The Family Fortune Read online

  After she was gone, Littleton put his cup on our elaborately carved mantelpiece. He stood at the fireplace with his back toward us, his arms outstretched in an odd, theatrical pose.

  He spun around so quickly his body made a swishing sound.

  “I’ve been going over your finances, and we need to take drastic measures,” he said.

  Astrid, who had just come in with some mini-biscotti and more coffee, put the tray down on an ottoman and backed quickly out of the room. I tried to catch her eye, but she wouldn’t look at me.

  Drastic measures?

  What was he talking about and why didn’t Teddy look surprised—or Priscilla? The words drastic measures yanked Miranda from her natural lethargy.

  “Whatever this is,” Miranda snapped, examining a pearl-toned fingernail, “can we get it over with? I dislike histrionics of all sorts. Drastic. Please. What on earth are you talking about? There’s a special sale at Louis today and I’d like to get there before everything is gone.” Though Miranda is always happy to pay full price, she can never resist a really good sale.

  “Louis will have to wait,” Littleton said. “I want you to sit and listen very carefully. This is the bottom line.” I hated the term bottom line. It always struck me that the people who used it didn’t really know what it meant. It was something a slick financial adviser would say, and Littleton was hardly one of those. “You have overspent and invested unwisely.”

  The room, though large, felt like the inside of a cigar box. I wanted to pull back the velvet drapes and open some windows. Didn’t anyone else notice how hot it was?

  “I don’t understand,” Miranda said. She was looking at Littleton as if he held the key to the vault at Shreve, Crump & Lowe.

  “The Fortune family is experiencing an insufficiency of funds.”

  “Go on,” Miranda said.

  Littleton was sweating at his hairline.

  “Economies must be taken,” he said, “compromises made. Your fortunes, excuse the pun, have diminished.”

  Miranda continued to stare blankly at him as if he were speaking in tongues.

  “We’re broke,” I said.

  Miranda turned on me.

  “Jane, must you be so dramatic? Must you always be so dramatic?” Miranda must have been very upset, because as everyone knows, I am not in the least dramatic. “We couldn’t be broke. We’re not broke, are we, Daddy? Broke—it’s such a shoddy word. We may be experiencing a financial shortfall, but people like us—we don’t just go broke.” She spat out the last word as if it were made of broken glass. “What does it all mean?” Her words were drawn out and her voice was as nasal as Gwyneth Paltrow’s when she played English. Miranda slumped onto her chair. Teddy walked over to her and put his hand on her shoulder, but he couldn’t look at her. He ran his fingers through his thick blond hair. Teddy’s hair, like Dolores’s, was a deception, but he had a good colorist and his looked completely natural.

  Miranda peered up at him and touched his hand. Her look was pleading, the same look she gave him as a child when she wanted a new toy.

  “Littleton discussed it with me and I discussed it with Priscilla last week,” Teddy said. “She and I thought it best that Littleton explain it to you, but the fact is—Jane’s right.” There had been many times when I had wanted to hear those two words, but this was not one of them. “We’re broke.”

  And in Teddy’s mouth, the words sounded oddly like a curse.

  Chapter 4

  Jane makes a discovery

  There was a pile of manuscripts on my nightstand and I wasn’t really in the mood to read them, but I picked one up and started to give it the quick once-over. By now I was usually able to spot a story’s potential within the first paragraph, certainly within the first page.

  My hand tightened on the pages I was reading and I began to salivate. That was the sign for me. One writer I knew could tell if he had a good story because the hair on his arms stood on end. With me, finding a good story elicited the same reaction as good food.

