Laurie Horowitz - The Family Fortune

“You want me to stay and watch the car?” he asked.

“It’ll be okay,” I said. I was none too sure about that, but I was willing to risk it. In minutes, we’d be ringing the doorbell and Jack Reilly would come to the door. He might slouch a little, have heavy brows, and a sexy smile. He’d be thrilled when I told him he’d won the fellowship, just as every winner had been thrilled. He’d be grateful and an instant connection would be made.

Jack Reilly’s apartment was on the third floor. Tad and I walked up the stairs. Someone had clipped their toenails onto the carpet and the hall smelled like fried fish.

We reached the door and I rang the bell. Nothing. We looked at each other and waited. Tad hit the bell again. There was movement inside.

The door was opened by a woman. She had one sponge curler in her hair and an unlit cigarette dangling from between her lips. She was thin and wore gray sweatpants and a pink T-shirt with no bra underneath. Tad stared at her as if he’d never seen a woman before.

“Yes?” she asked.

“We’re looking for Jack Reilly,” I said.

“You the police?”

“No.” In my suit, I guess I might have been mistaken for a very well-dressed detective, but Tad was every inch the college kid. “Jack Reilly has won an award,” I said.

“Are you Publishers Clearing House? Where’s Ed McMahon?” She poked her head into the hallway and looked around.

“I am Jane Fortune of the Fortune Family Foundation. Jack applied for our fellowship.”

“Fellowship?”

“Isn’t he a writer?” I was beginning to think something was terribly wrong. Maybe we had the wrong address.

“I guess you could say that. He scribbles. Won’t even get a decent job.” The woman’s voice was nasal, not too different from my sister Miranda’s.

“Is he here?” I asked.

“He took off. I don’t know where he is,” she said.

“Do you have his phone number?”

“I doubt he even has a phone. I had to beg him to get his own phone when he lived here. He likes to live off the grid.”

“Off the grid?”

“No phone, no address. He wouldn’t want the IRS to be able to find him, not after all the years he’s forgotten to pay his taxes.” She hadn’t invited us in and it didn’t look like she was going to.

“Isn’t there any way we can reach him?” I asked.

“I think I have his sister’s address around here somewhere,” she said. “But how do I know you are who you say you are?”

“You don’t, really,” I said. “I do have a card somewhere, but that doesn’t mean much.” I dug into my bag—the old canvas one—and fished a card out of my wallet. I handed it over.

She shrugged. “You know, I don’t even know why I asked. I guess it just seemed like the right thing to do, not that Jack would ever do the right thing. To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t care if you were the Mafia. If you find him, can you remind him that he owes me two hundred bucks? I’ll go find the address. I’ll be right back.” She retreated into the apartment, leaving the door open a crack.

Tad looked at me. “That’s that, then,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“We looked for him. We can’t find him. He seems like a loser anyway,” he said.

“We don’t know that,” I said. “Look at her. She isn’t exactly an arbiter of good taste. For all we know, he could just be some kind of iconoclast, which would be appropriate for a really great artist.”

“I thought you didn’t believe that artists had a license to misbehave. That’s what you always say.”

“Well, that’s true.” He was making me a little uncertain. I did have a long-held belief that the true artist spent more time on his art than on creating an artistic persona.

“He owes her two hundred and fifty dollars,” Tad said.

“Two hundred,” I said.

“Two hundred, then. He still sounds like a loser.”

“She probably doesn’t understand him,” I said.

Tad looked at me as if I’d gone mad.

“You sound like the other woman,” Tad said.

He was right. I had all the symptoms of infatuation for a man I hadn’t even met. Maybe you become susceptible to that sort of thing when you’ve been alone too long.

The woman came back with a slip of paper that had been ripped from a notepad. She was also carrying a spiral notebook and two books, Jitterbug Perfume and Duet for One. “This is his sister’s address. She lives in Vermont. I’m sorry, but I don’t even know her name. I know it isn’t Reilly.”

