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

by Alice Hoffman

  Inge’s eyes were wide. “What is so unusual?” she said, her hands dripping water onto the tile floor. “This is the way to discipline children. And he is a child, no?”

  “God in heaven,” Mischa moaned, “is this payment for my sins?” He knew that some punishment for his adultery would fall, and now it had. He waved a finger at Inge. “Lunatic,” he screamed. But while Mischa was raging, Phillip held close to Inge’s skirt. His head dripped with water, pools formed in his eyes. And, silently, he prayed that they would not take him away from the woman who loved him, the one who held him close.

  “We have to fire Inge,” Mischa told Esther.

  Esther tossed her long hair. “No, we need her.”

  Mischa did not want to discuss the incident at the sink; why shouldn’t Esther be protected? He shook his head. “What do we need her for?”

  Esther was panicky; she knew nothing about children. She especially wanted nothing to do with Phillip, who might betray her at any moment by sprouting a tattoo across his thin shoulders. “I don’t even know how to change a diaper,” she said.

  “Esther,” Mischa sighed, “he’s six years old. He doesn’t wear diapers.”

  “How can I live without Inge?” Esther insisted, though she hadn’t spoken more than ten sentences to Inge in the past year. Who would take care of Phillip? To whose bed would Mischa creep at midnight? “Oh, no. I can’t live without her,” Esther cried.

  “But she’s a crazy woman,” Mischa said. “She punishes our son by torturing him. She dips his head in water until he’s blue. She is fired,” he said. “She must go, today.”

  Esther the White held a hand to her forehead. A flicker of grief passed through her, as if Phillip had drowned in that sink Mischa spoke of. She wondered what her reaction might have been if Phillip had died as the nursemaid held his head under water, in the quiet bathroom. What had happened, Esther quickly decided, was as much her own fault as if she had held Phillip’s head down herself. She must never have anything to do with children.

  “All right,” Esther said. She stared into her husband’s eyes, to the yellow lines which spun out from the center of his irises. “All right. Fire her. We should never have hired her in the first place, with no references. But don’t expect anything of me. He is your responsibility.”

  Mischa did not expect anything of Esther the White for more than ten years. Still, several times a year Esther would feel the weight of some enormous sadness, but then the sadness would pass, and it was as easily forgotten as the jade pendant that was hidden in the lining of an old fox coat. Mischa did not expect anything at all from Esther the White until Phillip started walking into the water. After the first occurrence in the Serpentine, Esther the White decided Phillip was suicidal; she told Mischa to let the boy be—suicidal adolescence would pass, and Mischa could not convince her the situation was serious. But by the third summer, when Phillip was nearly twenty and he had already tried to drown himself three times, the last time wearing Mischa’s own hound’s-tooth sport jacket, Mischa expected something of Esther.

  “You have to do something,” Mischa said. He was particularly infuriated that his sport jacket had been ruined in the Thames.

  “There’s nothing to do. It’s obvious that he wants to kill himself.”

  “Is that a mother? Is that the voice of a mother?” Mischa said.

  Esther the White shrugged. Personally, she had never thought of herself as a mother. “You asked, I told,” she said.

  Recently, Esther the White had acquired a new boyfriend, but this one was a lover as well. He, too, was a foreigner—from Brooklyn, New York. His name was Shapiro, and he inspired in Esther both passion for sex and a fresh desire for New York. Shapiro had left a bad marriage; he now drove a taxi in London, and the two would often drive together for hours, Shapiro murmuring the praises of Brooklyn, and the American way, American women who walked down Fifth Avenue like they owned the world. He was ten years younger than Esther, but with him, Shapiro promised, it would be impossible to conceive. Hence, his bad marriage to a wife who wanted at least three children, and Esther the White’s passion. Often, she would go with him, up to his room near Paddington. There they made love; the taxi driver would whisper in his thick foreign New York accent, and Esther would stare at objects around the room—a hairbrush, a vest, a blue airmail letter, and she would imagine that each had traveled the distance from New York.

  She was not particularly interested in Phillip at this point: she had a lover, she had the desire to leave a country she was bound to by her family; plus she had never wanted him born. Phillip was not in the room, so Esther the White was perfectly frank.

