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

by Alice Hoffman

  But Phillip only shrugged when Mischa unlocked his cottage and informed him of Esther’s disappearance.

  “She’s quite sensible,” Phillip said. “I would never consider her a missing person.”

  Then Phillip turned away from his father, and went off toward the harbor; he pulled a painted lawn chair close to the sea wall, so that his sneakers rested on the uneven blocks of sand stone, and he breathed in the sea air. He drowsed in the sun. Mosquitoes drifted about his hair in a slow circle. And as Phillip began to fall asleep, as the tide came in, covering the driftwood and the green stones, Esther the White decided that she wanted to do more than dream about her son: she would talk to him. Ignoring the pain in her side, she walked across the wide, green lawn, afraid that now she had lost her granddaughter the same way she had lost Phillip. Without ever having had her—with no shared memories and without a trace.

  When Esther the White reached Phillip’s chair, she tapped his shoulder.

  “Wake up,” she said to him, because his yellow eyes were vacant and wide, and Esther the White could tell he had been dreaming. Perhaps of the past.

  Phillip looked up and shaded his eyes. “How about a match?” he said, and he took a filtered cigarette from his shirt pocket.

  Esther the White held a lit match for her son. Across the lawn the sun moved lower in the sky; it was August, and Drowning Season was nearly over; the days grew shorter. Esther the White’s own eyes began to close; she had taken her new prescription for Demerol, and the drug followed her like shadows; she nearly forgot that she had come to the sea wall to tell Phillip that the beach he loved would soon be crowded with houses, and that the water which called to him would be as calm as a bathtub, each wave carrying a swimmer or a body surfer.

  “Are you here for a reason?” Phillip asked his mother, surprised that she would come and see him, even though it was his first afternoon out.

  Above them the gulls circled high, scavengers cloaked and hidden in white feathers. “Yes,” Esther the White said, wondering just how long the guilt for Phillip’s childhood would sit like a stone inside of her, in her stomach, in her throat, in the blood which moved through her. “Yes,” Esther said. “I’ve come to tell you that I’m dying.”

  Her own words surprised her, and Esther the White closed her mouth tightly. Phillip was looking at her, quite clearly, with his deep yellow eyes, and Esther could no longer remember if Solo had really had eyes like that or not. After all these years, she could not remember. “Well.” Phillip smiled. “Isn’t everybody?”

  Esther lit herself a cigarette. “I’m dying faster than others. I have cancer. No one knows.” She had expected to speak of Esther the Black’s disappearance, she had expected to tell Phillip about the sale of the eastern section. She had never intended to speak out her own fear. She wondered if she was searching for sympathy, an end to her guilt, a final release; but it was too late to wonder why, she had already spoken, and Phillip gazed at the sea wall and nodded solemnly. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Are you?” Esther the White asked. “Are you really?” What if, Esther the White now thought, I had pretended to love him? What if the nursemaid hadn’t held his head under water for so long? Would he have hated me anyway? The pain in her side was moving like cold fire, the Demerol made her vision blurry, as if, when she stared at Phillip, he was only an old photograph. Now that the girl was gone, it finally seemed time to ask the question Esther the White had always kept quiet. “Why did you call her Esther?”

  “It’s a perfectly lovely name,” Phillip said, putting out his cigarette and signaling that he wanted another one lit. Like an inmate or an arsonist, Phillip was not allowed to carry matches. Although anyone could have told Mischa that Phillip was not at all interested in fire; that was not his element.

  “A million other names are lovely,” Esther the White pressed him.

  “That’s true,” Phillip said. “Cathleen is quite nice. Also Sally. And Marion and Jane.”

  “You called her by my name,” Esther the White said. “Mine.”

  “I wanted to, that’s all,” Phillip whined.

  “Oh, stop it,” Esther the White said. She wanted to know, she needed to know, and she might not have another chance to ask. “Stop being such a child.”

  Phillip looked at her shrewdly. “Then stop treating me like one. You never liked children, dear. So, give it up. And you can start by giving me my own matches.”