I took the paper and pulled out my wallet. I slipped the paper in and took out a hundred-dollar bill. “Here,” I said. “Some money came with the fellowship. Here’s a down payment on his debt.”

“Thanks,” she said. She smiled. “That’s white of you. Look,” she said, “if you find him, can you give him these?” She handed over the notebook and the books. “He left them here and frankly you have a better chance of seeing him than I do. I hate when men abandon stuff after they leave. So if you take it—whatever you do with it—it would be a favor to me.”

I slipped the things into my bag. Of course I’d find Jack Reilly. I might as well take them.

We walked back down the hall, then down the fish-stinking stairwell and out onto the street. The car was still there, and untouched.

“That’s that, then,” Tad said after we got inside.

“Why do you keep saying that?”

“There’s no point in looking for him. I don’t know why you took that stuff. I think we should just dump it right here into the sewer.”

“I disagree,” I said.

Tad frowned. “Come on. Let’s get out of here,” he said.

I pulled from the curb and we drove away from Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin—you never come out the way you went in.

We reconvened Tuesday evening to discuss the finer points of our financial collapse.

After dinner we went into the sitting room. I sat on the brocade sofa in one of what Priscilla called the “conversation areas.” I didn’t want to take a seat in the corner. My days of sitting in the corner like a china figurine were over—at least for the moment.

Littleton perched on a Chippendale chair near me. Miranda sat on a settee. Dolores had stayed at home for once. I glanced at Pris, who was knitting with a fluffy green wool. Teddy was slumped in a wingback chair by the fireplace. He sat just apart from our little group, as if he couldn’t bear to join us.

“You’ll have to cut out the Christmas party,” Littleton said.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Miranda said. Miranda was a renowned Boston party-giver. People jockeyed all year to get onto her Christmas party list. She had three-by-five cards on her dressing table with people’s names on them and she moved them from one pile to another depending on how well disposed she was toward the person on that particular day.

Though I wasn’t much of a party person, even I enjoyed Miranda’s Christmas parties. They were always done in a Roaring Twenties style with a big band and costumes. I liked watching the couples pull up to the valet in their fancy cars. They’d rush into the cold, the women hobbling toward the house in spiked heels, the men secure in their spats, and arrive at the door all flushed and smiling, blowing the frosty air like smoke.

Miranda loved to pull the strings of Boston society. She got invited to all the best parties because people hoped that their invitations would be returned. It was as if after my mother died, Miranda and I split her traits down the middle. Miranda got everything that was outgoing and social and I got all that was thoughtful and sedentary. Miranda flourished and became, in her way, a social luminary. Town & Country did a story on her. When Miranda and Teddy went out together, their pictures often appeared in the society pages of the Boston Globe.

“To be honest, you can barely afford to run this house, and if you are to continue to do it, you’ll have to make some major changes. Perhaps you could take in boarders,” Littleton said.

Priscilla’s head snapped up. I tried to picture myself as the proprietor of the Fortune Family Bed & Breakfast. We would introduce our guests to the moneyed class of the twenty-first century, the diminishing, foolish, useless moneyed class that didn’t even have the sense to hang on to what they had been given.

But, of course, the city would never allow it, nor would our neighbors, nor would our sense of propriety.

“Take in boarders?” Miranda whined. “What can you be thinking, Littleton?”

Littleton was perspiring into the collar of his shirt. He took out a linen handkerchief and wiped it across his neck.

“I don’t understand how this happened.”

This came from Miranda, whose collection of designer shoes and handbags filled an entire walk-in closet on the second floor. Teddy had some expensive habits also. He collected wines, cigars, antique watches, and first editions of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. He didn’t read the books; he just collected them. But all these things were minor indulgences for us. What had really happened was that for two generations we lived extravagantly and made no money. The family had dipped into the principal of its many trusts little by little until they were dangerously depleted.

My father also made some bad investments. He would read something in the paper, get an idea, and call his “broker.”

“Couldn’t we remortgage the house?” Teddy asked.

“You have two mortgages already,” Littleton said.

“We do?” I asked. I thought our house, which my father inherited free and clear, had remained that way.