Fortune's Daughter

by Alice Hoffman

  “You just remember there’s a big difference between not being able to fight it anymore and feeling like you’re all alone sometimes,” he said.

  “Even when you’re married?” Richard had asked, surprised that his father knew so much about being alone.

  Jason Grey couldn’t stop himself from smiling. “Especially then,” he had said.

  On his wedding night, Richard knew exactly what his father had been talking about. There was a private place in Lila’s mind that was somehow the same as that migrant worker with the shotgun. But if anything, this made Lila seem more precious. When Richard touched the white scars on Lila’s wrist he was dazzled by hope—it was as if Lila had died and come back to him, and he held her tight for a moment, before he stepped away.

  “I am looking at you,” Richard said. “And all I see is my wife.”

  The rest of that summer seemed to last forever; the air smelled like strawberries and the sunlight was unusually thick. Helen was delighted to have another woman in the house, and she taught Lila all her secret recipes, for cabbage soup and jam cake and sweet potato pie. Just before supper Lila always went outside to wait on the lawn for Richard and Jason Grey to come home from work. At that time of day the sky was deep blue, and under that sky Lila felt brand new. For a brief time she was a woman without a history—even her dreams were filled with ordinary things, fireflies and pearl-edged clouds, and teapots made out of copper. She didn’t question her good luck—she didn’t dare to. All she knew was that someone had fallen in love with her, and, amazingly enough, that was all she needed.

  But when autumn came, something changed. At night, after they had made love and Richard had fallen asleep, Lila found herself shivering with fear. She was certain that she would lose Richard: one day when she went out to wait for him Jason Grey’s Chrysler would pull up in the driveway and only her father-in-law would get out. She began to dream about her past; her womb tightened as it had for days after her baby had been born, and the contractions kept her up all night and made her afraid to sleep in the same bed as her husband.

  One night, Richard woke up sometime near dawn to find Lila huddled on the floor. He started to get out of bed, but Lila held up her hand, warning him to stop.

  “Don’t come near me,” she said, and the coldness of her own voice filled her with grief.

  “Come back to bed,” Richard said quietly.

  “If you really knew me you would never love me,” Lila told him.

  “If you’re referring to the fact that you once tried suicide, I know that and I don’t care,” Richard said.

  Lila threw back her head and laughed, and the sound went right through Richard.

  “Come back to bed,” he urged.

  “You really think you know me,” Lila said contemptuously.

  Richard could tell that after only a few months of marriage Lila was drifting away from him, and for the first time he raised his voice to her.

  “Then go ahead and tell me the reason why you tried to kill yourself. You obviously want to tell me, so you go right ahead. Tell me.”

  “I don’t want to,” Lila said in a small voice.

  “Then don’t,” Richard said. “But either do it and get it over with or let it go, because we can’t keep on this way, Lila.”

  Lila got back into bed and put her arms around him.

  “I thought when I met you you said you could read the future,” Richard said.

  “I said tea leaves,” Lila whispered. “That’s all.”

  “Well, I can see into the future,” Richard told her. “You might as well stop fighting it, because we’re going to be together for a very long time.”

  Lila wished she could believe him, but by the time winter came she was convinced that if they stayed in New York State they had no future at all. Someone in East China might manage to find out the truth about her; someone might tell Richard. She felt as if the past were right on her heels, and it got so bad that whenever she went into town to shop for groceries with her mother-in-law she wondered if perhaps the doctor had arranged for a couple in East China to adopt her baby. It became impossible for her to look at a child of any age; she swore her breasts were filling with milk again—at night they ached so badly that she had to sleep on her back. As her own child’s birthday grew near, Lila thought she might be going mad. Every night the sky was orange and black, and the days were as gray as stone. She grew more certain that if she stayed in East China through the winter something terrible would happen. She began to talk about leaving, but Richard imagined that what she wanted was a house of their own. He promised that in less than a year they’d find a house with a view of Long Island Sound and move out. But then one day when it was cold enough to make her shiver and remember the ice storm, Lila walked to the gas station to take Richard and Jason a Thermos of hot coffee and some lunch. There was a car idling by the gas pumps; in the passenger seat was a little girl. The girl’s mother had gone into the office to ask Richard for directions and a map, and when she came back out she found Lila with both her hands on the passenger window, weeping as she stared inside.