  I scrambled out of bed, sat at my desk, and finished reading. The story jumped off the page. It was full of characters who would remain with me long after I’d slipped the pages under my blotter. The story was called “Boston Tech,” after one of Boston’s tougher high schools, and was a version of Romeo and Juliet set in the time of busing and racial desegregation in Boston. A white family. A black family. Love. Violence. It was electrifying. My heart beat fast. The idea was simple, but brilliant in its simplicity. It was the type of story that could change a life. I flipped to the last page where all the writers who submitted to the Fortune Family Fellowship were asked to provide their basic information. The author’s name was Jack Reilly. Jack Reilly. He lived in Lynn, a rough working-class city north of Boston. There’s a rhyme about Lynn: Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin, you never come out the way you went in.

  Lynn, the city of sin. Back in bed, I tried to picture Jack Reilly. Someone who could write like this would have to be remarkable. Lynn. Jack Reilly would frequent neighborhood bars. He would wear a black leather jacket and smoke nonfiltered cigarettes. His hair would be thick and slicked back from his forehead. His jeans would have a hole near the right rear pocket. He’d work in a factory and write with a pencil in a crumpled spiral notebook during his breaks. He’d be the guy other guys looked to for advice. He’d be a man who inspired love in women. He’d be dangerous. Maybe on parole. Jack Reilly. Lynn. Lynn.

  Of course, he could be nothing like that. Max, the first winner of the fellowship, wasn’t the man I expected him to be. I expected a four-eyed geek with a leatherette folder, but the man who walked into Maison Robert to meet me and my coeditor, Evan Bentley, had an unusual beauty. His good looks should have made me dislike him. I was suspicious of beauty. Teddy and Miranda had taught me, by example, that some beauty was only skin deep, and I had come to believe that all beauty was only skin deep—that behind every handsome face lurked a shallow man.

  None of that mattered when Max Wellman walked into the restaurant. I was immediately tongue-tied and I was afraid he would think me a dimwitted dilettante. I wasn’t much more than that at the time, but at least I’d thought to recruit Bentley to give the contest credibility. Bentley had been one of my literature professors at Wellesley. He had written one novel to critical acclaim but had been unable to repeat the performance. Since he was the only writer I knew at the time, I asked him to help me. The credibility of the whole enterprise was severely threatened that evening when Bentley got drunk and vomited on Max’s shoes in the men’s room. Max was wonderful. He insisted on going all the way out to Newton Highlands with me to take Bentley home.

  We dragged Bentley up three flights of stairs. Max fished around in Bentley’s pockets for keys, found them, and let us into his apartment. Max turned on the hall light. We found Bentley’s bedroom and put him to bed. I wanted to leave him there, just tossed on the bed with all his clothes on, but Max removed Bentley’s jacket and shoes, and loosened his collar. He covered him up with a blanket from the foot of the bed.

  There is an intimacy to putting a drunk to bed, like putting a child to sleep. Max and I stood across from each other. Bentley started to snore. I looked down at Bentley’s shoes. Max had lined them up next to the bed.

  “You should take those,” I said. “To replace yours.”

  “I could never take a drunk man’s shoes,” Max said. His voice was low and serious, but it made me want to laugh. He smiled up at me and we slipped out of the apartment.

  In the cab, I apologized again for Bentley.

  “I like a good fallen icon,” he said.

  I didn’t know exactly what he meant, but I suspected that he had more compassion for Bentley than I did.

  I could hardly wait to call this Jack Reilly and tell him he’d won the fellowship. I’d have to talk to my intern, Tad, and then to Bentley. We’d arrange to meet Mr. Reilly. What kind of restaurant would he like? Maybe something down on the waterfront.

  Of course, I should
read the other stories, if only in the interest of fairness, but I already knew “Boston Tech” would be the winner. I’d learned a little something in fifteen years and stories like “Boston Tech” didn’t come along every day.

  Chapter 5

  Euphemia vs. Isabella

  The fact that I administer a trust based on one woman’s desire to outshine another doesn’t bother me in the least. My great-grandmother Euphemia Fortune was a contemporary of Isabella Stewart Gardner. Isabella left, as her legacy, the Gardner Museum, a Venetian palace on the Fenway. Had Isabella known that the Fens would suffer decades of high crime, she might have chosen another location for her museum, but when she chose that location, the worst that could be said of it was that it wasn’t central to the other cultural highlights of Boston.

