The Family Fortune (4 page)

Finn's was a small restaurant-bar on Beacon Street on the Brookline-Boston border. From Kenmore Square to Finn's you pass several neighborhoods and you can easily slip from a safe one to an unsafe one just by taking a few steps in the wrong direction.

Finn's is on the safe side of the line, a neighborhood full of brick town houses that have been converted into apartments and student housing.

The first time I ever went to Finn's, I was meeting Bentley to convince him to come help me with the fellowship and the
Review.
I had recently graduated from Wellesley College. Wellesley
College was argyle kneesocks and wool skirts. It was field hockey and long afternoons staring at the ducks in the pond while doodling poetry on thick white tablets. They say that going to a women's college is good for a girl's self-esteem. I think it would have worked for me if I hadn't been derailed by my mother's illness. I couldn't locate my self-esteem for a while after that.

Since Bentley was a “blocked” writer, he spent his days advancing the crushes his students had on him. I hadn't been one of those students. His bad-boy tweed and air of dissipation hadn't impressed me. Still, he was the only published author I knew, so I called him to ask if he would help me with my project.

“Which one were you?” he asked on the phone.

“Jane Fortune.” I had already given my name. I gave it again while I tried to think of something about me he might remember, but I couldn't think of anything that made me stand out from the other girls.

While I was still thinking he said, “I remember you. I remember the journal you wrote in my class.” Evan Bentley had his students keep a journal about the books he assigned us. We were supposed to write as we went along, but I ended up pulling an all-nighter and writing the journal in a frantic rush. He gave it back to me with an “A++” written at the top. Thanks to Bentley, I still keep a journal.

Bentley agreed to meet me at Finn's that long-ago afternoon. When I arrived, I opened the door to a windowless calm. Everything about the place was muted. It was four o'clock and the bar was empty except for two barflies, an ancient waitress, a boy bartender with braces on his teeth, and Bentley, who stood when he saw me and pointed to the stool beside him.

I hoisted myself up and tried to find a place for my pocketbook. It was a green leather Kelly bag that had belonged to my mother and I wore it like courage. I held it in front of me, then put it on the bar, but it looked awkward there, so I dropped it to the floor and worried about what detritus was going to end up stuck to its bottom.

“Thank you so much for meeting with me, Professor Bentley,” I said. I was attempting to play the role of confident patroness of the arts.

“It is my pleasure, Miss Fortune, but call me Bentley. I find the ‘Professor' highly superfluous.”

I didn't know if I could lose the “Professor.” I was brought up in a formal household.

Bentley was attractive enough for an older man, if you liked his type. Floppy brown hair, a five o'clock shadow, and baggy khakis falling over a pair of loafers.

“I'd like to buy you a martini,” he said. “Do you drink martinis?”

“I've never had one,” I said.

“Then it would be my pleasure to buy you your first.” He waved at the elderly waitress and called her Mary. She got up from where she was chain-smoking at a back table and left her cigarette burning in the ashtray.

I wasn't sure I wanted a martini but I didn't want to appear unsophisticated, so when it came with its three gigantic olives on a toothpick, I sipped it and wondered why anyone would voluntarily drink something so vile. I have since acquired a taste for martinis. Bentley had a scotch. He drank the amber liquid with gusto, licked his lips when he was finished, and immediately ordered another.

I told Bentley how much I had liked his book. I took it out of my bag so he could sign it. I checked the bottom of my bag with a surreptitious swipe of my hand.

“You're a very pretty girl,” Bentley said after his third scotch.

“Thank you,” I said.

“And rich,” he said.

I shrugged and blushed. I didn't like talking about money. We didn't talk about money in my family. (To our detriment, as it turned out.) Besides, I had yet to come into my trust, and even that wouldn't make me what we'd call rich.

“Rich is rich,” he said. “I grew up poor. Very poor. You know what my first job was?”

“No,” I said. Of course I didn't.

“I sold Bibles door-to-door.”