  Esther the White stared at the harbor; in the glare of the sunlight the water was nearly invisible. She wished she could have loved him. And she shivered, even though the sun was strong. Her eyes were cloudy, her eyes were damp; she was very close to tears, too close.

  “Give it up, old girl,” Phillip said softly, the softest words he had ever said to her.

  Esther the White quickly wiped her eyes with her silk scarf; she handed Phillip a pack of matches.

  “‘Success without college,’” Phillip read from the cover. He laughed, lit his cigarette, and tucked the matchbook into his shirt pocket. “Maybe that was the core of my problem,” he said, in the hope of changing the conversation to a lighter tone. “I didn’t get this matchbook’s advice when I most needed it in life.”

  Esther the White stared at her son. “That still doesn’t tell me why you gave her my name,” she said.

  Phillip puffed on his cigarette; smoke rings hid his face, his wild, yellow eyes. “I named my child Esther,” he finally said, when the gulls were reaching into the water and crying out to each other above the shoreline, “because I knew you would hate that. You would hate her. And I wanted to steal from you, to turn you into a ghost.”

  Esther the White nodded; her silk scarf blew like a veil in the wind. Her eyes burned, but she still stared at her son, shielding her vision with her hand, watching as Phillip seemed to grow older by the second, right before her eyes.

  “And, anyway,” Phillip said now, “Esther the Black is also my ghost. It’s interesting how that happened, but it’s true. We have the same ghost.” He smiled.

  “The girl is missing,” Esther the White said. “You call her your ghost, but you don’t seem haunted. You don’t seem concerned. You just sit here by your wall, and stare out at your harbor. Not very concerned.” Esther the White shook her head.

  “I don’t consider her missing, just because she is not in the Compound. But I do consider her unwanted. Unloved. There are things worse than missing, you know,” Phillip said. “There are things which force a ghost to haunt you forever.”

  Esther the White did not hear Phillip’s words. She was remembering the day she stood outside her parents’ small house; it was years before the strand of beads had broken onto the floor, years before Esther noticed that her eyes were a clear, hard blue. It was soon after her tenth birthday, and an early spring had suddenly come. Some of the snow had already begun to melt; up above, in the mountains, the wolves howled at dawn, as if howling alone could bring back the snow that kept tracks secret and covered.

  That day, Esther the White had been sent to the river for water. The ice closest to the shore had melted, and Esther carried a large bucket hooked over her shoulders with a thick, brown rope. She wore a woolly dress which scratched her knees, and blue ribbons tied around her braids. But the day was too warm for carrying buckets, so Esther the White walked past the riverbank; she trudged through the dark muddy earth, up toward the hills which led to the mountains. She was not yet afraid of wolves, or of being alone; and because winter had suddenly, magically disappeared, Esther the White walked farther away from the village than she ever had before.

  When she reached the first hilltop, Esther the White thought she heard voices, but there was no one around. Perhaps it was only an echo from the mountain above, the one they called the Wild Dog, because the crevices looked like fangs, and the snow on the peak looked like the foam around the mouth of a mad dog. Still, Esther the White heard voices, and when she walked a little farther she saw a sixteen-year-old girl from the village. Esthe
r breathed easier; there were no Cossacks or robbers or gypsies, only Rifka, who wore a long fur cape, even though the day was warm and the birds had already begun to return from the south. Rifka turned around before Esther the White had time to smile or call out.

  “What are you doing here?” Rifka said. Her deep red hair hung to her waist; her face was white and drawn. Esther knew that she had spent the winter inside her parents’ house complaining of aches and refusing to meet with her cousin, Lazar, who came every evening to see her. “What are you doing here?” Rifka said again. Her voice was as soft as a snake’s, and she waved a heavy cotton scarf in the air. “There are wolves here,” she said.

  “There are not,” Esther the White argued. “The only wolves are up there.” She pointed to the Wild Dog. It was when Esther lifed her arm to point to the mountaintop that she noticed the blood on Rifka’s scarf. But she didn’t say anything, not one word. She looked down at the mud puddles around her boots.

