The Family Fortune

a very good one. He took care of our personal finances. Though my father might have found someone more adept than Littleton, Littleton, or a member of his family, had been with us for decades, and that counted for something in our family.

“So Littleton’s coming for brunch. He comes every third Sunday. What’s the big deal?” Miranda asked.

“Tomorrow is not a third Sunday,” I said.

“Technicality, technicality,” Miranda slurred. She disappeared up the stairs, pulling herself up by the oak banister.

My father usually looked at least a decade younger than his sixty-two years, but tonight the only people he could have fooled were the visually impaired—and, perhaps, Miranda. I put my hand on his arm.

“Everything okay?” I asked.

He nodded but looked distracted. He often looked distracted, but not this distracted. He touched my cheek.

“Your skin is so dry, Jane.” He turned to go up the stairs. “Don’t stay up too late. If you don’t get a good night’s sleep, you’ll age much faster than necessary. They don’t call it ‘beauty sleep’ for nothing. You can borrow some of my Crème de la Mer. It’s on the top shelf of my medicine cabinet.”

I thanked him, even though I had no intention of borrowing one of the panoply of beauty products he kept in his bathroom. I just couldn’t bring myself to borrow emollients from my father. I didn’t even like to go into his bathroom, because it retained the fruity scent of a person too well preserved.

Before I went to bed, I took a look at myself in my bedroom mirror. I had to admit that though the mirror was beautiful, an antique from the nineteenth century, the picture it reflected back was not inspiring. I was hardly a woman in full flower. I took out my ponytail and shook my head. My hair was long and thick, but I had recently sprouted two gray hairs. I’d been wondering what I should do about them. I didn’t like the idea of going gray. I felt old, but not that old. I took hold of the grays and tweaked them out.

I could make a trip to the salon, but I refused to waste my time on what I believed to be inherently trivial. This gave me a feeling of moral superiority which was, I suppose, its own form of vanity.

I turned toward my desk. There was an invitation from Wellesley College, my alma mater, tucked into the blotter. The desk was a Shaker table with clean lines that didn’t go with the rest of the furniture. The other furniture was older, more ornate, darker. I had chosen this desk myself on a trip to Pennsylvania with my mother. She told me the desk wouldn’t match my furniture, but I didn’t care. I wanted something in my room that I had chosen myself.

Dean Lydia McKay wanted me to give a talk about my work with the Fortune Family Foundation. I had been running the foundation for a little more than fifteen years. Before she died, my mother had called me into her room one afternoon and pointed to an ugly wooden chest in the corner.

“I want you to have that,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said. Why was she giving me an ugly chest? It wasn’t as if I’d ever admired it.

“That box contains all your great-grandmother’s papers. I want you to take over the foundation. I didn’t do as much as I might have done,” my mother admitted, “but you, Jane, can return the foundation to its former glory.”

I dug into that box after my mother died and read every paper in it. My great-grandmother Euphemia wrote copious journals. I followed some of Euphemia’s advice and came up with a few ideas of my own. If I had my way, the Fortune Family Foundation would someday have the same prestige as the MacArthur.

I fingered the invitation. Despite my debut as valedictorian at Wellesley, I hated speaking in public and refused invitations or handed them off to Evan Bentley, the coeditor of the Euphemia Review, but Wellesley was my own college. I’d have to consider it. Still, I was never sure why anyone would want me to speak. My claim to fame was having established a literary magazine. All I did was read stories: I didn’t write them. Who was I compared with all the literary luminaries that were available in Boston?

I marked my calendar and leaned the invitation against a lamp so I wouldn’t forget to respond. I didn’t feel much more accomplished now than I did when I was a student. I knew there was physical evidence of achievement. I had published thirteen issues of the Euphemia Review and was just about to publish the fourteenth. I had discovered several writers and at least one of those, Max Wellman, my first love, had gone on to be a huge commercial and critical success. In my heart, though, I was a background person. I wasn’t the type of success people should be asking to speak at a college, even if I went there myself.

One of the Red Sox shirts I usually slept in was hanging over a chair and I slipped into it, then pulled down the silk duvet on my bed and crawled in. I looked up into the white canopy as I had done since I was a child. Not much had changed since then, or so I had led myself to believe. Even Mathilda, my one-eyed doll, still lolled on the bed, long after she should have taken her rightful place with the other toys in the attic.

Chapter 3 A change in the family’s fortunes

The next morning Priscilla was the first to arrive for brunch. She arrived at ten o’clock on the dot. She was always on time and always brought her knitting with her. If there were an Olympic event for nonstop knitting, Priscilla would definitely place. She sat in her favorite camelback chair and pulled out her current project.

When Dolores trailed her father into the sitting room before breakfast, Priscilla started to steam like a teapot. Dolores Mudd was Littleton’s errant daughter who had recently returned to Boston after an unsuccessful adventure in Hollywood. Miranda found something riveting about Dolores, and that summer Miranda had anointed Dolores her new best friend. It felt like Dolores spent more time at our house than at her own. Dolores served as Miranda’s lady-in-waiting and peppered her with compliments. “You look just like Grace Kelly,” she said. Miranda does not look like Grace Kelly. Okay, maybe she does—a very skinny one.

Dolores was a worn twenty-seven and her hair had been bleached so many times it looked like it might crack off her head. She had a crooked front tooth that was more endearing than unattractive. It made her look vulnerable, and a little softness was just what she needed. She wore black jeans and spiked heels. The heels were unnecessary for a casual family brunch. Who on earth was she hoping to impress? And what would those shoes do to our hardwoods? I’m sure they weren’t friends of Chinese carpets either.

I thought Miranda’s fascination with Dolores was peculiar. Miranda herself had a fine-wine kind of beauty, while Dolores was more like Boone’s Farm fermented apple beverage. Maybe Miranda was fascinated by Dolores’s presumed unconventionality. Dolores had followed her dream to California, even if it only resulted in a messy divorce and a small part in a sitcom called Life Itself, which was canceled after six episodes. Neither Miranda nor I had had the gumption to follow our dreams. As far as I knew, Miranda didn’t even have a dream, unless it was marrying a suitable CEO.

Dolores was wearing a pink mohair sweater. It showcased her artificially enhanced breasts. She wasn’t shy about her implants. The first time I met her, she took my hand, placed it on her right breast, and said, “Feel this. It’s hard as a rock.”

“I’d rather not,” I said. I pulled my hand away, but not before noticing that Dolores’s breast was indeed as dense as petrified wood.

“Jane is not very experimental,” Miranda apologized for me. Perhaps not, but I wasn’t interested in touching another woman’s breast, even in the interest of science.

“And they’ll never sag, not even when I’m a hundred,” Dolores said.

“That’s lucky,” I said, but I couldn’t really see how a shriveled old woman sporting the sprightly breasts of a sixteen-year-old cheerleader was a good thing. It seemed to me that all the parts of your body should age together as some kind of unified whole.

On the way into the dining room, Priscilla pulled me into an alcove in the hallway near the front door. She kept her voice low, more of a hiss than a whisper.

“I don’t understand the attraction Miranda has for that girl,” Priscilla said.

“Dolores glitters, I guess,” I said. It was the best explanation I could come up with. And it was true in its way. At the very least, Dolores sparkled, whether it was her hair clips, her bracelets, her dangling rhinestone