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

by Alice Hoffman

  “Temporarily,” Phillip had told Rose. “We move around quite a bit.”

  His accent was English, his eyes were golden, his family was rich, and Rose was twenty-six and still unmarried. She aspired to better things and places than Bridgeport, Connecticut. So, Rose seduced Phillip on the bathroom floor in his parents’ apartment, and four months later they were married in an Episcopalian church on 62nd Street.

  When Rose’s Connecticut family discovered that the family had Anglicized their name, and had once been Jewish, they stopped telephoning, they stopped talking. And when Phillip began hovering near the banks of the East River, Rose was actually relieved that Esther the White suggested that the family move into the completed Compound, which already showed sure signs of failure, since not one house had been occupied or bought. They would move in, Esther the White insisted. Temporarily. But, after two years, when not one of the pink houses had yet been bought, and Rose now had to care for a year-old daughter who looked nothing like herself, and a husband who attempted suicide each pale, gray summer, Rose began taping pictures of the desert onto her bedroom wall.

  It was difficult, but Rose soon learned to ignore Esther the White’s cold stares when she poured herself gin and tonics in the morning, when she hummed and decorated Esther the Black’s nursery with mobiles of cactus flowers and slot machines. Esther the Black had, in fact, been conceived as a gift to Esther the White. Rose had imagined that if she brought forth an heir, the old bitch would get off her back, retract her cold stares, and set up a trust fund. But, Esther the White did none of those things; she refused to see the child for several days, and when she learned that Phillip had named the girl after her, she was taut with hysteria, frightened of having her name stolen, of becoming a ghost. So, Rose gave up. She stopped trying to please Esther the White, but she insisted her daughter try even harder. Rose’s passion for Nevada sprang up at the same time she began to despise Esther the White, the family, and everything about the Compound, even the sea. Her desire for another state grew obsessive. And when Esther the Black was older, Rose dressed her like an Indian with a rouge-painted face each and every Halloween. She drove the girl out to the new tract housing which had begun to circle St. Fredrics; and, from the driver’s seat of Mischa’s Cadillac, Rose watched as her Indian daughter gathered Almond Joys, sour balls, and apples.

  In 1962, Rose begged Mischa for a TV, which she said would be therapeutic for Phillip—a connection to the real world. But Phillip refused to desert his National Geographics, and Rose alone watched TV. She tuned in to game shows each morning, practicing the quizzes, and dreaming of the time when she would rise like a storm from the audience and then—from podium or chair—she would win the cash she needed to fly off to Nevada; if she were lucky she might win a Camaro as well, perhaps a year’s supply of groceries, or unlimited stays in Best Western Motels. And although she never appeared on a game show, never even went so far as to take the ferry to Manhattan, she did make it to Las Vegas, once.

  Rose charged all of her expenses on an American Express card she had stolen from Mischa’s kidskin wallet. The day that Rose left, Esther the Black was in school, and the TV reception was hazy because of a spring rainstorm. After finishing her last bottle of tequila, Rose decided that she could not face another Drowning Season.

  Phillip still referred to her flight as the “Nevada Caper”; the rest of the family tightly named it “Rose’s Episode.” Esther the Black was listening at the door when Phillip persuaded Esther the White to convince Mischa not to press charges, to let Rose return to the Compound—even though she had been apprehended by a policeman in the lobby of the Dunes, where she had run up an eight-hundred-dollar tab in a week.

  “Darlings,” Rose had whispered to Phillip and Esther the Black, after her return, after Esther the White had coolly appraised Rose’s tanned arms, “I’m awfully sorry about the mess. But, really, my life’s as dry as instant potatoes. And it’s your mother,” she pointed a sun-browned finger at Phillip, “who keeps us here.”

