Laurie Horowitz - The Family Fortune

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.

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.