The Family Fortune

And though I wasn’t crazy about it—neither the niche nor the family—I was comfortable with it, and there’s something to be said for that.

Sometimes I looked out my third-floor window and saw the tourists there—in their sneakers and sweat suits holding guidebooks and cameras and staring up into our windows.

What were they thinking when they peered up at us like that? Maybe they thought that behind our bay windows we lived charmed lives. And depending on your idea of what a charmed life is, maybe we did.

Chapter 2 Jane stays home on a Saturday night

It was a Saturday night in August and it was not unusual for me to be sitting at home with a book on my lap. At some point in the evening I had fallen asleep in front of the empty fireplace.

I woke to the sound of my sister Miranda dropping her keys in the front hall.

“I’m exhausted and drunk,” she said.

“You were the life of the party,” Teddy said.

“It was the dress. It was expensive, even for me—but worth every penny.” When she left the house that evening she was wearing a midnight blue sheath that accentuated her narrow hips. The color would have made her look cadaverous had she not drenched her porcelain skin with expensive self-tanners. She used makeup liberally and was no stranger to artifice. Miranda, though she was flat as a pancake, always allowed her nonexistent breasts to precede her into a room. She had such a regal way of walking that she could actually convince you that her figure was something more than that of a prepubescent boy.

Teddy and Miranda wouldn’t be caught dead at home on a Saturday night. Through the Fortune Family Foundation, I wrote the checks that sent them to charity balls and parties, but I rarely went myself. These charitable contributions were expected of us. Not only that, we were, as part of the Boston establishment, expected to make an appearance. I didn’t have much interest in going to parties, not that Teddy and Miranda ever invited me. We usually bought only two tickets. Before my mother died, she had accompanied Teddy to these events, but Miranda took my mother’s place when it came to her public duties.

Maybe an outsider would think it strange that Miranda and Teddy did everything together, but it wasn’t really. These events were often attended not just by couples but by family groups—Mr. Endicott and his two daughters, Bill Cushing and his sister Alice. It wasn’t so unusual for a father and daughter to go together, especially if the wife was gone. Teddy and Miranda liked going to parties together because it gave them a freedom they wouldn’t have if they took actual dates. A woman was perfectly respectable, yet at the same time unfettered, when escorted by her father. And Miranda was a convenient shield for Teddy. Since my mother died, he’d been pursued by most of the single women in the Social Register. Both Miranda and Teddy wanted to play, but neither of them wanted to be forced to commit to a relationship that would last longer than two hours.

I stayed in my seat by the empty fireplace and listened to them talk about the party.

“I couldn’t believe that bitch Veronica Buffington snubbed you like that, Daddy,” Miranda said.

“Well, I did forget to send a note when her husband died.”

“Michael died five years ago,” Miranda said.

“Terrible breach of etiquette. I can hardly forgive myself. Though I was so busy at the time. And people do make mistakes. I tried to apologize, but I guess it was too little, too late. Your mother usually took care of those things. But it really is no excuse. I should have come home from St. Barths for the funeral. That’s what I should have done. Michael being my distant cousin and all, and we were close when we were children, but, well…’’ He trailed off. Teddy understood that he had breached a convention, but it never occurred to him that he might have hurt the Buffingtons’ feelings. He was much better at dealing with social laws than human emotion.

“For God’s sake. They don’t have to hold a grudge. You were on vacation and then you forgot. Things happen—not that I mind not having to talk to Glenda-the-Good-Witch. Mother and daughter, always together—a little odd, don’t you think? And Glenda always doing good works. I hate people who are always doing good works. I don’t trust them.”

“Some of them are sincere, I think,” Teddy said.

“Oh, Daddy, you always have such a good opinion of people. You make me feel so jaded.”

I listened from the other room. If Teddy, who had all the depth of a drop of rain, could make Miranda feel jaded, there was really no hope for her, maybe no hope for any of us.

“Well, tonight you lit up the room,” Teddy said to her. He believed that looking good could make up for any number of other insufficiencies.

“Did I?”

“Of course. James Putnam couldn’t keep his eyes off of you.”

“His googly-googly eyes.” Miranda sang these words off-key.

“I think he’s a good-looking boy, and they say he’s going to run for state senate.”

“Let me know when he’s president.” Miranda giggled.

I went out to the foyer. I was still holding the book I had been reading.

“How was the function?” I asked. I didn’t know what to call a formal dance that benefited battered women.

“It was a party, Jane,” Miranda said. She leaned in close to me and said, “Can you say ‘party,’ Jane? Try it.” Each time she pronounced the p in “party,” a jet of spittle landed on my cheek.

I wiped it off with the back of my hand.

“If you can’t keep your thoughts to yourself, can you at least contain your own saliva?” I asked.

She stared at me. I was so used to this kind of behavior from Miranda that I usually let it go, but I had been having a pleasant evening. I was reading Maugham again, and I always enjoyed Maugham. I didn’t appreciate this barrage of abuse. I hadn’t done anything to deserve it.

“You spend the whole night reading again, Jane?” Teddy asked. He treated my passion for reading as if it were a sick compulsion, much like a mild case of kleptomania.

“You and your stories—they aren’t real, you know,” Miranda said as she swayed toward me. I put my hand out to steady her. “It’s downright antisocial. That’s what it is.”

“You look washed out, Jane,” Teddy said. I could always count on my father to comment on the lackluster quality of my looks. It wasn’t that I was unattractive. All the Fortunes were as attractive as money and good genes could make them, but of all of us, I took the least care with what had been naturally bestowed, and Teddy considered my attitude a personal affront.

“At your age,” Miranda said, “you should wear a little makeup. It would be a service to society.”

It was typical of Miranda to focus on something like my bare face at midnight. Though she sometimes picked at me when she was sober, she couldn’t help herself when she was drunk.

“I haven’t been out in society,” I said.

“More’s the pity,” Miranda said. Miranda sometimes talked as if she’d just walked out of a nineteenth-century novel, though, to my knowledge, she had never read one.

Both Miranda and Teddy were handsome in a well-kept sort of way. They shared the belief that appearance should be a priority and that great amounts of time and money should be expended to attain a polish so pure that only the sharpest critic could discern that its artificial glow wasn’t absolutely natural.

Teddy and Miranda shared many beliefs that the rest of the world didn’t, and that’s probably why they were such perfect companions for each other. Of course, it was inevitable that someday someone would come along to break up the happy duo. I hoped so, especially for Miranda’s sake. Teddy had been married once already and perhaps he was in no hurry to do it again, but a father is a poor substitute for a husband, no matter how well you get along.

As for me, I was coming to terms with the fact that I was going to be left on the shelf to sour like cream. I didn’t like it, but I was coming to accept it.

“Anyway, tomorrow’s a big day,” Teddy said.

“What’s so big about it?” Miranda asked. She tripped on her gown but managed to remain upright.

“Littleton’s coming for brunch.” Teddy called Littleton our “counselor,” but he was really just a lawyer and not