Laurie Horowitz - The Family Fortune

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.

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 earrings, or a combination of these that rendered the effect, I don’t know, but something about her was arresting.

“Like costume jewelry,” Pris said. “She doesn’t fool me with that bottled tan and bleached hair. Dolores Mudd is completely ordinary, if you ask me.” No one did ask her, but that never stopped Priscilla from offering an opinion.

“And it’s so inappropriate,” she said, “her being here, today of all days.” I still didn’t know what Pris meant by that, since Dolores had joined her father for every monthly brunch since she’d returned home in May. “She was definitely not invited, I can assure you.”

Dolores had made a lame excuse when she arrived—something about needing to catch a ride with her father into the city because she was going to a concert on the Esplanade that afternoon—but I didn’t believe her. She was as fascinated with us as Miranda was with her. I feared that it might also have something to do with Teddy, a good catch for someone like Dolores, despite the difference in age. My father is almost irresistible to women, and that’s hard to admit, especially when I haven’t made a dent in the social landscape for years.

“Remember Guy Callow?” Pris asked. She was still holding me in the alcove with a hand hooked into my elbow.

“You can’t blame Miranda for that. It was so long ago.”

“Just an example of Miranda’s bad judgment when it comes to friends.” Priscilla didn’t want to miss yet one more opportunity to offer a negative opinion.

Guy Callow was a short-lived boyfriend of Miranda’s, the son of some of Teddy’s out-of-town friends. The summer Guy took the Massachusetts bar exam, Teddy offered our house as a base of operations. I met Guy briefly but went out to the Vineyard to open our summer house. Teddy and Miranda waited a couple of weeks to make sure Guy had everything necessary to fortify him for the exam—which, apparently, included Miranda. After Teddy left for the Vineyard, Miranda stayed behind. Guy was supposed to come out to the island with her, but a month later she came out alone. She was not happy. She spent hours sitting in the sunroom staring at nothing in particular.

“You want to talk about it?” I asked once.

“Nothing really to say,” she said. “He thinks I’m spoiled, and if he thinks that, then he doesn’t know me at all. I’m hardly spoiled.” She fingered her three tennis bracelets. They sparkled in the sun.

“Do you think I’m spoiled, Jane?”

She had never asked me a question like that before. A better sister would have given a more honest answer.

“He shouldn’t have said it,” I said. “We were all very kind to him, very hospitable. Whatever he thought, he would have been better off keeping it to himself.”

Miranda stared at me and tapped her fingers on the arm of the chair. Perhaps she realized I had given no answer, but she was as morose as I’d ever seen her and I couldn’t hurt her more. I lived by that old rule, “First, do no harm.” Miranda’s malaise lasted five days, but after that, she went back to her tennis games and parties.

Three years later, we heard from Guy’s parents that he had married a Dutch supermodel named Ooh-Lala. When Miranda heard about this she walked down to Saks and bought a Louis Vuitton train case. When she came back from the store, her mood was much improved. The purchase of an expensive piece of luggage, apparently, cured her of any residual feelings she had for Guy Callow. I couldn’t understand how a designer bag could so easily repair a broken heart. I was a different animal. I could remain inconsolable for years.

I finally extricated myself from Priscilla and went into the kitchen, where our housekeeper, Astrid, was cutting mushrooms for a frittata. Her black hair was wrapped around a serving spoon. Tendrils fell forward and she periodically wiped at them with the back of her wrist. Astrid was around my age, but she always acted like an older sister. She must have thought I needed one, despite the obvious fact of Miranda.

“The king is ready,” I said.

“Well, I’m not,” she said. She chopped with ferocity. Astrid joined our family on the heels of my mother’s death. We always had cooks and housekeepers, but compared with Astrid they had all the emotional depth of a kitchen appliance. Astrid floated up our walk one winter, swinging her hips like a Brazilian Mary Poppins, and I don’t know what I would have done without her.

I picked a mushroom from the cutting board, slipping my fingers around her moving knife.

“I cut your fingers off,” she warned.

“Not on purpose, I hope.” I popped the mushroom into my mouth. “Need help?”

“You take the coffee out.” She nodded toward the Limoges coffee service.

“Astrid?”

“Yes?”

“Do you know what’s going on here today? What this brunch is all about?” She looked at me. She knew. “Tell me,” I said.

“Ouch,” she said. I looked at her hand. She had sliced into her finger. The cut was bleeding into the mushrooms. “Damn,” she said. “Toss those, will you, Jane? The ones with the blood.” She went over to the sink to run some cold water over her hand, then wrapped her finger in a paper towel.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Take the coffee out,” she said.

“Astrid?”

“Please, Jane, take the coffee out.”

I lifted the heavy coffee urn, balancing it with one hand on its base, and carried it into the dining room, where the entire party was now seated.

“About time,” Teddy said. “Where on earth is Astrid?”

“She cut her finger.”

“That was clumsy of her.”

My father liked to think that one person—Astrid—could handle every chore in our house. It was as if he never noticed me picking up after him, folding his clothes, putting Miranda’s shoes away, throwing in a load of laundry, dusting a room. The illusion of “help” was especially important to him when we had company. We were a family with a full-time servant, and for Teddy, the show was more important than the service itself.