  “Sorry,” she shrugged. “I know nothing about children.”

  At that time, Phillip was seated on a maroon velvet couch in the study. He shook his head. He dripped water. He eavesdropped and agreed with his mother—his parents should leave him alone. However, Phillip had not wanted to kill himself, and he truly felt sorry about ruining the hound’s-tooth jacket. He wanted only to be left alone. Alone, so that he could merge with the water. He believed any water was beautiful, whether for its dark waves or for its slow-moving currents. He wanted to be a part of that beauty, traveling at a natural speed through the waves, without effort.

  “I’m not saying Phillip’s right,” Esther continued. “Maybe he’s crazy. But if he wants to do something crazy, who does it hurt? Maybe himself, but that’s his right.”

  Phillip, the eavesdropper, nodded solemnly and agreed.

  “Me,” Mischa declared. “His father. It hurts me. It hurts the floor, it hurts my jacket, it hurts my reputation, it’s an insult to me as his father.”

  Esther the White reconsidered. She thought of her lover, Shapiro, and the wonderful Brooklyn that was now living inside of her soul. She pursed her mouth and breathed heavily. “Take him to America,” she said.

  “For what?” Mischa asked. His business was booming with semidetached houses, why go to America?

  “You’ll see,” Esther the White smiled. “The move will cure him. Take him to America.”

  “What?” Mischa said. “I thought you were over that. He doesn’t need America, he needs a wife.”

  “A wife?” Esther said. “What would he do with a wife?”

  “Phillip, in here,” Mischa called. “Get in here.”

  Phillip was standing in the doorway before Mischa called his name.

  “Yes?” Phillip said.

  “Yes?” Mischa mimicked. Esther the White quickly slipped on the dark glasses she had taken to wearing whenever she drove through the city in Shapiro’s taxi. “Not yes,” Mischa said. “No. I’ve had enough of this walking into water. Enough.”

  Phillip stubbed out his cigarette in a small egg-shaped ashtray; he hung his head like a hound.

  “Let me ask you this.” Mischa sat heavily in a cushioned chair and bit off the tip of a cigar. “How long have you had this … urge?”

  “Father, I’m really interested in water from a philosophical point of view. I just get carried away.”

  “I ask why you’re embarrassing me, why you’re killing yourself, and you tell me about philosophy?”

  “It’s not that I want to hurt myself. It’s just that the water seems so purifying, so much cleaner.”

  “Cleaner?” Mischa bellowed. “Cleaner than what?” He turned to Esther the White and whispered: “We have a lunatic for a son, we have a lunatic.”

  “We’ll take him to America,” Esther the White whispered in answer to her husband.

  “What did I do? Did I do something wrong?” Mischa said.

  “Not at all,” Phillip said, not daring to say that he had been imagining diving deep into the water for years. In primary school he had practiced holding his breath under water, so that he could stare up to watch the way the light filtered through the top of the water during swim practice. And when he finished school, at seventeen, Phillip had begun to dream of rivers and seas. In a notebook he drew the plants and the fish that swa
m through his dreams. Once there was a gray porpoise, which he followed for some time. Another night, he found a flower which seemed to be a sea rose, tiny and white. But he had also attended parties, he took girls out on dates to the cinema, he had many friends and began to work for his father. He had seemed, to Mischa and Esther the White, absolutely unmarked. Yet he was happiest dreaming, or drawing his visions into his leather-bound notebook.

  “Why, you haven’t done anything at all to me,” Phillip told his parents. “I walk close to the water, and then suddenly, before I know it, I’m in some river or pool.”

  “We’re getting you married, then we’ll see how far you walk,” Mischa told his son.

  “But I don’t know anyone I’d want to marry,” Phillip said.

  Mischa laughed. “Want. Did you hear him, Esther? Want.”

  “I heard him,” Esther said. “I still say, leave him alone, forget the wife, and let’s go to New York.”

