Caroline's Daughters

by Alice Adams

  Sage has not told anyone just why her stay in New York is so prolonged, as far as Jill knows (she might have told Portia but no one has spoken to Portia). Sage mentions work and treatments for her arm at some hospital there—both quite credible to Jill, and to Caroline, whom Sage calls regularly. But not to Noel, who insists that Sage has always said she can only work at home, in her studio (the studio that he built for her), and that really nothing could be the matter with her arm. He suspects, he tells Jill, that something is going on between Sage and “that dealer guy with the funny name.” Meaning Calvin Crome, whom Sage has indeed mentioned to Caroline.

  Jill, who has not said this to Noel, does not think so; he is only judging by his own motives, what would most likely keep him in New York.

  If Sage were having a relationship in New York, and that is how Sage undoubtedly would put it, she would most likely call Noel and tell him right out, “Noel, I’m having a relationship with my dealer, Calvin Crome. I want a divorce, but when I come home we can talk about it.” That would be Sage’s style, that awful Sixties “openness,” that stupid talk-about-it school of thought.

  And so there is Noel, consumed with jealousy, and probably staying home for more or less that reason. Thinking that Sage might show up. Afraid to leave. It’s fairly funny, really, Jill finds.

  When she is not meditating on the eastern view, Jill takes long walks, in a number of different directions, and with different ends in view. She goes to the beach, just up and over a sandy ridge, past a small grove of cypresses, wind-bent and strange, like weird sculptures. And then just ahead is the rough blue Pacific, with uneven lines of foam (like giant crazy coke lines, Jill has thought), striations of darker, almost purple water, out in the depths.

  Arrived at the beach, she can take either direction: to the right, up past Sea Drift and all those crowded-together, over-priced houses, to the end of that spit of land, the channel separating Stinson from Bolinas, where Portia might or very well might not be.

  Or, in the other, leftward direction, back toward the town of Stinson Beach, past the shabby calles of the relatively poor to the several crazily expensive houses up on stilts, there on the sand. (Earthquake fodder, Jill has thought of those houses.)

  Every night, for the sunset, Jill takes one or the other of those beach walks, choosing more or less at random.

  More practically, each morning she walks from her house into town, about a mile and a half, to shop for whatever she plans to eat that day. And for the newspaper; she does not turn on the radio for news, and there is no TV.

  But even during these scenically diverting and energetic walks, always a new and changing landscape through which Jill walks very fast—still she is aware of a heavy, almost dizzying apprehension which has been with her, like a strong and resistant virus, since the first revelation of Buck Fister’s address book. When she saw her name among his “friends.” Her fears are very imprecise, nonspecific, and thus worse: she fears that anything at all could happen now. It is not exactly that her imagination pictures further headlines, “Buck Fister Names Young Lawyer as Former Call Girl. Daughter of—Graduate of—Sister of—” On the other hand, sometimes she does imagine exactly that, and when the phone rings she imagines just such a message.

  Or, maybe she does in fact have a virus? Could she conceivably have AIDS, in some early form? She has meant to go and get herself tested but always she has managed to put it off. She is uncertain as to first symptoms, other than those terrible dark blemishes, Kaposi’s something. But those come later, she thinks.

  Of course she does not have AIDS, but she does not feel well at all, she feels constantly fearful, menaced. Ill-prepared for whatever should happen next.

  The general store at the crossroads is sometimes crowded. Jill is always afraid that she will see someone there she knows, from somewhere—even Portia, from Bolinas—and she will have to explain or invent an explanation for her presence in Stinson Beach. To say where she is staying, all that. As a defense against such a person, such inquiries, she has taken to wearing her large dark shades, and a dumb-looking flowered scarf that she found in the house, covering her hair. And she hurries through her tiny list of purchases: lemons, bran, eggs, frozen Weight Watchers’ pizza, frozen W.W. zucchini lasagne. (Noel would die if he knew what she ate out here, Noel the big gourmet cook.) And then at the checkout stand a Chronicle. Generally she scans the headlines for a minute while her bill is being added up, and often that is as far as she gets with the paper until dinnertime.

  Thus, it is there at the checkstand of the Stinson Beach general store that Jill learns of Buck Fister’s death. His killing. Murder.

  PROMINENT REAL ESTATE BROKER SLAIN OUTSIDE SO-MA CLUB.

  Instantly certain that Buck is the broker in question (and why? it could have been someone else, some one of hundreds), Jill drops her eyes to the story. And yes, it was Alberto “Buck” Fister (Alberto? Buck is/was Italian? that is surprising, somehow)—well known, highly successful though recently under Grand Jury investigation for alleged involvement in a prostitution operation—who was shot at close range by an unknown assailant or assailants as he left the new club, Heavy Duty, on Folsom Street, in the early hours of yesterday morning. Mr. Fister had come in and gone out alone. There were no witnesses. He had a drink at the bar, had talked to no one. It was the bartender’s impression that he was meeting someone there who did not show up. A mother, Mrs. Rosette Arnold, of Elko, Nevada, listed as the sole survivor. No friends were available for comment. Dead on arrival at Mission Emergency Hospital.

  “That’ll be twelve seventy-nine.”

  “—what?”

  “Twelve seventy-nine. Oh, and seventy-five for the paper. You want the paper?”

  “Yes.”

  “Out of twenty. Thank you, and have a nice day. Say, don’t forget your groceries!”

  The public beach is a short two blocks from the store, from the crossroads at the entrance to town, and it is there, in the women’s room provided for picnickers, that Jill repairs with her paper, and with the groceries she almost forgot.