  On the surface, Isabella and Euphemia had everything in common. Neither was especially attractive, but Isabella was one of those women who knew how to transform limited physical gifts into an overall magnetism. You can see it in Sargent’s famous portrait of her. Both women were rich, but Euphemia took one look at Isabella over tea on the lawn of the Gardners’ Brookline farm and decided she had to have some of what Isabella had—whatever it was. A certain glamour. A savoir faire.

  I read all about this in Euphemia’s journals. She was not a public person, but she was not shy about pouring out her ambitions on the page. I would have liked to follow in Isabella’s footsteps—joyful, and heedless of certain conventions—but instead I am more like Euphemia. She feared the limelight, but her great tragedy was that she also craved it. I often wonder if I’m more like my great-grandmother than I’d like to admit.

  When I took over the foundation I used Euphemia’s journals as instruction manuals on how to run it. Like her, I offered a place for a writer to work for three months and a stipend. Euphemia bought a house for the fellowship in a town called Hull, only about forty minutes from Boston.

  In her day, Hull was a convenient seaside town, close to Boston, and the home of some of Boston’s brighter lights. Even the Kennedys owned a gabled house in the hills there once, but the town had since fallen on hard times from which it had never completely recovered.

  One day I drove down to find the cottage Euphemia bought to house the first recipient of the fellowship. It was high on a hill overlooking the ocean. In her day, it stood alone, but now it was surrounded by suburban-style homes. Children’s toys littered the yard, but I could still imagine the first recipient of the fellowship walking up the front steps.

  I might have chosen another town, since Hull was no longer fashionable and we no longer owned that house, but I went back to Hull, choosing a cottage that was for rent on a street called Ocean Avenue, a street that ran from the ocean side to the bay side of the peninsula. From the cottage’s upper window, on the ocean side, you could see the Boston skyline.

  That is where Max and I fell in love. I drove down there with a pair of shoes from Brooks Brothers. That was my excuse. I needed to replace the shoes Bentley had ruined. The shoes were the most expensive pair in the store. I told myself that it was the least I could do after Bentley and the vomiting incident, but really I wanted to impress Max with my generosity. He said I shouldn’t have done it, that the ruined shoes weren’t nearly as nice as the new ones. (I didn’t doubt it.) He seemed to like them, though I never saw him wear them that summer. That was a summer of flip-flops and shorts.

  Max said that I had arrived just in time, because he was going crazy.

  “Solitude is great,” he said, “in theory, but I’ve never been so alone in my life.”

  “I thought writers like to be alone,” I said.

  “They need to be alone. It’s different.”

  We walked down to the pier for fried clams. He already knew the woman who served the food from behind a screened-in window and called her by name—Jo, short for Josephine. I was impressed by anyone who made friends that easily, and Max was one of those people. He brought the world in around him so that wherever he was, he was inside a circle.

  I hardly left the beach that summer. Max said that it was much easier to work when I was there.

  “Isn’t it your responsibility to make sure this thing is a success?” he asked. I was too happy to care about responsibility. A responsible person wouldn’t have slept with the first person to whom they gave a grant. It could come back to haunt me.

  Max worked all day, except for the few afternoons we took off to play. I learned to cook and each night served something new and interesting, though not always good. After I worked on it half the day, I was always disappointed when the results didn’t live up to my expectations, but Max didn’t seem to mind. I could have served him macaroni and cheese every night and he would have been just as happy as with my Stroganoffs, bouillabaisses, and risottos.

  After that summer, the foundation continued to rent the house for three years, then we bought it. I replaced the old dusty furniture, had the house painted, and put a deck on the roof. From there you could see both the ocean and the bay.