  “Yes,” Rifka insisted. “There are too wolves here. They come at night, like ghosts, when everyone is in bed.”

  Esther the White felt her skin crawl. There was a bundle on the earth, resting near the hem of Rifka’s cape.

  “You’d better go right away,” Rifka suggested.

  “What’s that?” Esther the White said, pointing to the bundle.

  “What?” Rifka said.

  “That.” Esther pointed to what looked like a heap of rags; but something was moving on the damp, still-cold earth.

  Rifka moved away. Esther the White could see a tiny child; an infant’s arms and legs waved, an infant’s voice cried when Rifka moved away. But the cry was weak and no one else could have heard it, except maybe the wolves.

  “Whose is that?” Esther the White asked.

  Rifka was standing near her now; her hair was so long that, when she turned to look back, the tips of her hair touched Esther’s face and streaked across her skin like feathery blood.

  “Nobody’s,” Rifka said, though they could both hear the baby cry. “It’s nobody’s, and don’t you dare tell anybody what you saw, Esther the White,” Rifka said. “Do you understand?”

  Esther the White could not stop staring.

  “Do you understand?” Rifka pulled a braid of Esther the White’s hair, and then she went back and tucked the bundle beneath a low bush. Rifka smoothed her hair, and she pinched her pale cheeks to bring the color back. She took Esther the White’s hand and led her away.

  “Do you think anyone will find it?” Esther the White asked.

  Rifka pinched her skin harder. They walked down to the river together; Rifka waited as Esther the White filled up her bucket. When they entered the village, each one would return to her own mother. Rifka’s mother would shake her head when Rifka told her she was sick again; and when the girl went up to the sleeping loft where she would face the wall with empty eyes and pale cheeks, her mother would shake her head again, and wonder if such a sickly girl would ever find a husband. Esther the White’s mother would scold her for taking so long with the water; she might even smack Esther’s face with the back of her hand. The two girls thought about their mothers as they walked down the dirt road which wound through the village; their feet slipped in the mud, and the water that Esther carried sloshed over the bucket and onto her shoulders.

  “Rifka,” Esther the White said, and she thought about the blood she had seen on Rifka’s scarf, “did it hurt? Was it terrible?”

  Rifka held a finger to her lips. They had neared Esther’s house; her mother stood on the porch, waiting and tapping her foot. “Yes,” Rifka whispered. “Terrible.”

  Esther the White watched after Rifka; but Rifka walked straight ahead. She didn’t look back toward the hills, not once. And that night, sleeping in a bed between her brothers, Esther the White heard the wolves howling up above. The moon was very bright, and Esther could think of nothing but the baby sleeping under a small leafless bush. For several nights afterward, Esther dreamed of babies, of children lost in the woods. She wondered if Rifka also had these dreams. When Esther’s family visited one night in Rifka’s parents’ house, Rifka’s eyes were bright, and she did not even look in Esther’s direction; her cheeks were pink as rose petals.

  Esther the White tried hard to believe that someone would find the infant—a childless woman from the village, a gypsy, or a nobleman. But the wolves still howled at night, and the weather changed again, so that the false spring disappeared, and the puddles of earth and water turned to ice once more. It was then that Esther the White decided that she herself would go back to the hill and find the child. Her own mother could raise it; the child would be a brother or a sister to Esther; perhaps, when she herself married, she would take the child with her to her own house. Or, perhaps Rifka would decide she had made a terrible mistake, and thank Esther with kisses and tears when the baby was returned.

  And so, one morning, Esther the White returned to the hillside where she had first seen Rifka. It was not winter or spring, but some gray time in between. The hillside was quiet, and the peak of the Wild Dog was covered in clouds, so that it looked as if there were no mountain towering darkly over the village and the river and hills. Esther could not find the child. She looked for quite a long time, wondering if an infant wrapped in rags might have rolled downhill, or if it had somehow managed to crawl away. But there was no sign that the child had ever been there; even the rags were gone. There were no footprints in the ice which had formed on the hillside—not the mark of a woman, nor the pawprint of a wolf. And Esther the White sat down on the cold, hard earth and wondered if somewhere the child was crying; and she shivered as if it were she who had been left alone in the woods, unprotected and waiting for any approaching step.