  But Rose could not and would not leave. She had stayed so long, she would stay a bit longer, at least until Phillip received the inheritance which she would manage. And now, fifteen years after the Nevada Caper, it was Esther the Black who dreamed of escape. It was Esther the Black who guarded her eyes whenever anyone in the family demanded to know her plans for the future, it was Esther who wore her denim cap so that no one would have the chance of peering into the ideas which moved inside her skull. Rose had tried to frighten Esther the Black into behaving, but it hadn’t worked. “Penniless,” Rose would hiss, when Esther the Black despaired over Ira Rath, or her lack of friends, or the criticism which was showered down on her by Esther the White.

  Rose had had a lifetime of dust, a lifetime of waiting for an inheritance which was being bled by Phillip’s analysts and clinics, and Esther the Black had no such fears. She knew from the fishermen that there was nothing frightening about sleeping in shacks and eating rice and beans with sweet fish sauce. There was only one threat which kept Esther the Black in line, which kept her at the Compound and forced her to sit up straight when she wanted more than anything else in the world to slouch: she was afraid that any slip-up of her own would reflect on her father.

  “They’ll throw him in the loony bin,” Rose would whisper when Esther the Black would not take her vitamins or smile. “They’ll say he’s a bad influence on you. They’ll lock him up for good, and cut our allowances in half.”

  Of course, there was more to fear. To leave the Compound, and then to be forced to return—through bad luck, or bad vibes, or a bad tuna-fish sandwich that produced ptomaine and stacks of hospital bills which Esther the Black could never afford. Endless scenarios rushed through Esther the Black’s skull whenever she thought of escape; in each she was driven to her knees, forced to return to the Compound as more of a prisoner than ever before. She was a maid, a chauffeur, Cohen’s assistant, a sharecropper struggling to pay off the debts incurred during her short visit to the outside world. And always, in every scenario, it was Esther the White who was the guard, Esther the White she had to pay back. All in all, Esther the Black was scared. She feared that someone in the family would discover that she had a job, or that she hid all of the money she earned beneath her mattress; they would know that she planned to take her parents and leave, disappear, into the bright Nevada sun.

  Esther the Black was afraid of her own plan; perhaps because she dared not even tell Cohen, who had always been her ally; but she needed to talk, she needed support. That may have been why, in the third week of July, she telephoned Ira Rath. She telephoned from the only Compound phone, which was located in the entrance hallway of her grandparents’ house. She called to ask the accountant’s son, whom she had not seen since he first went away to his college in Vermont, if he would be her accomplice; and she quickly found the number, listed under Solomon Rath on West 87th Street.

  “Ira?” she said, turning to glance over her shoulder, freezing whenever a floorboard creaked.

  “His father,” the voice said. Esther the Black stopped talking. The accountant might know her voice; she had seen him at Friday-night dinner less than a month before. “You want my son?” Solomon Rath asked.

  “Yes,” Esther said quickly, disguising her voice. “I’m a friend from school.”

  “He doesn’t go to school anymore,” the elder Rath sighed. “He dropped out of Bennington at the end of his last semester. A friend from school would know that. Who is this?”

  Esther the Black panicked. It was early morning, she would be late for work, Esther the White would glide down the staircase in her pale blue robe and find Esther the Black, a traitor at the phone. “All right,” Esther the Black said to the accountant. “The truth is I’m in love with your son. I’ve seen him in Central Park.” Esther had been to Manhattan only twice in her lifetime, and then just to visit Phillip in Doctor’s Hospital the summers he contracted pneumonia; but she had seen enough movies on Rose’s TV set to know that the pa
rk was a place for lovers. “I followed him home. That’s how I got your name and address. I must talk to him. I must.”

  She waited. The accountant breathed. “So,” he said, “it’s you.” He moved his mouth away from the phone. “Ira,” he called. “It’s Esther the Black on the phone.”

  Esther lit a cigarette and wondered how Rath had known her. Did she have a reputation for craziness? Had her grandmother warned the accountant, as they pored over the family’s financial records together in his air-conditioned office, that Esther the Black was capable of anything, that she might telephone at early hours of the morning, lying and proclaiming a false love?