  Lila forced herself not to run after the car. It hadn’t mattered that the child wasn’t hers, Lila wanted her. She’d had the terrible urge to get behind the wheel of the car and kidnap her, and if the child’s mother hadn’t come out of the office when she did Lila might have already been driving west. She would have turned the radio on to a low volume, and the heat up to high, and the little girl would have been right beside her, her sleepy breath filling the car with a deliciously sweet odor.

  That was when Lila decided that California was the answer. Once, she had imagined that she and Stephen would go there together and live high above Hollywood, in the hills. Now all she wanted was a place to start over, a place so free of history that the past barely existed. She started talking about going west that evening at supper, and once she started talking she couldn’t seem to stop, not even after the others had put down their forks and turned to look at her.

  “Are you and Richard planning to leave New York?” Helen asked in a frightened voice. For the first time she began to know the dangers of having a daughter-in-law.

  “No,” Richard told her, although he realized that something was about to happen. “We’re not planning anything,” he told his mother.

  Helen was relieved, but when Richard glanced over at his father he didn’t look quite sure of himself, and Jason Grey could tell that his son wouldn’t be in East China much longer.

  Every night Lila begged him to leave. She talked about palm trees and pelicans until Richard began to dream about the Pacific Ocean. In his dreams the ocean was amazingly green, like a thin piece of jade held up to the sun, and blue-eyed pelicans dove into the waves. One night when the snow was falling and Lila was turned away from him, Richard sat up in bed.

  “All right,” he told his wife. “We’ll go to California.”

  Lila kissed him until his cheeks and his eyelids were wet.

  “But you’re the one who has to tell my mother,” Richard said.

  Lila backed away. “You’re her son,” she said. “You tell her.”

  “You’re the one who wants to leave. You tell her.”

  Richard put his arms around Lila and pulled her close.

  “You don’t understand,” he told her. “I’m her only child and as far as she’s concerned she’ll be losing me forever.”

  Richard felt his wife move away from him, even though she was still in his arms.

  “I understand perfectly,” Lila said coolly. “And if you’re too afraid to tell her, I will.”

  But that night Helen was already being told. Jason Grey turned to her in their bed and asked, “How would you like for it to be just you and me again?”

  “You and me?” Helen said, confused. Then she realized what Jason meant. “Oh,” she said, and she started to cry.

  “All you had to do was say no,” Jason teased her.

  “What makes you so sure they’re leaving?” He
len asked.

  “I’m sure,” Jason said. “They just don’t know how to tell us.”

  “Well, if that’s what they’ve decided,” Helen said, still crying, “I can think of a lot worse things than being left here with you.”

  Helen might be losing her son, but she didn’t intend to make it easy for Lila to take him away. First of all, she was sweet as pie—every time Lila began to talk about California Helen offered her a wool sweater that just didn’t suit her anymore, or a new recipe, or a piece of china, until—piece by piece—Lila had an entire service for eight stored in a cardboard box in the attic. Every day Lila swore she would tell her mother-in-law about their plans, and every day she put it off. Richard unpacked their suitcases, convinced that Lila’s obsession with California had been nothing more than a reaction to a particularly cold winter. But when Lila stopped talking about leaving it wasn’t because she wanted it any less.

  One day in January, Lila went up to the bedroom and didn’t come down. She stayed in bed for three days and nights, and every time she breathed she felt a terrible pain in her abdomen. She refused to speak to Richard, and she would not see a doctor. Richard couldn’t bring himself to go to work and he wasn’t allowed in his own room. He sat for hours at the kitchen table, unable to eat, not understanding why he felt as though he had lost his wife.