  By the time she herself was pregnant, Esther the White had long forgotten that lost child of Rifka’s. But now this talk of ghosts had suddenly made her remember, and she felt the loss more strongly than ever. She looked at her son as if he had been the child bundled in rags and left on the ice. On this August afternoon, all Esther the White saw was a stranger, a man who looked old, whose beard was gray, not at all her child, the thin, pale boy with the water-soaked hair.

  “I should have loved you,” Esther the White said.

  “It’s too late for that now,” Phillip said. “Why don’t you try loving your granddaughter? I want her to have something; I want my daughter to be different, to be loved. You know, Mother,” he lowered his voice, “I really am your child. I can’t love.”

  Esther the White looked down, at the earth; he was right, he was her son, whether Mischa was his father or not, he was hers, and she had never been able to see it before. She felt that she owed him something, if only because he was hers. “I came here to tell you that your father and Max have decided to sell the eastern section of the Compound. Max is trying to convince your father to sell everything. I am trying to convince him not to.”

  Phillip stared at her quietly; he looked sane—an old, sane stranger. “Have they done that?” he said. “Really?”

  “I had no way to stop them.”

  “Of course not,” Phillip said. “Well, that’s the end of my harbor. Not even a place to haunt.”

  “You’re not surprised?” Esther asked; she had been truly frightened of his reaction, she had imagined that he would jump from his chair to climb the sea wall one last time.

  “I’ve given that up, too,” Phillip said. “Surprise, hate, all of it.”

  His hands were so frail that Esther wondered how they helped him climb the sea wall; she wondered if they were strong enough to make another attempt that season.

  “I want to do something,” Esther the White said. “I want to be something to her. But it’s too late for that.”

  “Never,” Phillip said. “No such thing as too late.”

  “I can’t do anything.” Esther the White dropped her closed hands on her lap. “I’m dying,” she said.

  “Yes, you’re dying,” Phillip said. “But you’re not dead.”
r />   Esther the White closed her eyes. “I’ll try,” she said.

  “Do,” Phillip said, leaning back in his lawn chair with a satisfied smile. “I’m feeling much more relaxed now.” And it was true, his eyes were heavy with Valium and sun. “Do something, and then we might all be able to give up our ghosts,” he said now, but he didn’t look at Esther the White, and she was uncertain that he had even spoken the words. “Look,” he said, as his analyst, Dr. Otto, drove through the Compound gate in his MG. “The man’s pathetic,” Phillip confided to Esther. “But I enjoy confusing him. Just when he thinks he has me pegged—when he figures my case is closed, I invent new symptoms. The sessions amuse me.”

  Phillip nodded as the psychiatrist walked across the green toward them.

  Dr. Otto reached down and shook Esther the White’s hand.

  “Doctor,” Phillip said, “have you met the woman who pretends to be my mother?”

  The psychiatrist shook Esther’s hand with the grip of a coconspirator, but Esther the White was not on his side; she never had been. “I’ll go now,” she told Phillip.

  “Must you?” Dr. Otto said, as he removed his driving gloves. “I thought that as long as you’re right here, we might try some confrontation therapy. That might just lead us to the core of your son’s problems.”

  “Alleged son,” Phillip said.

  “Actually,” Esther the White said, as she rose from the lawn as gracefully as she could, though the pain in her stomach was shifting like a wave and she really did not want to leave Phillip’s side, “the core of my own problem is the need for a nap.”

  As Esther the White walked across the lawn, she heard Phillip’s laughter and the light, sweet sound settled inside her as it echoed above the Compound. Alleged son, alleged bastard, alleged lunatic; Phillip’s laughter was growing inside of her, fluttering like a bird.