The Family Fortune (10 page)

“It's him,” Lindsay said. She jumped from her seat.

“Calm down,” Charlie said.

“Really, girls. He's just a man,” Charles Sr. said without looking up from the television.

“Well, it's not like we have celebrities showing up on our doorstep every day of the week,” Marion said. She adjusted her bulk so that she was sitting straight on the edge of her chair. The girls looked like racehorses ready to burst through the starting gate. Charlie put out a restraining hand and went to the front hall.

There was the noise of greeting. A coat must be removed. A bottle of expensive wine must be handed over.

And then, there he was.

He was introduced to everyone.

I was last.

“Yes, Jane and I have met,” he said. He extended his hand. “Hello, Jane.” We might as well have been acquaintances who had bumped into each other once at a literary function.

His voice brought me right back to when I'd first known him. It had
always affected me like a shot of adrenaline. He didn't look exactly the same; he was thinner. He was more fit than he'd been, but I had liked him the way he was before, a little bulky, not fat, but solid.

“It's good to see you again, Max,” I said with all the courage of a stout rum. Good to see him? It was great. It was as if his presence brought back every happy memory I'd ever had. But he was cavalier and distant. He acted as if I were almost a stranger.

Had I expected more? How could I have expected more?

“Well,” Marion said, “now that Max is here, I guess it's time for dessert.”

“You didn't wait on me?” he asked. This was an expression a New Yorker would use. Some of the Boston in him, even some of his accent, was gone.

“We were so full. We were waiting for dessert anyway,” Lindsay said.

We took our seats in the dining room, all of us, except for the boys, who had gone upstairs to play. Max was guided to a chair at the foot of the table. Heather and Lindsay sat on either side of him. Winnie and I were relegated to chairs nearer Charles Sr., who sat at the table's head. Winnie looked sour. I could tell she was annoyed to be exiled so far away from our special guest, but I was relieved.

“So why have you come back to Boston?” Heather asked.

“I'm here for Thanksgiving.” Max stated the obvious, which allowed him to give an answer without really giving one.

She colored. “But Charlie says you're looking for a house.”

“I am.”

“What they want to know, Max, and let's just get it right out on the table with those pies, is do you have a girlfriend?” Marion asked.

“Mother!” both girls choked.

Max smiled. He had a few lines around his eyes. His hair was still thick and still that sandy color that looked greenish in certain lights and brought out the green in his eyes.

“Lindsay wants to be a writer,” Heather said.

“Heather. He doesn't want to hear about that,” Lindsay said.

“I do,” he said. He had developed a way of giving whomever he was talking to all of his attention. I'd heard that this ability was usually found in movie stars and politicians.

Heather cut Max a piece of pie. Between Heather and Lindsay he was supplied with pie for a solid hour and he ate every piece that was put in front of him.

“Well, I'm not a very good writer, not yet,” Lindsay said.

“I'm sure that's not true,” Max said. “Would you like me to read something?” He was more generous than I was. Of course, he had different motivation. Lindsay was particularly pretty when she cocked her head and smiled at him the way she smiled then.

“I couldn't think of asking that. I couldn't take your time,” she said.

“I don't mind.” He ate a forkful of pumpkin pie. “I'll be staying with my sister through New Year's. I'm taking a long vacation and I'd be happy to read something.”

Lindsay put her hand to her chest. “Oh my God, you are the coolest.”

She swung her long red hair. I wondered if he would have been so quick to read something by a chunky girl with bad teeth.

He finished his pumpkin pie and Lindsay supplied him with a piece of apple.

“Charlie, when are you free to go looking at houses?” Max asked.

“Any time, Max. I'm at your disposal.” That was Charlie's business voice. I'd heard him use it many times. “We could go tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow, then. What will you girls be doing tomorrow?” Max asked.

Winnie, from the end of the table, said, “Jane and I are going shopping.”

“You are?” Charlie said. “What for?”

“Christmas, silly. Never too soon to get started.”

Max had been addressing Lindsay and Heather, but Winnie wanted to get into the conversation, so she took the only opening she could get.

“We might drive up north to go skiing for the day,” Lindsay said.

“You never told me that,” Marion said. “I thought you'd be here.”

“I just thought of it.”