I had never met a Bible salesman before. It sounded so fictional, so
Paper Moon
.

“Well, you've written a wonderful book,” I said.

“It
ain't
the Bible.” He smiled. “And wonderful books don't always translate into money.” Fourth scotch. “So how much would I make?” he asked.

“For what?”

“For helping you with your little project?”

I hadn't even thought of that. How naïve could I be? My mother had arranged for a stipend for me, but I didn't even think about paying Bentley.

“It would be prestigious. You could be the next George Plimpton,” I offered. I had been poring over the
Paris Review
in an attempt to understand what the
Euphemia Review
should be like. At the time, Mr. Plimpton was very much alive, well respected, and invited everywhere, whether it had to do with film, theater, or literature. You could do far worse than becoming George Plimpton.

“Ha. You don't know that, Miss Fortune,” he said.

“Call me Jane, please,” I said.

“Yes.” He gave a thoughtful nod and bit his bottom lip. He considered me. “Would you like to hear the story of my life?”

“Not really.”

“No?” He stared at me as if he found my answer unbelievable. Then he laughed. “But I've had an interesting life.”

“Still,” I said, “it's not really relevant to me, is it?”

“Relevant? What's that got to do with anything? How do you know you want to work with me if you don't know anything about me? Bartender, another scotch, please.”

“I don't know if I want to work with you,” I said. I turned to the bartender. “Could I have a glass of water, please? And a cup of coffee?”

“Coming right up.” When the bartender smiled at me his braces sparkled.

Bentley, despite the fact that I told him I wasn't interested, relayed a story about his work as a traveling Bible salesman in West Virginia. It was a cheap, shoddy, bawdy story, and certainly a fabrication. When he was finished he turned to me.

“So do you believe it?” he asked.

“Not really,” I said.

“Does literal truth matter?”

“If you just told me a lie about yourself, then I don't know any more about you than I did before.”

He smiled a subtle smile and lowered his eyes.

“Maybe you know more,” he said. He looked up. “Jane,” he said, “do me a favor, will you?”

“Okay.” There was doubt in my voice.

“Try not to be so literal.”

I still don't know if Bentley was ever a Bible salesman, or if he ever slept with a woman who told him stories in a room festooned with paper roses, but I came to believe that he was right. Literal truth doesn't always matter. What he told me became a part of his history because, somewhere inside, he was able to make me believe it on a level that didn't have anything to do with intellect. I didn't want to believe it, but he painted it so vividly that it was now a part of him, and whether that West Virginia woman could walk right up to us and lay a sloppy kiss on Bentley's cheek didn't matter a bit. It was Bentley who convinced me that how we remember things is more important than how they actually happened.

“Memory is long,” he said, “and the present is only a moment and the future does not exist. So it's what we carry with us into the present that's important.”

Bentley had been resting one of his arms on a green paper place mat. When he picked up his drink, he noticed that the ink from the place mat had stained his white cuffs. His shirt had been the only noncrumpled thing about him, but now his cuffs were stained green.

“Goddammit,” he said.

I turned the place mat over so that only the white side showed. He looked at me and nodded.

“You're a very practical girl, I see,” he said. I cringed. I had been praised for my common sense too often for me to enjoy it as a compliment. Besides, I don't think Bentley meant it as a compliment, and being a compliment was all that redeemed it.

“Whatever stories we choose,” I explained, “will be published in the
Euphemia Review
. The best one will win the author a place to work for ninety days—and a stipend.”

“Terrible name. The
Euphemia Review
. Where did you come up with that?”

“Euphemia was my great-grandmother's name and it's nonnegotiable.”

Poor Euphemia. I could do this much for her. Even if she had created her trust in an effort to vanquish Isabella, Euphemia still deserved some glory. So what if her efforts had not been terribly successful, nor her motives exactly pure.

“It's quite an undertaking,” Bentley said when I explained the whole project to him.

“But will you help me?” I asked.

“I'd still like to know what I get out of it,” Bentley said.

