The Family Fortune

Chapter 10 Escaping the Goldmans

The day the Goldmans came to see the house, Priscilla and I went to a lecture on Elizabeth Barrett Browning at the Boston Public Library. On any other day I might have been perfectly happy to listen to a bespectacled academic, but on that Saturday morning I couldn’t get the Goldmans out of my mind. If they took the house, it was inevitable that soon Max would be standing in the same spot where I had stood just that morning, gazing out of the same window.

By the time the question-and-answer period began, I felt sick.

I looked over at Priscilla. Her attention was concentrated on the librarian type at the podium, as if there had never been a more riveting subject than Browning. The hall felt stuffy, even though the floor-to-ceiling windows were wide open. I was amazed at how many spinsters you could pack into one room. I had attended many lectures with Priscilla and was rarely restless, but after listening to the speaker drone on for over an hour, I had to escape. We were in the middle of a row (Pris always insisted on sitting in the center) so I had to “excuse me” past at least eight frumpy women who were annoyed at being disturbed. Priscilla looked at me with concern, but she didn’t follow me out.

In the hall I went to the watercooler, leaned over, and took a long drink.

That summer fifteen years ago, Max and I had been sitting on the seawall in late August and the sun was setting all pink and orange over the Boston skyline. Max handed me a brown paper bag and in the bag was his manuscript. He was finished.

“I’m moving to California and I want you to go with me,” he said.

I didn’t even have to think about it. It was one of the only times I can remember that I immediately knew what I wanted.

The next morning I took the commuter boat to Boston so I could tell Priscilla. I’d tell my father later, but first I wanted to test the news on Priscilla. Teddy would follow her lead. I found Priscilla in her breakfast nook, nursing a cup of coffee and reading the Boston Globe.

“Hello, dear. You’ve been making yourself scarce. Pour yourself a coffee and sit down so we can have a chat,” she said. That summer Priscilla had spent most of her time in Kennebunkport, presumably with some man, and she had just come back so there was no reason I would have seen her.

“How is everything? And why haven’t I seen you more? Tell me about your experiment in literature.”

I wasn’t thrilled by her patronizing tone.

“It’s going very well,” I said. “The first recipient of the fellowship has finished his book.” I tasted my coffee.

“I hope he can find a publisher. That would be a real feather in your cap,” Priscilla said.

“And in his.”

“It would be good for the foundation.”

I paused, not knowing how to approach the subject of Max. I took another sip of coffee and blurted it out.

“Max has asked me to go to California with him,” I said.

I wanted Priscilla to act as my mother’s emissary, to take all she knew about my mother, put it in a blender, and come out with the essence of what my mother would have said.

“Don’t be ridiculous. We don’t even know this boy,” Priscilla said.

“You can meet him,” I said.

“I’m afraid you’re escaping your grief,” she said.

“You’re wrong,” I said. I had never told Priscilla she was wrong before, but this was the first time I felt manipulated, as if maybe she didn’t have my best interests at heart. The feeling was so deep I could barely reach it, let alone recognize it.

“You’ll ruin his career and your life,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“He’ll have to spend his time figuring out how to support you both. It will leach his energy away from his writing and he’ll resent you for it.”

“But I have the trust fund. And I can work.”

“The trust doesn’t kick in until you’re thirty and you’ve never worked. Besides, do you think any man wants to live off his significant other or partner or whatever you’re going to call yourself—even today? You think he’ll be proud of himself if his history reads that he married his patroness? Think about the word patronize, Jane. Patron and patronize are from the same root.”

“He didn’t ask me to marry him. He asked me to go to California.”

“Worse. At least if he asked you to marry him, you’d have some respectable connection, such as it is. This way, he’s free to drop you whenever he wants to. I’m only thinking of you. I’m standing in loco parentis, saying what I think your mother would have said.”

“My mother wouldn’t have tried to protect me from life.”

“You’re wrong. She tried to protect you from everything unpleasant in life. Even with her illness. She was sick long before she ever told you. She didn’t want you to suffer. She never wanted you to suffer,” Priscilla said.

“Well, it didn’t work. I suffered all the same. People do, you know.”

“I know what she would have wanted. I knew her best. You don’t understand anything about men. You never have. I’d be more likely to trust Miranda with something like this.” I didn’t bring up Guy Callow, but then no one knew what really happened with him—and Miranda hadn’t suffered much. “You and Max come from different backgrounds. He’s just beginning on what is a very difficult career. Give him a chance. If the love is strong, a few years won’t change it.”

I didn’t believe her. Romantic songs and books prattled on about eternal love, but I knew that if I didn’t go with Max now, I’d lose him.

When I called Teddy, who was on the Vineyard, to tell him my news, he told me that he wouldn’t give me any money (not that I had asked for any) and that, of course, I’d have to give up the foundation.

“The Fortune girls don’t run off to California. Not on my watch,” he said. “Besides, you won’t like it. It’s not your kind of place.”

How would he know? He’d never even been there.

Priscilla came out of the lecture and saw me leaning with my forehead against the wall. She put her hand on my back.

“Buck up,” she said. “The thing with that writer was so long ago. You really should have forgotten about it by now.”

I lifted my head from the wall. Priscilla stood there with her solid stick figure encased in a tweed skirt. Perhaps any normal person would have forgotten, but it wasn’t as if so much had happened to me since to make me forget.

“I wasn’t thinking about Max,” I said.

“I just thought that since we were escaping the house so we wouldn’t have to see his sister, he might be on your mind.”

“It was hot in there. That’s all.”

“The windows were wide open. I actually felt a chill.”

“I was hot,” I said.

“Whatever you say, dear.” Priscilla peered over her half-glasses with a look so tolerant I felt like I’d shrunk to the size of the buckle on her shoe.

We walked home from the library and entered the house, where Miranda and my father were having drinks in the sitting room.

“You should have stayed, Jane,” Miranda said. “They were really interesting people.”

“Nothing like what you’d expect in show people,” Teddy said. I think Teddy still thought in terms of vaudeville. He didn’t equate “show person” with someone like Joseph Goldman, who ran a multimillion-dollar company.