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 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.