  But Mischa was convinced he was right. He was convinced that Phillip only needed “settling” like a foundation. Yet when Phillip was persuaded to date the daughter of an acquaintance of Mischa’s, an Anglican girl who studied art, he drove to the Thames and jumped in. The art student telephoned from the hospital, where Phillip had been taken, and where the water was now being pumped from his lungs. “We were having such a good time,” the girl told Esther the White, “until he saw the water.”

  On the other end of the wire, Esther the White smiled. She held a linen handkerchief over the receiver and turned to Mischa; and he stared back into the pale eyes he had always feared as a child, eyes he sometimes forgot belonged to his wife.

  “We’ll take him to America,” she whispered, not because she thought Phillip could be cured in New York, but because she ached for America, she longed for it, and had planned, when she had first stepped outside the ice of her childhood village, to get there, no matter what it took.

  Mischa nodded in agreement and defeat, and he stared at her in silence as Esther the White hung up the phone. Esther the White smiled lightly, that afternoon, when Phillip rested in a hospital bed, but her heart was pounding, her fingers twitched. “We’re almost there,” she whispered, to no one in particular. “Almost.”

  But now, safe in America, resting between cool sheets, in an ebony bed, Esther the White still felt she hadn’t arrived, she was still only almost there. It was an American sky outside her window, but she could not sleep; it was New York air out there, still she dreamed of Phillip. And she seemed suddenly to have lost all of her courage; she was afraid.

  She, who as a girl could have faced anything, even the wild ice that surrounded the village where she was born, was now terrified of a quiet death between soft feathered pillows. What she had set out to do long ago had been accomplished—she had left the past behind and come to New York; but there was no white-maned lion inside her now; there was only air, cold quivering air. And because the night simply would not go away, Esther the White sat at her window and wondered how, at this late date, she could change her life; how she might, finally, ride the night to sleep.

  Chapter Two

  THEY had locked Phillip in the smallest of the cottages. And although Esther the White dreamed each night that her son was drowning, the padlock on the pink wooden door was unnecessary; Phillip was exhausted. An oar from the rescue boat had placed a gash in his scalp; and had the family unlocked his door, the sunlight might have done Phillip some good, for his lungs were tired and blue.

  Lisa brought him plum jam, tea, and kasha with noodles. Max spent an entire afternoon playing poker with his nephew, until he noticed that Phillip was busy stuffing cards up his sleeve. Mischa did not believe in pampering the ill; and both Esther the White and Esther the Black avoided the cottage—they could not bear to see Phillip this way. On the seventh day of his recovery, Rose walked down the overgrown path to Phillip’s door.

  “Whatever did I do to deserve such a hot day as this one,” Rose groaned as she locked the door behind her and slipped the key into her pocket. She walked through the darkened room and began opening curtains. Phillip sat on a wooden rocker, turning pages of a National Geographic which a local physician had brought to the cottage several summers before when Phillip’s drowning had led to complications: a severe ear infection and partial deafness. Phillip smoked a cigarette and leafed through a picture essay on Montreal.

  “I said,” Rose repeated, hands on her hips, “whatever did I do to deserve it?”

  “Meaning the burden I am?” Phillip smiled.

  “Of course not,” Rose said. “Darling,” she called him, and then she waved a hand through the unmoving air. “The heat,” she said. “Never you.”

  “Article on new frontiers in the West, in this issue,” Phillip said of the National Geographic.

  “Really?” Rose moved closer.

  Phillip nodded. “Arizona.”

  Rose refused the magazine. “I’m only interested in Nevada. You should know that by now.”

  They were silent, until Phillip said, “I’m feeling quite well today.”

  “Wonderful,” Rose said, but she was distracted. She kicked off her thin-strapped purple sandals. “Fine, but I’m worried about Esther.”

  “Our Esther?” Phillip fanned himself with his magazine. “Don’t you think it’s a bit warmer in here now that you’ve opened the curtains and let the sun in?”

  “Truth is,” Rose frowned, “I think something’s wrong with her.”

  “Our Esther?” Phillip said, as he offered Rose a mint.

  “Truth is,” Rose lowered her voice, “I think she’s planning to screw us all. That’s what I think.”

