Fortune's Daughter: A Novel

by Alice Hoffman

  The earth had already begun to settle, but that night everyone moved with caution getting into bed, as if anything might happen while you slept. The dog lay down beside the bed; it was so quiet that twice Rae reached down and touched its head, just to make certain she wasn’t alone. She felt more a captive of her own body than ever—she longed to sleep on her stomach, her ribs and back ached. In the dark she could hear her own pulse, and it seemed too loud and too fast. Her pregnancy felt like a bottomless pool, and now that she had jumped and the water was almost over her head, she could not imagine why she had ever made this leap. Even though she now knew that Lila would be there with her in the labor room if she wanted her, something was missing. It wasn’t just that Jessup had disappeared, it was the feeling that she was having this baby without having had any past of her own. Who would send presents, who would look for photographs of her as an infant so that she could compare and see if the baby took after her?

  As she fell asleep Rae found herself trying to imagine Carolyn on the day of her own birth. She knew only this: It had taken two days for her to be born. For two days her father had sat in the waiting room, he had shaved in the visitor’s washroom and ordered sandwiches delivered from a deli down the street. Down the hall, Carolyn had to be strapped into her bed. At the very end, when she couldn’t stand it any more, they gave her Demerol, but it didn’t last long enough, and when it wore off she begged them for more. For an hour they left her there, strapped to the bed, and when it came time for the baby to be delivered they told her about something called twilight sleep and then hooked an IV to her arm. After that the pain grew worse, too enormous to respond to, but she wasn’t really there. She could hear herself screaming, yet she was detached, and although the nurse swore they had shown her the baby the moment she was born, Carolyn couldn’t remember a thing about it, and when she was given her daughter to hold she held on tight, for fear it might be discovered that she hadn’t really had a baby at all.

  That night Rae had no dreams, as if she’d been given twilight sleep herself, and when she woke in the morning she realized that she’d been crying in her sleep. She had a cup of tea, then gave the dog two of the Pet Tabs she’d gotten at the vet. When they went out for a walk the air seemed back to normal, the flawless blue air of April. The dog carefully kept pace alongside Rae, but the one habit Rae hadn’t been able to break it of was chasing birds, and it took off, behind some bushes, after a pair of jays. Rae clapped her hands and whistled, and as she waited for the dog to grow tired and trot back down the sidewalk she decided that she wasn’t quite as prepared for the baby as she’d thought. The nightgowns and crib sheets were laundered twice and carefully folded, the hats threaded with ribbons were stacked in a neat pile, the medicine chest was stocked with Vaseline and cotton and rubbing alcohol. But there was still one more thing she needed, and she clipped the dog’s leash on so that it wouldn’t run off again, and went right back to her apartment. She got her car keys and her pocketbook, and then she went out and spent the rest of the day shopping for a pair of red shoes.

  By the time Rae was ten days overdue, Richard and Lila had played a hundred games of gin rummy. They played at the kitchen table and they kept score. There was anticipation in everything they did, and each morning when Rae phoned to tell them still nothing had happened, they looked at each other and sighed. At night they both heard Rae’s relaxation tape in their dreams—the sound of wind chimes, two flutes playing scales. Richard had taught Lila all of the breathing techniques, and he didn’t hide his great relief that both of them would be there in the labor room with Rae. But secretly Lila wasn’t certain that she’d go through with it.

  Richard had decided to take care of the earthquake damage himself; instead of calling the tree service Lila had found in the phone book, he borrowed a saw from their next-door neighbor and began to cut the lemon tree into logs. He had already collected all the lemons from the ground, and each day Lila made a fresh pitcher of lemonade. When there were only three lemons left, Lila made one last pitcherful, and as she stirred in a cup of sugar she suddenly realized that if they had had a child together it would have been long gone, to a separate life, to a family of its own, and it would have been just the two of them in this house anyway. When she took Richard a glass of lemonade he switched off the buzz saw and drank the whole glass without pausing. All around them the air smelled sweet; if they saved the logs and rationed them carefully in the small fireplace in the living room they might be able to capture the scent of lemons all that next winter. They could hold hands in the dark and watch the wood burn from November to March, and each time it rained it would seem like April in their house.