Most of the people I had grown up with had plenty of time to volunteer for things. They'd think it inelegant to ask for compensation. I sipped my martini and wondered why I was trying to finish something I found so odious.

Bentley looked up when the door opened and a shadow stood in the door.

“Hey, Finn,” Bentley called out, “I have a bone to pick with you.”

“Ah, fuck off,” the man said.

Bentley turned to me. “Protect your virgin ears.”

“My ears are not virgins,” I said.

“Finn, your goddamned place mats stained my new Brooks Brothers shirt.”

“What do you want me to do about it?” Finn asked. He walked be
hind the bar, took a box of place mats, and deposited them in the trash. “Satisfied?”

“You could pay my cleaning bill,” Bentley said.

“Fuck off,” Finn said.

“There's a lady present,” Bentley said.

“Fuck off.”

Bentley turned to me.

“So, Miss Fortune, what do I get?”

I maneuvered myself off the barstool. I had chosen the wrong man, not that I had so many choices. Still, I could find someone else. Boston was full of colleges and universities, full of writers of Bentley's limited success.

“I suppose I could come up with an honorarium,” I said. I stood straight as a lamppost and held my Kelly bag in a knotted fist.

“I've upset you,” he said.

“I just have places to be.”

“I take it you don't spend most of your afternoons drinking in bars.”

“I do not,” I said. I was so prim. Looking back, I am surprised he could tolerate me.

“Sit back down. I never said I wouldn't do it.”

“I'm not sure I want you to do it,” I said, but I hoisted myself back onto the barstool.

“That's it, Jane. Get in touch with your inner fire. If you could do that, you might be writing yourself.”

“Not everyone has to be some kind of artist. I am a sensible person who knows what I am trying to do here. I didn't come here to be psychoanalyzed or second-guessed.” I felt a film of sweat on my forehead.

“But shouldn't we all take the risk to find out if we have what it takes to be a real artist?”

“No,” I said, and took a large sip from my glass.

“If, like me, you eventually find out that you're not the artist you thought you were, you can play disappointed genius like I do. I've made that into its own art form.” He finished the rest of his scotch.

“You can make feeling sorry for yourself into an art form if you want to, but I think you're a coward.”

It was unlike me to be so confrontational, especially with a relative stranger, and someone so much older than I was.

He looked down at the bar, examined his stained shirt cuffs, then looked up at me.

“I always wanted to be George Plimpton,” he said.

I paid for the drinks. We slipped from our stools and walked out of the dark bar and into the dimming light of a late April afternoon. Bentley shook hands with me, and with that handshake, Evan Bentley and I became the team that would discover some of the best writers of the next decade.

Before I turned toward the trolley, he asked, “Did I tell you how pretty you are, Jane?”

“You mentioned it.”

“Well, you are,” he said. “You are very pretty, Miss Fortune.”

 

Finn's hadn't changed much in fifteen years. Its busiest nights were when the Red Sox played. This was not one of those nights and the place was empty.

Bentley and I arrived at the same time. We walked in and sat at a table.

“Hey, Finn,” Bentley called.

“Fuck you,” Finn said.

We ordered two steaks. The only thing missing from Finn's was Mary. Fifteen years ago, she was seventy-two, so she had retired or died—or both. It took two waitresses to fill Mary's shoes.

I passed “Boston Tech” over to Bentley. He and I had gotten into the habit of meeting whenever we had something important to discuss, even though most of our business could be done by mail, e-mail, or over the phone. We called each other the Luddites, because any time we could do something the old-fashioned way, we did. Bentley still wrote his novels (his writer's block had finally ended) with a favorite fountain pen on expensive Italian paper.

I had bought Bentley countless drinks and meals on the foundation. Then, five years ago, Bentley stopped drinking. I didn't begrudge him one meal or even a drink. His company, when he wasn't plastered, was well worth the time and money I'd spent on him. And tonight I was happy to spring for a New York sirloin if Bentley would read “Boston Tech” before he ate his salad.