  Phillip slowly chewed a green mint; he thought about his daughter and then reached for another mint.

  “Phillip, did you hear me?”

  “Dear, what would you like me to do? I’m an invalid.” He handled the folds of his blue bathrobe and smiled.

  Rose sighed. “Do you have anything to drink in here?”

  She herself had stocked the cottage with bottles of tequila and gin.

  “Cabinet,” Phillip said.

  “And naturally no ice,” Rose said. “I’ll have to settle for straight gin.” She poured some into a glass and sat down across from Phillip, in a large loveseat. She crossed her bare feet and sipped her drink. “I don’t know what will happen next. A heat wave. Trouble with Esther the Black. A hurricane.”

  Phillip shrugged and continued to eat mints. Both of them knew that nothing ever happened at the Compound, except for Phillip’s own drownings. They sat together like two old friends, in silence. Rose settled back into her flowered cushion.

  “Any chance of your finding a way to get to Nevada?” Phillip asked.

  “Not one chance.” Rose smiled.

  “Tell me,” Phillip asked. “What is it about that place that attracts you so?” A state without water, a state with no escape.

  “The climate is so nice and hot in Nevada,” Rose answered.

  “But, dear,” Phillip said, “you hate the heat.”

  “Yes, but it’s clean there. A clean sort of heat.”

  “When will you ever scrape the money together?” Phillip sighed.

  Rose shrugged. “Perhaps when you die—there’s your insurance, and your parents will just have to help support me.”

  “Awfully sorry,” Phillip apologized.

  “But Esther the Black,” Rose said. “She could ruin everything. She could make your mother so angry that you’ll be sent upstate to a psycho ward, and I’ll be on the streets. After all these years.”

  “Rose,” Phillip warned.

  “Well, it’s true,” Rose said. “She’s a troublemaker. I’ve seen her leaving the house early in the morning. God knows what she’s up to. She probably has a lover in town. Or maybe one of the fishermen.” Rose snorted. “Something has to be done.”

  “I’m telling you right now, Rose,” Phillip said, and Rose stared up at him as if it were a rational man who spoke. “Leave the girl alon
e. You have to forget about running her life. How you could have arranged a marriage for her in the first place, so many years ago, is beyond me. People just don’t do that anymore. Not even for an inheritance.”

  “Oh, what do you know about what people do?” Rose pouted.

  “I read a lot,” Phillip snapped, but both of them knew all he ever read were back issues of National Geographic. Phillip lashed out at Rose because he was tired; he was always tired after a drowning. Still, he cared for Rose and was sorry to disappoint her. She was the girl’s mother, and she wanted for Esther the Black what her own mother in Bridgeport had wanted for her. A husband, a lovely quiet life. And money. Enough money for all of them. Phillip lit a cigarette and then asked brightly, “What’s it like out? Low tide?”

  Rose poured herself another glass of gin. Really she thought, Phillip was gracious, understanding. He would have gladly sent her off to Las Vegas. If the credit cards had been in Phillip’s name, rather than in his father’s, Rose might have been, at that very moment, drinking a cold gin and tonic beside the pool at the Dunes Hotel. He knew nothing about children, of course; he knew nothing of the fear Rose knew each time he attempted suicide and Rose had to face the possibility of expulsion from the Compound.

  “Yes,” Rose answered. “It’s low tide.” She did not really know if it was or not, she hadn’t bothered to glance at the beach as she walked down the path to Phillip’s cottage, but she did not want to take the image of low tide away from her husband; those slick stones, as they appeared when the salt water first rolled away and left green algae and seaweed stranded on the beach, made Phillip smile. Rose finished her drink, she avoided the topic of Esther the Black; after all, Phillip was a sick man. So, she spoke of the boredom of spending an afternoon in St. Fredrics, she told Phillip what was served for dinner all week, she described a troupe of sixteen bluejays that had taken up residence in the mimosa trees outside Esther the White’s bedroom window. Phillip listened, and he rocked back and forth in his chair; and then he walked to the window and lifted the heavy curtain in his hand. He was so tired that he might no longer have the strength to scale the sea wall; he wondered if Cohen would still manage to follow him.