  Richard bent down and put his empty glass alongside the tree stump. When he stood up his back cracked. He couldn’t use the saw for more than an hour without feeling it that night, and the job was taking him days longer than he’d planned.

  “Maybe I should have hired a kid to do this,” he said now. “Maybe it was a mistake not to call a service that would come and dynamite the stump.” He surveyed his work and looked puzzled; the more logs he cut, the more wood there seemed to be still left to cut. “I should have been able to cut this all in one day,” Richard said.

  He seemed so fragile that Lila put her arms around him, and she stayed out there with him, sitting in the sun while he cut more wood. She thought of Hannie, who had been married less than a year when her husband had gone off with the other men in the village to buy grain, and had then disappeared. A sudden autumn storm had trapped the men in the woods; at night the people in the village could hear wolves howling, but there was nothing they could do. Later, four of the men were found in the woods, buried under new drifts of snow. All of the sixteen women who had become widows mourned their husbands together, but as she sat on a wooden crate in the ashes with the line of other women, Hannie had felt nothing at all—she was already pregnant but she barely knew her husband, she couldn’t even remember what his favorite meal had been.

  When Lila looked at Richard, she remembered everything about him. The way the bed creaked when he sat down and pulled off his shoes, the smell of blueberry pancakes, his favorite breakfast, on Sunday mornings. When she looked at him carefully she could see the boy he used to be, right there beneath his skin, and she had the urge to kiss him. Soon Richard finished cutting logs, and he came to sit next to her in a wrought-iron chair. Lila felt herself grow excited. When he looked at her that way she knew he was seeing her for who she really was.

  That night they went to bed early, and they took off their clothes under the covers and laughed the way they used to when it was freezing cold in their bedroom in East China. When they made love they felt each other’s bodies, but they also could feel the way they used to be, and the delight of knowing somebody so well was so staggering it made them weep and hold each other tight all night long.

  On the morning when Rae was eleven days past her due date, Lila woke up with a lump in her throat. All that night she had dreamed of Hannie, and now she remembered the reason Hannie had come to New York in the first place: she had lost her son in the war. It had been the worst winter anyone could remember; the ice was thick enough to swallow you alive. Thousands had been left homeless and they wandered from village to village, stealing from root cellars and begging for food. When the mayor came to tell Hannie that her son had been killed, she couldn’t contain her grief, her screams could be heard all over the village, and mothers held their hands over their children’s ears. Hannie’s son had been a soldier, but to her he was still a boy. Her neighbors built up the fire in her stove, but once they had gone out to bring her some soup, Hannie locked her door and wouldn’t let them back in. She sat there by the stove, with a blanket around her, and as the night grew later, her grief grew as well. When her neighbors pounded on her door, Hannie ignored them. What good were they to her—they couldn’t tell her what she wanted to know. She was obsessed with finding out the way her son died—if he had been in pain, if the end had been quick, if he had
called out for her as he lay dying. After a while she convinced herself that he had—he had wanted his mother, and no one had come to him.

  There was a storm that night, and the wind was fierce. Every now and then, Hannie heard a pounding on her door, but she didn’t move to answer it. Her despair was blinding, it did away with time. When she called out to her son, she swore she could hear his childish voice answer and call her Mama. Finally, she fell asleep, and as she slept the drifts outside grew higher and the fire in the stove went out and a trail of smoke floated between the ceiling and the floor. When she woke up, Hannie opened the window and waved the smoke outside. Then she went to the door. It was jammed, and she had to push harder and harder. At last it fell away. The sunlight was so harsh that Hannie held one arm over her eyes to shield them, but of course she could see what had been against her door, and her blood drained away. It was a boy of ten, one of the many homeless, and he’d been frozen to the ground, his hands still reaching for the door. It had been his voice she’d heard all night, he’d been the one crying for his mother, and no one had come to him, no one had lifted him out of the ice to carry him home.