  “Hello.” It was Ira; he had been asleep, his voice was thick, a stranger’s.

  “Don’t say a word,” Esther told him. There was silence on the other end of the phone. Esther stubbed out her cigarette without having ever inhaled. “Good,” she nodded. “We have to get one thing straight. I feel I have to tell you that I don’t intend to marry you. So forget about it.”

  “All right,” Ira said. And then he asked, “Who is this?”

  “Esther. Esther the Black. Now, don’t say a word. I may need your help. I assume that, as a childhood friend, you will oblige me.”

  “What the hell,” Ira said. “We’ve known each other for a long time. Of course I’ll help you. If we had married we would have been divorced. Of course, then I would have had alimony, some sort of settlement. I’ll be damned if I know how to get the money to cut a record. But I’ve gotten a band together, and I’m not too proud to take The Quick and the Mad into every sleazy bar in New York if I have to.”

  “I would have paid you alimony?” Esther the Black said.

  “Sleazy bars,” Ira Rath repeated, “are the price you pay when you love rock and roll.”

  “Rock and roll.” Esther shrugged. She was confessing her secrets, and he spoke of music.

  “I’m a singer. A personality. That’s why I dropped out of school. My father okayed it because he figured I’d be taken care of with your family’s money. But to hell with your money, Esther the Black. To hell with it. And to tell you the truth,” he lowered his voice, “my father says there really isn’t a financial reason for our marriage anymore. He says if your grandfather doesn’t sell off some property you’ll all be in the poorhouse.”

  “Don’t say another word,” Esther warned. “Someone may be listening.”

  “Nah,” said Ira Rath. “Esther the Black, what hell our marriage would have been.” He sighed.

  “I don’t know,” Esther the Black said, insulted, and suddenly shy.

  “But my father would sooner have me dead and buried than playing rock and roll, even if that means marriage to you,” Ira said.

  Esther the Black and Ira agreed to mislead their families; they would be co-conspirators, they would meet like lizards in a cheap bar at the harbor of St. Fredrics. It was a relief for Esther to finally whisper her plans of escape to someone. But then Ira Rath nearly ruined it all by lowering his voice and saying, “If we’re really going to be allies, you have to confide in me. Are you a virgin? I could never relate to virgins.”

  “Ira,” Esther the Black said. “That’s none of your business.”

  But it was too late; he had forced her to think about the fishermen. Esther the Black rubbed her forehead and remembered. If she hadn’t been the Drowned Man’s daughter, some fisherman might have asked her to run away with him, to the Florida Keys, to Miami, or she might have moved into some young man’s camper and learned how to repair fishing nets.

  Esther the Black had never had friends in St. Fredrics, and Ira Rath had been nothing more than an occasional visitor who wore blue suits and glasses and taught her to smoke cigarettes. She had only the fishermen’s children; and when the fishermen’s girls her age began to wear bluejeans and shawls, when they kissed any boy who was interested, Esther the Black sat with them on the cold stone beach. The winter when she was sixteen, Esther decided that it was time for her to have a lover, and she chose a boy named Terry, perhaps because she had known him all of her life, perhaps because he had his own tent, which he heated in the winter with a small coiled electric heater that he plugged into his older brother’s trailer with a stiff extension cord. Esther the Black often jumped out of her window at night, and slid off the roof, while Phillip and Rose slept beneath an electric blanket on the first floor. It seemed natural to Esther for her to fall asleep in that tent; even when the snow was falling, when the Compound paths were icy; she felt safe, and miles away from her grandparents’ house. But in a few weeks, Terry began avoiding her. Finally, one day when she went with Cohen to help scale fish in the encampment, Esther the Black confronted him.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she asked the boy. “I’m not pregnant you know,” she whispered as Cohen called for hot coffee and a pair of gloves to protect his fingers as he scaled half-frozen fish.

