tourists into buying Pacific conch shells as native to the St. Fredrics harbor. There was also a fish store, with a window display of plastic sea anemones and a plaster model of a blue shark suspended by string so that it seemed to fly somewhere behind the glass. Around the doorway, some of the Compound poachers had gathered. They stood wearing their familiar mark—a blue headband wrapped around their foreheads. Esther looked up from her torn newspaper and watched as the fish-store owner, who had just bought a crate of mussels and bluefish, suggested that the poachers keep away from the slick sawdust-coated doorway. They frightened away the shoppers; suburban women from the new housing developments which tightly encircled the old port town were not likely to push by a group of lingering, thoroughly fishy men. “Out of here, my friends,” the fish-store owner said. “Out of here, bums,” he joked.

  Esther knew the fishermen well, though they never greeted each other in public places, and her grandmother would have been shocked to know how many evenings Esther the Black had spent in their campground when Cohen, serving as Esther’s babysitter, and later her friend, drank bourbon and played cards and Esther the Black learned how to kiss and how to scale fish. It would have been easy to work for the fishermen; she was as strong as any of the women who rowed out into the harbor when darkness fell, and it would have not taken her long to learn how to repair a net. But they would never have had her; she had grown up in their encampment, but she was still the Drowned Man’s daughter, and many of the old men were convinced that she carried the harbor’s curse with her.

  And even if they had offered her a job, digging the mud for mussels or clams, cleaning fishhooks, or rowing he
r own small boat, they could never afford to pay her anything but her weight in fish. They were poor, they lived in shacks and trailers, and many of the young men and women had left to find their fortune in Florida or California. Esther the Black watched as the fishermen walked down Main Street, and when one of the young men stopped to slip on a pair of yellow sunglasses and offer himself as a guide to a couple who carried a picnic hamper, Esther the Black sat up so straight, even her grandmother would have been proud of her posture.

  In the window of the old Woolworth’s, just behind the fisherman’s left ear, was a help-wanted sign. Esther left her newspaper and her cap on the bench; she raced across the street, not waiting for the streetlight to turn, dodging between the moving cars. She rushed down the aisles of the store pleading to see the manager as the slow wooden fans droned overhead. Esther the Black bit her fingers, she shifted her weight from foot to foot. The store manager drummed his nails on a glass counter top and eyed Esther’s enthusiasm coldly; but she was used to cold glances and she said, “I can do it. I can sell anything. Give me a break.”

  “A break?” the manager said. “This isn’t Hollywood. It’s only part time in cosmetics.”

  But all the same, by the time Esther got through with him, the manager felt like a producer, a director, a giver of breaks.

  “All right,” he told her, as her nervous fingers fluttered and the lies she was inventing about experience and previous employment flew like birds, faster and faster, leaving the taste of feathers in her mouth. “Don’t tell me again about your sick relatives. Don’t tell me how terrific you are. Prove it.”

  And by the time Esther had been fitted for a pink uniform, and given the lowdown on the previous cosmetics salesgirl, a woman named Ronelle, who had been caught with forty cartons of Maybelline eyeliner in the trunk of her Mustang, the day had grown late. And Esther the Black, who was thinking about possibilities, about not behaving, walked back to the Compound without looking at the road. Instead, she merely followed the scent of the orange flowers which grew by the side of the road, until she was home.