  Hannie left her village the very next day, and during the two years it took her to reach New York, she decided to concentrate on the future. That’s when she began to read tea leaves, at first for no money, and later for only a token.

  When Lila had heard Hannie’s story, she had not known how to react. It was too awful, condolences could never be enough. But Hannie had seemed so detached it was almost as if she had been telling a story about someone else. Hannie called for the waitress and ordered toast and jam, although when her order came she only spread butter on her bread very thinly, with the brittle motions of someone who knows she can’t explain her grief any more than she can describe the moment when she knows she has held on to her grief for too long.

  Lila knew that it was sometimes quite impossible to account for some very simple things: how your life can go on after you’ve lost your child, how the clear blue sky of an early morning can move you to tears, how a woman can stand by her own kitchen window and watch her husband go out to gather wood and not want anything more than that one moment—that instant when the man she loves sees her watching through the curtains, and turns to wave.

  On the twelfth day after her due date Rae began to have chaotic cramps that came and went and a feeling that wire was being pulled taut all the way around, from her belly to her backbone. She drank herbal tea and read magazines. There was no point in alerting Richard and Lila because Rae thought it might be nothing more than back strain, something gone wrong with her spine. But the cramps grew stronger, and when they began to come at five-minute intervals Rae knew they were contractions. She phoned her doctor. She was ready to leave for the hospital then and there, but her doctor told her to call back when the contractions were two minutes apart.

  Late in the day, when nothing had changed, Rae grew calmer. She got out the mop and washed the kitchen floor, then took the dog out and watched it chase birds in the courtyard. She did all this between contractions, which had begun to feel familiar, separate from childbirth, some flaw in her body she’d have to learn to live with. Then they changed. They were still coming five minutes apart, but they were hot, as if someone pressed a burning bar of iron into her flesh at regular intervals. She took a cold shower and let the water beat against her spine. But she was still so hot that she opened every window in the apartment, and as she leaned out the kitchen window, to gulp down some cool evening air, she saw that a pickup truck was parked at the curb.

  Rae threw on a dress, then held the dog back by its collar until she could run out the door. All week she’d felt Jessup had been there, late at night, at hours when Rae didn’t go out. Now she’d caught him. He was sitting behind the wheel, eating his dinner out of a McDonald’s bag when Rae pounded on the passenger window. Jessup looked at her through the glass; he held his hamburger in the air and for a moment he seemed to be considering turning the key in the ignition and stepping on the gas as hard as he could. Rae knocked on the window again, and after he’d looked at her a little longer, Jessup leaned over and rolled it down. Rae held on to the base of the window and lifted herself up to get a better look.

  “I knew you were sneaking around here,” she said triumphantly.

  “I’m not sneaking anywhere,” Jessup said. “I just don’t happen to have an address right now. That’s all.”

  “So you’ve just been parking here,” Rae said.

  “That’s right,” Jessup told her.

  “You just happened to pick my street out of all the streets in Southern California? How dare you park here and eat a goddamned hamburger? How dare you think you can do this to me?”

  “All right!” Jessup said. “I happen to think I have a right to see my kid.”

  “Oh, really,” Rae said.

  “Are you going to let me see him or not?” Jessup said.

  Rae was holding on to the edge of the window; she pulled herself up and held on tighter as she felt a contraction begin. For seven nights Jessup had been watching the apartment, but because he didn’t want to be found out, he never saw more than what might happen in any apartment after midnight: a light switched on, a window opened, a shade lowered. Now, all he saw was Rae’s face, her fingers, her narrow shoulders.

  “It was a boy, wasn’t it?” Jessup said.

