Laurie Horowitz - The Family Fortune

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.”

“I write fiction. It was a story.”

This interviewer wasn’t having much luck with Max. I knew that Duet for One, at least the first part, was about me. I knew it, but since I had been so closemouthed about my relationship with Max, no one else did. Max had re-created the scene in the restaurant with Bentley, the scene in the bathroom when Bentley vomited on his shoes (a scene Max managed to make laugh-out-loud funny), and the trip back to Bentley’s apartment. He had written about my arrival at the beach cottage with a new pair of shoes. In Duet for One, the couple’s relationship hinges on that pair of shoes.

Tad finished reading “Boston Tech” and looked up with the glazed expression of someone who’s been far away.

“It’s awesome,” he said. That was high praise for Tad, though it was a word I would have liked to cure him of. So few things in life were really awesome, and it was such a wonderful word when used sparingly. But maybe, this time, he was right. Maybe “Boston Tech” was awesome.

“Should I call Bentley?” I asked.

Tad brandished a pile of stories.

“I haven’t found anything as good as this,” he said. “I don’t think you’ll find another one as good.”

“I know.”

With Tad listening on the other line, we called Bentley.

“I want to call this Jack Reilly right away,” I said.

“I’d like to read the story first,” he said.

“Then meet me. Meet me now, and I’ll give it to you.”

“I can’t meet you until later,” he said. “I have a class to teach.”

“Six o’clock at Finn’s, then?”

“Okay.”

Bentley now lived on the other side of the Charles River. He moved there after he married Melody James, who inherited a two-family clapboard house in Somerville. It was convenient, since Harvard had snatched him away from Wellesley. His work with the foundation had given him a reputation for literary discrimination and taken his career to a new level.

I didn’t know what to do with myself for the rest of the afternoon. I was too excited to sit in the office, so I packed all the stories into my tote.

“How old is that bag?” Tad asked. He seemed to have a new haircut every week, and this week’s caused him to keep pushing his bangs out of his eyes.

“Older than you are,” I said, “and your point?”

“It’s ancient, stained, and ugly. You could use something new. Ever think of getting rid of that Talbots look and going for something a little more hip?”

“I don’t shop at Talbots and this bag is fine. The best thing about it is it will last forever.”

“No, Jane, that’s the worst thing about it.”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” I said.

I decided to kill some of the time before meeting Bentley by walking over to the Gardner Museum. I could have some lunch, then wander upstairs to see if Euphemia was still there. She would be, of course. She was in a painting and therefore trapped. Besides, even if she could walk away from her spot in that second-rate painting on the third floor, I didn’t think she’d have the nerve.

Finn’s was a small restaurant-bar on Beacon Street on the Brookline-Boston border. From Kenmore Square to Finn’s you pass several neighborhoods and you can easily slip from a safe one to an unsafe one just by taking a few steps in the wrong direction.

Finn’s is on the safe side of the line, a neighborhood full of brick town houses that have been converted into apartments and student housing.

The first time I ever went to Finn’s, I was meeting Bentley to convince him to come help me with the fellowship and the Review. I had recently graduated from Wellesley College. Wellesley College was argyle kneesocks and wool skirts. It was field hockey and long afternoons staring at the ducks in the pond while doodling poetry on thick white tablets. They say that going to a women’s college is good for a girl’s self-esteem. I think it would have worked for me if I hadn’t been derailed by my mother’s illness. I couldn’t locate my self-esteem for a while after that.

Since Bentley was a “blocked” writer, he spent his days advancing the crushes his students had on him. I hadn’t been one of those students. His bad-boy tweed and air of dissipation hadn’t impressed me. Still, he was the only published author I knew, so I called him to ask if he would help me with my project.

“Which one were you?” he asked on the phone.

“Jane Fortune.” I had already given my name. I gave it again while I tried to think of something about me he might remember, but I couldn’t think of anything that made me stand out from the other girls.

While I was still thinking he said, “I remember you. I remember the journal you wrote in my class.” Evan Bentley had his students keep a journal about the books he assigned us. We were supposed to write as we went along, but I ended up pulling an all-nighter and writing the journal in a frantic rush. He gave it back to me with an “A++” written at the top. Thanks to Bentley, I still keep a journal.