  On the fourth day Helen spent the morning crying, then she went upstairs. She walked into Lila’s room without bothering to knock and sat at the foot of the bed.

  “You don’t have to tell me what’s wrong,” Helen said. “Just tell me—is leaving New York the only thing that will cure you?”

  Lila hadn’t talked for such a long time that when she spoke her voice was thick.

  “It’s the only thing,” she told her mother-in-law. “If I stay here I’ll die.”

  Helen took the suitcases out of the closet and packed Lila’s and Richard’s clothes. She telephoned Jason at the gas station and asked him to bring home the station wagon he’d been working on to replace their old Chrysler. Then Helen went downstairs to the kitchen and closed the door behind her. While Jason Grey and Richard packed up the station wagon and helped Lila down to the car, Helen baked a honey cake. She used almonds, and sweet brown pears, and when it was done she carefully placed it in a tin that she carried out to the car. She handed the cake to Lila through the window of the station wagon, and she kissed Richard twice before she let him go. Lila held the cake tin on her lap, as if its heat could make her well. When they had been on the Long Island Expressway for over an hour, she suddenly begged Richard to drive into Manhattan.

  “I understand,” Richard had said. “You want to see your parents before we go.”

  But that hadn’t been it at all. It seemed so simple now—Lila would run into the apartment and shake her mother by her shoulders until she divulged the name and address of whoever had stolen Lila’s daughter. Then all Lila had to do was go back out to Richard and tell him that her mother had insisted they take a little cousin with them to raise as their own. Once they reached the house where her daughter was being held, Lila would slip through the front door, wrap the child in a warm blanket, then run as fast as she could. All the way to California she would hold her daughter on her lap—she wouldn’t let go of her, not until the western sky opened up in front of them as they sped past black hills and corrals full of half-wild horses.

  When they got to the apartment building, Richard couldn’t find a parking space, so he circled the block. Lila got out of the car, but once she was standing on the sidewalk her sense of expectation disappeared. She went inside the building and climbed the three flights of stairs, but when she reached the apartment and knocked on the door there was no answer. She knocked again and again, but each time she did she felt more defeated—in the cold hallway her plans to kidnap her daughter seemed ludicrous, and in the end, when she walked downstairs and back out on to the street, she was relieved that no one had been home.

  She could see the station wagon half a block away, stuck in traffic. It was then that she happened to turn back to take one last look at the apartment building, and when she looked upward she saw the curtains moving in the window of the parlor. Up on the third floor, hidden behind lace curtains, Lila’s mother gazed downward. As soon as she realized Lila saw her, she dropped the curtains and moved away. But even then Lila could see her mother’s shadow, a line of black pressed against the white curtains.

  When the station wagon pulled up to the curb, Lila got in, leaned her head against the seat, and wept.

  “They may not be the best in the world, but they’re still your parents,” Richard said. “It’s not easy to leave people behind.”

  Lila reached down and lifted up the hem of her dress to wipe her eyes.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Richard asked. “We don’t have to go to California—we can still turn back.”

  Without bothering to look, Lila knew that her mother was still watching her. She moved over so that Richard could put his arm around her, then she closed her eyes as they drove toward the Lincoln Tunnel, and in no time at all they had left New York behind them for good.

  At first it seemed as if it was only a matter of time. But a year passed, then two, then three, and Lila still hadn’t gotten pregnant. She bathed in tubs filled with warm water and vitamin E, she forced herself to eat calf’s liver twice a week, she gave up caffeine and chocolate and spices. Every morning, before she got out of bed, she took her temperature, and she kept a chart of her ovulation taped to the back of her closet door. But in her heart, Lila knew that she’d never be given another chance; each time Richard talked about the child they would someday have Lila grew more desperate, and by the time she turned thirty she had given up hope.