  She stepped away from the truck and let him see how huge she was. “It hasn’t been born yet, but when it is I’ll send you a telegram.” She began to walk away. “If you have an address by then,” she called over her shoulder.

  When she heard the door of the truck open and slam shut, Rae began to walk faster. She could feel that this contraction was different; the wire around her was so hot and tight it was impossible to move.

  “I want to talk to you,” Jessup called.

  Rae tried to keep walking but couldn’t. She inhaled slowly and counted to five, then exhaled and counted again. By the time Jessup had run across the courtyard, she was doubled over.

  “Are you okay?” Jessup said.

  Rae took his hand and placed it on her belly so that he could feel the contraction.

  “Jesus Christ,” Jessup said, withdrawing his hand. “Rae.”

  Jessup leaned toward her so she could support herself on his arm until the contraction was over. Afterward, he tried to follow Rae into the apartment, but the dog stood in the doorway, barking.

  “Get this dog away from me,” Jessup said.

  Rae looked through the drawer in the night table for an old watch with a second hand. Jessup tried to push the dog back with his foot, but each time he did its barks were worse than before.

  “I’m going to have to kick the shit out of you,” Jessup told the dog.

  “Stop it!” Rae said.

  Jessup and the dog looked over at her.

  “I thought you were supposed to have already had this baby,” Jessup said.

  Rae went to the doorway and held the dog by its collar. She could feel the vibration of a growl low in its throat.

  “That just shows how little you know,” Rae said.

  It wasn’t just the dog’s growl she was feeling, she could feel vibrations in the air.

  “I need something to drink,” Rae said. “Herbal tea.”

  Jessup looked at her confused. “You want me to make you tea?”

  “I think you could manage it,” Rae said. “They’ve trained chimpanzees to make tea—all you have to do is fill the kettle and turn on the burner.”

  Jessup went into the kitchen, and Rae could hear him rummaging through everything, making a mess.

  “Mint,” she called. “In the first cabinet.”

  After she sat down in the easy chair Rae realized she was still holding on to the dog’s collar. The metal felt cool, like the chain-link fence that marked off Rae’s parents’ house from the next-door neighbors’. When Jessup came in with the tea, Rae waved him away. It had been a little more than two minutes between con
tractions, and this last one had gone on for nearly a minute. The blood had drained from Jessup’s face, and all you had to do was look at him to see how scared he was.

  “Let’s go,” Jessup said. “I’m taking you to the hospital.”

  “I have to time the next one,” Rae said. She still couldn’t let go of the dog. “I don’t want to get to the hospital and have to turn around and come back home.”

  Jessup took the wristwatch and sat on the edge of the bed, facing Rae.

  “You really have nerve,” Rae said. “What makes you think I want you here?”

  She could feel the next one beginning, low in her back, spreading out in a circle.

  “Is it starting?” Jessup said. “Should I time it?”

  Rae nodded and began to breathe deeply. She kept her eyes focused on the center of Jessup’s forehead. As the contraction subsided she thought of how Jessup couldn’t wait to be born, how they’d had to stop the elevator and deliver him right there. After twelve days of hesitation, Rae’s baby suddenly seemed to take after its father. She could feel its urgency inside her, and she knew that the time had come. She let go of the dog’s collar, and when the dog whined and rested its head on her knee, she gently pushed it away. And then Rae felt a pop, like the sensation you feel in your ears when a jet suddenly drops and the pressure changes.

  “Something’s happening,” Rae whispered.

  Jessup ran over to her, but before he could reach Rae her water broke. Her dress was drenched, and beneath the easy chair there was a pool of liquid.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Jessup said.

  He knelt down beside her, stricken. It took Rae a moment to realize that he hadn’t the faintest idea of what had just happened. As far as Jessup could tell she was dying, first water, then blood, then her bones might begin to dissolve.

  In spite of herself, Rae smiled. “Don’t be an idiot,” she said. “This is supposed to happen. Get me a towel and the blue dress in the closet.”