  Though it’s been years since I delved into the competition between Euphemia and Isabella, I still like to go and sit on a particular stone bench at the Gardner Museum. Except for the ring of the occasional cell phone, I can imagine myself back in time and hear the crinolines rustling. Euphemia would be happy to know that for all of Isabella’s grand pretensions, the museum is a somber place despite the airy atrium and fresh flowers. It feels as if the color gray has descended on it like dusk. Euphemia would have been even more delighted to know that these days the museum’s collection is sometimes considered second rate.

  Upstairs on the third floor, in a corner, is a picture of several women standing together. Euphemia is in the picture, off to the side. The catalogue names her. She has a full chest, a huge bustle, and a receding chin. If anyone resembles her, it is my sister Winnie, who often wears that same air of perpetual dissatisfaction. The painting is known as a lesser work, and that’s where Euphemia is memorialized forever. If she knew of our financial troubles, she’d be so mortified she would probably remove herself from the painting entirely. The next time I climbed the stairs to see her, she’d be gone, hiding in some other picture where no one would be likely to find her.

  The morning after the “big announcement” I walked to my office in Kenmore Square. It’s a good walk from Beacon Hill, but on a beautiful day—and it was a beautiful day—I preferred it to climbing down into the subway and rushing around underground like a mole.

  Like Isabella, I hadn’t chosen prime Boston real estate for my enterprise. Kenmore Square, near Fenway Park, is an unglamorous part of the city, catering to students and baseball fans. In fact, it is not too far from the Gardner Museum.

  I rented the office shortly after taking over the foundation. My mother thought that an office would give the foundation more legitimacy.

  A tasteful plaque on the door says “The Fortune Family Foundation,” but I never did much in the way of decorating. The inside of the office looks like it belongs to a low-rent detective in a Raymond Chandler novel.

  I opened the door. My intern, Tad, was stacking manuscripts on my desk. He separated the stories into several piles, depending on how much he thought I’d like them. I gave him the coffee I’d picked up at the shop on the ground floor, the shop that had the real teapot spouting steam out front. I’d loved that enormous teapot since I was a child, and maybe that was why I took this office just above it.

  I pulled “Boston Tech” out of my tattered L. L. Bean tote and slapped it onto the desk.

  “You have to look at this,” I said. Each time I touched the story, I felt a low jolt of excitement.

  “Lunchtime soon enough?” Tad asked. He was very serious about keeping the office organized and usually read on his own time.

  “Can’t wait,” I said.

  “Is this Jane Fortune that I see before me? I think you are—dare I say it—ebullient?”

  “Shut up.” I blushed.

  “You can only speak to me
like that because you don’t pay me,” he said, smiling.

  “Just read it,” I said.

  He was embarrassing me. I hated to see myself as he must see me, a desiccated old maid with a lonely passion for literature.

  He sat at his desk, a big oak block I had acquired when my old school was auctioning off some of its ancient furniture. While he read the story, I looked through the mail. There was a packet of clippings about Max Wellman. I used to pull the clippings myself, but eventually I hired a service. Since Max was the first winner of the Fortune Family Fellowship, I had a responsibility to keep up with him, didn’t I? I had been in love with him—maybe I still was—so I used the clipping service to stalk him, in a genteel way, of course.

  The article that arrived that day was a profile of “the author at home” in Vanity Fair. It showed him in his Tribeca loft. He was, if possible, even more handsome than he was when I first met him. I read the article, not just for what was in it, but also for what I could find between the lines.

  “So,” the interviewer, a woman, asked, “you’ve been connected with all sorts of women. Do you have anything to say about that?”

  “What would you like me to say?”

  “Do you have anyone serious in your life?”

  “Isn’t everyone in your life serious?”

  “You are teasing me.”

  “I’m not,” he said.

  “Let’s face it, Mr. Wellman, you are known as the Literary Lothario, New York’s bad boy. Casanova with a pen. Do you care to comment on that?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Okay, then. Your first big success. Duet for One. It’s been said that it was based on a true story, that you could never have written it with such truth, such feeling, if there wasn’t something personal in it.”