“I think you should stay home,” Marion said. “I don't get to see you girls nearly enough.” They came home at least twice a month, sometimes more.

“And you're not such a great skier,” Heather said. Lindsay shot her a look.

“Why not spend the day writing?” Heather asked. “You have the whole day.”

“Yes, that would be fun.” Lindsay's enthusiasm was forced, and when she thought no one was watching she gave her sister a dirty look.

“Tomorrow night Lindsay and I are meeting some of our college friends at a club in Boston. Why don't you meet us there,” Heather said to Max.

“Why would he want to do that?” Charlie asked.

“It sounds fun,” Max said. “What time are you going?”

“We'll be there at ten,” Heather said.

“That's a little late for an old guy like me.” Max winked.

“Come on. We've read all about you. You go to all the best clubs in New York,” Lindsay said. That was an understatement. He had a reputation for being the biggest womanizer in Manhattan. The Literary Lothario.

“So I'm found out. I guess I'll have to come.”

“Don't forget,” Lindsay said. She put her hand over his and looked into his eyes.

The whole display was nauseating under any circumstance and I might have left the room to vomit, but I was on my seventh rum and cider and I wasn't sure I'd be able to stand up.

I had never wanted to believe Max's reputation. Magazines and newspapers aren't always right. It could have just been a publicist's way of getting him extra attention.

Watching him now, with his eyes boring a hole right through Lindsay's head, I wasn't so sure. He had definitely changed, but there was no way of telling how much.

Fortunately, dessert went on until late, and by the time the pies had been decimated, I could walk without falling over. Max had barely looked at me all evening. The few times our eyes met, we both looked away. Max was the first to leave, so at least he didn't see me hobbling drunkenly over the flagstones on my way back to the house.

The children had already fallen asleep, so they stayed behind with their grandparents.

Winnie let me lean on her as we walked across the field. She gave me an odd look.

“Jane, I think you're drunk.”

“Yes.”

“You hardly ever get drunk. I can't remember the last time you were.” She paused. “That Max Wellman is quite the ladies' man,” she added.

“That's what they say.” My ankle twisted, but I didn't fall. It was dark. We should have brought a flashlight.

“I thought you said you knew him,” she said.

“I did.”

“He said he would barely have recognized you.”

We were going up the walk when I tumbled into the shrubbery. I started to laugh and couldn't stop. Winnie and Charlie reached down to help me up, but each time they pulled me up, I fell back.

“Jane, I think you're hysterical,” Charlie said, but he was laughing, too.

“You're battering our bushes,” Winnie said.

I let them pull me from the hedge and help me upstairs. I remembered dragging the drunken Bentley up the stairs that first night with Max. I had no sympathy for Bentley then. I couldn't understand an Evan Bentley who felt, at thirty-five, as if his best days were behind him, but then I hadn't even tried.

Winnie came down in her pink quilted bathrobe. She hadn't brushed her hair and she had a rag-doll look to her.

“Oh, good, Jane. You found the hot cross buns. I love the way they smell. She poured herself a mug of coffee, opened the refrigerator, and added a generous quantity of cream to her cup.

“Max Wellman seems to like our girls,” Winnie said. My head was pounding and my eyelids felt scratchy.

“What's not to like?” I kept my voice even. I didn't really want Max Wellman to like “our girls.” Winnie looked up at me.

“God, Jane, you look just awful.”

“Thanks.”

“I don't think I've seen you get that drunk for years. Maybe I never have.”

“I don't know what happened,” I lied.

“Charlie's sisters are nice girls, but they are no geniuses,” Winnie said.

This was true. They were silly and young, but Winnie was hardly a genius herself, and it didn't keep her from getting married to a perfectly nice man, maybe not an exceptional man, but a perfectly nice one.

When Charlie came downstairs, he was already dressed for work in a version of what he'd been wearing last night—khakis and a sweater.

“What time are we leaving tonight?” Winnie asked. She stayed seated on the bench at the kitchen island, so I got up to get Charlie a cup of coffee. The important thing about being a single woman in another person's house is to anticipate the needs of others so your presence is constantly equated with positive feelings.

“What?” he asked. He was already looking at his PDA and poking at it with a stylus.

“For the disco. What time are we going?”

“We aren't going,” he said, still poking at the PDA. “The papers come?”