  The nights they made love, Lila could never sleep. She waited until Richard’s breathing grew deep, and then she carefully got out of bed. On these nights she went out to the garden, and she sat in a black wrought-iron chair beneath the lemon tree. She never bothered with slippers, even though the patio was cold and snails moved across the slate, leaving slick trails behind. There had been something wrong with the garden from the start; the neighbors had warned them that everything you wanted to grow simply wouldn’t, but renegade plants would reappear each time you pulled them out by the roots. At the rear of the yard, along a low wooden fence, the previous owner had foolishly planted a passion flower vine that was now so tangled it had begun to strangle itself with its own flowers. At the time of night when Lila went to sit in the yard it was almost possible to hear the vine growing, wrapping itself tighter around the fence.

  In the mornings Lila climbed back into bed, and Richard never seemed to notice that she’d been gone all night. He still talked about the son they would have someday, the daughter who would look just like Lila, but each year he sounded a little less convinced. When they had been married for fifteen years, Richard said, “Let’s say we can never have any children. Is that the worst that can happen to us?”

  She told him it wasn’t, but secretly Lila believed that it was. Childless women began to disgust her—she could sense their brittle presence in the supermarket and the bakery, she could look right through them and see white dust and bones. The worst times were when Richard’s parents came out to visit. The older they got, the more they wanted grandchildren, but even they knew enough to stop asking when. The year Lila turned thirty-nine was the first time Helen Grey visited without advising them that the guest room would make a perfect nursery. But every now and then during that visit, Lila would look up and find her mother-in-law watching her, as if she were the only person who really knew just how badly Lila had cheated her son.

  That was when Lila began to do readings again. It wasn’t for the money—Richard had bought his own shop—it was because of the comfort she found in reaching into someone else’s sorrow. She began carefully, starting with her neighbors, who were shocked by her sudden interest in them. In time, Lila’s clients swore by her. Her advice was noncommittal but sou
nd, and Lila actually found she was pleased when her clients grew to depend on her, waiting to make travel plans or give a husband an ultimatum until Lila could read their tea leaves. It was one of her regular customers, Mrs. Graham from around the corner, who brought her niece to Lila’s one afternoon. The red tablecloth was set out and the water boiled by the time the two women arrived. Lila read for Mrs. Graham first—the question of whether or not to put her ailing dog to sleep was evaded until next time—and then for the niece. The niece had come from a bad marriage in Chicago, and she was already reconsidering the separation from her husband.

  “What I want to know is will he walk all over me if I go back?” she asked Lila. “I give in to him a lot, and that’s my problem. If he tells me he’s spent his paycheck I say, Why that’s all right—but inside I’d like to kill him.”

  Lila nodded and poured the water over the tea leaves; she could tell that the niece was going back to her husband to give him another chance. She watched the leaves float to the surface without much interest, but when the niece had finished her tea Lila took one look inside the cup and immediately began to cry. Lila’s clients sat on the edge of their seats, and they both let out a whoop when Lila informed the niece that she was pregnant.

  “Wait till I tell my husband,” the niece said. “He is going to flip out when I tell him.”

  After they left, Lila went into the bathroom and ran the cold water, and from then on she refused to open the door if Mrs. Graham came for a reading. All the rest of that month, Lila felt shaky, and each time she closed her eyes she saw the small motionless child in the center of the cup. It was not as if she had not seen death during readings before, but this was different, this was enough to break your heart. She grew careful; if a client even mentioned that she was considering pregnancy, Lila never read for her again. But she was tricked the following year by a high-school student who had accompanied her mother to a reading. Lila had carelessly poured a cup of tea for the girl so that she’d be occupied during her mother’s reading. It wasn’t until the reading was over, and Lila reached for the girl’s cup to carry it into the kitchen, that she saw the symbol again. At first she was paralyzed, but when the mother went out to start her car, Lila found an excuse to pull the girl back into the house. After she’d told the girl she was pregnant, Lila was so upset she was the one who seemed to need comforting.