  Esther the Black watched her lover all day, and when she accidentally touched his shoulder, as she helped a group of young men carry boxes of fish to a pick-up truck, Terry pushed her hand down. “Get away from me,” he said, looking over his shoulder, as if afraid that one of his friends might see them touch. “Esther the Black, please go away.”

  Esther the Black ran. Her feet slipped on icy paths. She ran until her breath filled the air; and then she collapsed, in a dark flower bed beneath the first-floor window of her grandparents’ house. She wore an old raccoon coat which had once belonged to Rose; the shoulders were padded, like armor. She pulled her legs up, the flowers all grew beneath her, underground. Terry had followed, and he appeared suddenly beside her in the flower bed where there was only ice, and not even the movement of one leaf.

  “Sorry,” Terry said, and Esther the Black shrugged; she did not think she would climb out her window at night to meet with him again. “Do you love me?” he then asked her.

  The flowers grew underground, and Esther the Black wondered if she would ever love anyone. If she said yes, I do love you, would Terry be crazy enough to feel guilty, to run away with her? Would he, palms coated with the harbor salt and ice, rescue her and give her a life?

  Esther the Black lit a cigarette; the fisherman’s blue headband was dark navy colored in the night, and he looked around, over his shoulders, into the ice and the darkest trees, and Esther the Black then realized that Terry had never before been to this section of the Compound, to her section. She wondered what her grandmother would say if she wandered out onto the porch to breathe some winter air and saw a poacher in her flower bed; she wondered if her grandfather, Mischa, would raise his walking cane if he saw that the fisherman’s fingers were now touching her skin. “No,” Esther the Black said finally, “I don’t love you.”

  The fisherman smiled and tossed a stone into the snow. “I was worried about that,” he said as he moved his arms to surround her padded shoulders, and he smiled beautifully, as if Esther the Black had just released him. Each time Esther the Black saw her fisherman in the encampment after that time, after he had run off into the darkness, he smiled sadly. And Esther paid him back for following her into that most dangerous section of the Compound, her section, by never mentioning his name to any of the girls her age. After that, Esther the Black was sure the fishermen and their children were afraid of her; she was an outsider, and they would never trust her. She began to stay away; she went so infrequently to the fishermen’s campground that even Cohen had grown suspicious.

  “Esther the Black,” he said to her, “tell me, do you have a boyfriend in town?”

  Esther the Black rolled her eyes.

  “I never see you in the campground.”

  “I’m busy,” Esther lied.

  “Too busy for old friends like the fishermen?” Cohen had asked.

  “Yes,” Esther the Black had said, but she was thinking of her fisherman’s dark eyes, and the way his breath moved in the deep, frozen air, and the way he whispered to her in the night. “Too busy.”

  When she had stayed away for mo
nths, when Cohen tried to explain her absence with half-hearted excuses, the fishermen grew to believe that Esther the Black had deserted them for her own family, as they had always suspected she would; they began to avoid her on the streets of St. Fredrics, on the roads, and the beach. The girls she had grown up with got married—they had children, they worked on the fishing boats or as waitresses in town. Sometimes, Esther the Black would watch them from the sea wall; women who wore their hair long and wild, tied with the thinnest of blue headbands, working on the boats as their children waited, patiently, among the green stones, on the beach. She was not certain which of them her fisherman had married, but Esther the Black was certain that woman would wear her hair to her waist and never count her hours in the sun.

  But now Ira Rath was still breathing over the phone, and Esther the Black heard a footstep on the stair. “Friday,” Esther the Black said. “Don’t forget.”

  She hung up the phone and ran out the door of her grandparents’ house. She hitched a ride to town on Route 16, and that day, as she sold forty dollars’ worth of eye make-up, and sixteen dollars’ worth of blush-on rouge, Esther thought of Ira Rath. It was great luck that he wasn’t interested in marrying her, that he hadn’t pleaded with her to keep their engagement; and yet, she was disappointed. He had thought of her only as a step on the road to stardom. He had never really been her friend, Esther the Black decided; and, by the end of the day, she was no longer certain she wanted him as her ally.