I had already retrieved them from the front walk. Charlie took them from the chair where I had left them, pulled up a stool, and started to leaf through each one with great efficiency.

“Of course we're going. Do you want to get old before our time? It's not fair that we never get to have any fun.”

“We do have fun,” Charlie said, barely looking up. “Anyway, who would watch the boys?”

“Your mother will, I'm sure.”

“Don't be so sure,” he said.

I took the buns out of the oven, lined one of the array of baskets I found on top of the refrigerator with a linen napkin, and filled it up.

“Well, I got Ariel to watch them today so Jane and I could go shopping, but I don't think Ariel can stay into the wee hours, and if we don't
get to the club until ten, then we won't be home until late and the boys should really stay over at your mother's.”

“So Ariel will take the boys all day and my mother will take them all night. Is that what you're saying?”

“Exactly.” Maybe this was Winnie's modus operandi. If she pretended she didn't understand what Charlie was saying, she could get her own way without making a fuss. “Winnie, they're at my mother's now,” Charlie said. “You and Jane can go out tonight. I'll watch the boys.”

“I have a better idea,” I said. “I'll take care of the boys and you two go.”

“Marion won't mind,” Winnie said.

“I'd rather watch the boys. You know I hate clubs,” I said.

“Right, you are more the lecture type than the disco type,” Winnie said. I didn't know if I liked that description of myself. It seemed so spinsterly. It
was
so spinsterly. “Then it's settled. Jane will take care of the boys,” she said.

Charlie looked at me.

“I don't think it's right,” he said.

“Jane doesn't mind,” Winnie said.

Mind? Hardly. If I couldn't extricate myself from their disco plan, I'd have to fake an illness which might not be too difficult considering the state of my hangover.

Charlie finished his coffee while whipping through two newspapers, then left for the office. I was very conscious of what he would be doing that day—driving Max all over suburban Boston to look for the perfect farmhouse in which he could settle with some nubile young thing.

Ariel arrived at ten and by ten-thirty Winnie and I were off to the mall in Winnie's Volvo. The parking situation was so bad it took us nearly twenty minutes to find a spot. I was feeling frayed even before we stepped out of the car, but Winnie, usually so lethargic, became a different person. The crowds didn't bother her. Once inside, she opened her purse and looked at a list. She was on a mission.

Malls make me dizzy. It could be the lighting. I think it is designed to
make people crazy so that they lose control of their mental faculties and buy things they neither need nor want. There was a man on the first floor playing Christmas carols on a grand piano. I followed Winnie from store to store. It wasn't long before Winnie could see that I had lost whatever small amount of enthusiasm I had to begin with. The clue was when I sat on something I thought was a bench and it turned out to be a sculpture.

Winnie came out of a store called Scissors and Knives wielding a bag.

“You are sitting on a head,” she said.

“A what?”

“A head. I'm afraid you've mistaken this decorative piece of art for a bench. You are sitting on a head, a child's head, as a matter of fact.”

I stood up and looked around to see if anyone else had seen me park myself on a bronze head. I thought I was pretty good at recognizing art, but perhaps mall art wasn't my specialty. As a piece of art, the bronze wasn't much, but it wasn't much of a bench either. I might just as well have sat in a flowerpot. There were people looking.

“You were never much of a shopper,” Winnie said. “You never understood the health benefits.”

“Health benefits?” My head was pounding from the fluorescent lights and my feet hurt from the tiled floor.

“Certainly. You walk, for one thing, briskly in a pleasant environment. You get to express yourself with each and every purchase. Everything I buy is an expression of me. It's one of the most creative acts there is. Come on,” she said. I thought maybe she was going to take me into a special room where they indoctrinated you into the cult of shopping. Instead, she took me to the hair salon on the top floor of Filene's.

“I'm going to leave you here,” she said. I didn't care where she left me so long as she left me somewhere. Winnie approached the counter. “I'd like to speak to Mr. Marco,” she said.

“He's with a customer,” the girl said. Her hairstyle made her look like she'd recently been electrocuted. Perhaps a case of the cobbler's children having no shoes.

“Tell him it's Winnie Maple,” Winnie announced in a loud voice. The
girl disappeared behind a partition and it wasn't a moment before Mr. Marco himself came out. Mr. Marco was about five feet tall and bald on top, but he sported a black ponytail, pulled from the hair on the sides of his head.

