The Family Fortune Read online

  The Family Fortune

  Laurie Horowitz

  Lively characters populate this mildly amusing modern take on Jane Austen's Persuasion. The nineteenth-century classic revolves around wealthy Anne Elliot, who is persuaded by her mother's best friend to break off her relationship with dashing but poor Captain Wentworth. In Horowitz's debut, sensible but suggestible Jane Fortune ("I live under the cloud of being Miss Fortune, though I prefer Ms.") splits with writer Max Wellman, the recipient of a fellowship sponsored by her family's foundation. Max soon becomes successful, while Jane endures her fate as a single professional woman surrounded by the vapid and vacuous denizens of upper-crust Boston. (When members of the Fortune family find themselves in dire financial straits, they must rent out their Beacon Hill mansion and winter in Palm Beach--poor souls!) Among the novel's snooty cast: Jane's younger sister, Winnie, a whiny, unhappily married hypochondriac, and Priscilla, the high-society divorcee who serves as catalyst for Jane's romantic demise. While frothy and fun, The Family Fortune is a far cry from the astute social commentary of the original Miss Jane.

  Laurie Horowitz

  The Family Fortune

  For my father, Benedict Horowitz,

  who would have been so proud

  All the privilege, I claim for my own

  sex…is that of loving longest, when

  existence or when hope is gone.

  —Jane Austen, Persuasion

  …and their prejudices reminded him of

  sign-posts warning off trespassers who

  have long since ceased to intrude.

  —Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

  And this is good old Boston,

  The home of the bean and the cod,

  Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots

  And the Cabots talk only to God.

  —John Collins Bossidy

  Chapter 1

  In which we are introduced to Miss Fortune

  I once knew a girl named Hope Bliss. How her parents didn’t realize that they were putting a curse on her, I’ll never know. I myself am a Fortune, from a long line of Fortunes, and though I am simply Jane, I live under the cloud of being Miss Fortune, though I prefer Ms.

  At thirty-eight I still lived at home. I told myself I had good reasons for that, or at least excuses. My sister Miranda lived there, too, and she was almost forty, even older than I was. Ours was not an ordinary house. It was a stately town house in Louisburg Square, a prestigious and historic location on Beacon Hill. The only people who could afford to live there were the nouveaux riches and people like us.

  Who were we, the Fortunes of Louisburg Square? We were the old-money aristocracy. During the time of the robber barons, the Fortune family was in textiles, but most of our money came later, from an array of fancy mustards. We had been, you could say, the condiment kings of the East. We had, however, sold the company to Basic Foods before I was born.

  I had known boys who came out of the womb in dinner jackets and girls who could preside over high tea before they could speak in full sentences, but really, what was the relevance of that in the new millennium?

  We old-money Bostonians were an anachronism, the Lost Tribe of the Wealthy, wandering through the desert of modern life, cut off from the world, never realizing that our days were numbered. We were a generation of dilettantes, trying our hands at cooking, weaving, pottery, always with a dwindling trust fund to back us up. Our creativity, our determination, and our will to succeed had been diluted by comfort. We existed on the complacent understanding that we never had to strive for anything. Our ancestors had been captains of industry, but some of us had never even held a job. Deep down, we knew we were becoming obsolete. Maybe that’s why we, the old guard, kept such a tenacious grip on our way of life.

  Louisburg Square is one of the stops on the many walking tours of Boston. The town houses in the square encircle a shared and gated park. The park is charming in all seasons—snow-laden or bright with blossoms. Our square is, in its way, quintessential Boston with its bricks, bay windows, and cobblestones.

  Though our house could have accommodated the entire string section of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the only people, besides my sister and I, who lived there were my father, Theodore Henry Adams Fortune III, whom everyone called Teddy, and Astrid Fonseca, our housekeeper and cook.

  My younger sister, Winnie, was married and lived in a neighboring town with her husband, Charlie, and their two boys, but Miranda and I had never left. We were modern spinsters, remaining at home long after any self-respecting woman would have moved out.

  Our mother died right after I graduated from college, and that’s the time you are supposed to make plans for the next stage of your life. Whether it’s graduate school, work, or simply a studio apartment in a questionable part of town, the big choices are upon you.

  Somehow I never got around to making them.

  Not long after my mother died, I fell in love with a man named Max Wellman. He asked me to move to California with him, but my mother’s best friend, Priscilla, talked me out of it. She said that I’d ruin his life, which, looking back, doesn’t say too much about what she thought of me at the time. Maybe she just wanted to keep me at home. Priscilla doesn’t like change and I’m sure my mother’s death was all the change she could tolerate.

  After my mother died, Priscilla swept in to help our family get back on its feet. Who knows, maybe Priscilla was trying to cushion her own loss when she bought that apartment right around the corner on Mount Vernon Street. She and my mother had been best friends since they were children. Priscilla, who had been divorced for many years, made our family her own.

  My father’s most endearing quality is his awareness of his own limitations, so without my mother to guide him, he relied on Priscilla for all sorts of things—mainly her judgment. Many people in our set thought Priscilla would marry my father after a respectable time. I knew better. Pris thought Teddy vain and foolish, though when my mother was alive, Pris put a good face on it. Later, she told me that my mother had been able to disguise many of my father’s failings. That’s what marriages are for, Priscilla said, to shield your partner from the world’s bad opinion. I hoped that marriage was more than that. Priscilla said that if she had to listen to Teddy crack his knuckles—one of his few unattractive habits—for the rest of her life, she’d find a way to jump from the Hancock Tower.

  “I swear to you,” Priscilla said, “your mother died of boredom.” No, I thought. It was definitely the cancer. “They looked like a perfect match, your mother and father. They each came from old Boston families. There was absolutely no opposition to their marriage even though, by today’s standards, they were young. And your father was even more handsome then than he is now. And he was so charming. How could she know that the charm was the sum and total of it? Jane, I would never want that to happen to you.”

  I don’t blame Priscilla, not really. I was twenty-three and could have made my own decision. I just wasn’t strong enough to fight the opposition, which included not only Teddy but also Max’s grandmother in Boca Raton.

  So I lost my first love and first love never comes again. That’s what they say, the they of stories and fairy tales. Second love didn’t come, either, which, I suppose, precluded third and fourth.

  It wasn’t so bad. I filled a niche in my family. I was the sensible one, the ponderous one, the one who did the extra laundry our housekeeper, Astrid, couldn’t keep up with. I was the one who cooked on Astrid’s day off.

  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 s
uits 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 a very good one. He took care of our p
ersonal 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.