“Winnie, my love, what are you doing to me? You are not here without an appointment, are you?”

“It isn't me, Mr. Marco. It's my sister,” she said.

“Me?” I turned toward Winnie.

“I suddenly had an absolutely marvelous idea.” I noticed that my sister could take on the persona of the person to whom she was speaking. She never tried it with me (maybe my personality wasn't strong enough to mimic), but it worked like a charm on Mr. Marco. “Look at her,” she said. “Just look at her.” She lifted one of the limp locks that had escaped my ponytail. “My sister is a beautiful woman, but she doesn't do a thing about it. And you know, Mr. Marco”—she bent her head toward him conspiratorially—“when you reach a certain age it's incumbent upon you to bring your best qualities to the fore. Don't you agree?”

“Completely,” he said.

“Ah, I said to myself, Mr. Marco is a genius. If anyone can give her what she needs, it's Mr. Marco.”

“But without an appointment.”

“Oh, Mr. Marco. You know great art must be the whim of the moment. When I come back, I want to see the hair that launched a thousand ships. Let the artist in you take flight.”

I wasn't sure I wanted to have the hair that launched a thousand ships, maybe the hair that launched a small lobster boat.

A heavy girl in a white jumpsuit washed my hair. When she finished, she wrapped my hair in a towel and took me to a chair next to the one where Mr. Marco was working. I waited while he chopped and frowned and danced around his subject, an elderly woman with severely thinning hair.

Winnie was right. Mr. Marco could work miracles.

After he took a blow dryer to the old lady's head, she came out looking just like Carol Channing.

He wiped off the chair and blew the stray blond hair to the floor with the blow dryer. Then he motioned for me to sit. He stood behind me and we both looked into the mirror. He put his hands in my hair, fluffed, and puffed.

“You have good hair. Long and thick. I can make you look like Michelle Pfeiffer,” he said.

“I doubt that very much,” I said.

“Watch me.” And he began to snip.

If I didn't look exactly like Michelle Pfeiffer when he was finished, I did look like a much better version of Jane Fortune. My hair, which had been down to my waist since I was a child, was now shoulder length. Mr. Marco had added some blond highlights “to rid the hair of any hint of its inherent mousiness.”

When Winnie came to get me, her surprise was almost worth the three hours spent in a series of vinyl chairs.

“Jane, you are a knockout,” Winnie said. She paid so much money to retrieve me, I felt as if I'd been ransomed. She was loaded down with bags and I took some of them off her hands.

“Charlie's going to kill me. I'll keep some of these bags in the trunk.”

“Why do you buy so much if you know he won't like it?” I asked.

“It's one way to get Charlie's attention.”

“I don't know if that's the best way,” I said. I was stepping gingerly because I knew I was entering dangerous territory.

“You've never been married.” That was obvious and she didn't need to point it out.

“What if he gets too annoyed?” I asked.

“He won't.”

“But what if he does?”

“I don't know, Jane. I've never given it much thought.”

We packed the trunk of the car.

“He just seems a little discouraged, that's all,” I said.

“Then he should say something. Am I supposed to read his mind?”

“Look, it's none of my business, really.”

A cardinal rule of being a good single woman—and one I was on the verge of breaking—was never to give advice about someone else's relationship. The trick behind this rule was to remain as inoffensive as possible so that no one could ever have a reason to object to you. That is the foundation of being a good single woman.

“You're my sister. Of course it's your business,” Winnie said.

“Then maybe you should pay a little more attention to Charlie. With all of the responsibilities he has as a young father, you wouldn't want him looking around for something that seemed like more fun.” I wouldn't normally have said anything like that, or even thought it (this isn't the kind of thought a good single woman can allow herself to have), but it was Charlie's hand placed just a little too long on mine that had started me thinking in that direction.

“He wouldn't do that. Not Charlie. The boys and I are everything to him. And to tell you the truth, I resent the implication.” We got into the car. “It's not fair. You haven't been staying with us for even a week and you're suggesting that I'm not a good wife.”

“I didn't say that, Winnie. I would never say that.”

“That's what it sounded like.”

“I only want what's best for you, Winnie,” I said.

“I know you do,” she said. She put her hand over mine. “That's just how I feel about you.”