  In her booth, seated on the closed toilet seat, she reads and rereads that item, as though closer scrutiny might yield further information. Which it does not. No witnesses, no clues. The bartender’s name was Clancy Barnes. No suggestions as to motive.

  Anyone at all could have wanted Buck dead, including me, thinks Jill. Or, it could have been what they call a random killing, the kind we all dread for ourselves, just a wrong-place wrong-time death. Some crackhead driving past and not liking your face—and who in his or her right mind ever liked Buck’s face, all those mean little features crowded into the middle of the circle of his head, especially those tiny pig eyes. A pig’s face, and now a dead pig.

  But suppose it turns out not to have been Buck after all? That quite irrational fear, which she knows to be irrational, nevertheless sweeps through Jill’s heart, like a chilly wind. Suppose this is all an elaborate plot for Buck’s escape, a plot contrived by Buck himself, so that he can show up somewhere very far away, having evaded both the Grand Jury and all the local people like herself who wished him dead? All the whores, like her.

  But that is mad, truly mad. It must have been Buck.

  Refolding her paper, Jill stands up and walks quickly out of that building, out into the manzanita thickets that thrive in that low-lying sandy area of the park, out through the thickets to the open beach.

  On the sand she stops and for several minutes she simply stands there, breathing hard, as though she had run, her paper still clutched to her side.

  The air is fresh and cool, faint smells of gasoline fumes from the highway mingle with beach smells of salt, and dead fish. As foghorns blend with the sound of a bulldozer, from a building site farther up the beach. Fog, massed and gray, obscures the western horizon, as, closer in, gray waves curl and foam at the edge of the beach.

  Would anyone imagine or believe that she had anything to do with this, with this careful murder of Buck? Jill finds that
she does not believe for an instant that the killing was random, if anything it seemed very well planned indeed, what the papers like to call a gangland killing. On the other hand, it is crazy to fear that anyone might in any way connect her, accuse her of having done it. For one thing, she actually is innocent, she only wished him dead, and she has not been so foolish as to say so; no one knows how much she hated Buck, how she wished him dead.

  Except Noel. When she told Noel about the tricks, of course she also mentioned Buck, in an accidental way—and Noel, along with being so incredibly, wildly turned on by the very idea, Jill doing it with strangers in strange hotel rooms, for money—along with all that terrific excitement and a part of it, maybe, was Noel’s white-hot rage at Buck, street-Irish anger, turning Noel into a fighter, glaring, eyes on fire. Like a dark little rooster: Jill now remembers this secret thought that she had of Noel, her private smile as he ranted and swore at Buck. (Cocksucker, motherfucker—funny that these are the worst things men can find to say about each other.)

  And once Buck’s address book was more or less published in the paper, Jill did tell Noel how she hated Buck, could kill him. How she wished that she had never known him.

  No one, though, aside from Noel knows any of this.

  Looking back down the beach to her left, eastwardly, the San Francisco direction, Jill is seized then with a strong, urgent need to get back to the city, not to her own place but just to somewhere in town. Away from here, no matter that she has paid for two months more. She is still a lot richer than most people are, she might as well spend the money.

  Turning in the other direction, toward the beautiful house that she quite suddenly dislikes, Jill begins to run.

  A good runner, although she does not much like running, too sweaty, Jill veers down to the packed wet sand at the water’s edge and then starts moving along very fast, elbows in, her short fair hair flattened to her head (she has dropped the silly kerchief somewhere), as sandpipers scatter and skitter off in all directions.

  By the time she reaches the dunes, the high ridge that marks the path back to her house, Jill is fairly winded. She stops—panting and sweating, thinking, I’m not in great shape, that was not very much of a run. After a moment she starts up and across the dunes, toward the cypress grove that separates her house from the beach.

  And then she drops instantly flat on the sand: through the trees, in the driveway next to her house, parked next to her new car, is an old Studebaker. Custom-striped, green and white. Noel’s car.

  Pressing her body into the cold, resisting sand, Jill very carefully raises her head and she sees—Noel. Noel approaching his car, and at the same time looking all about him; he has obviously just knocked at her door and found her not there. Actually with all that glass he could just look in, which undoubtedly he did, he could see her not there. Noel, in his crisp clean khakis, clean matching shirt, stands there in the sunshine, looking slightly disappointed, a very small frown on that excessively handsome face, but on the whole he looks happy, Jill notes, recognizing his habitual expression of pleasure in himself.

  And why? Just what is he so happy about? Did he come all the way out here to tell her about Buck’s being dead, imagining she would not know? (And actually she might not have; she doesn’t always bother to get the paper.)

  At that moment Jill remembers that she has left the newspaper along with the small sack of groceries back in the restroom. No matter.

  DID NOEL KILL BUCK? Jill does not really think so.

  Has Sage come home?

  If he even moves an inch in the direction of the trees that now protect her, Jill will get up and run, all her muscles are tightly poised for that run. Before he has time to realize who she is she will be out of sight. Her heart is beating so hard that it jolts her body, she feels it could shake her to death.

  Noel looks at his watch, and then, in the manner of a person who has come to the end of the time allotted for a given project, he moves decisively toward his car. He opens the door, gets in, and in another minute or so (to Jill, a long, long time, many beats of her heart) he is gone, as dust from his hasty exit rises on the unpaved, rutted road.

  She forces herself to stay where she is for a moment more, then gets up and rushes for her house, now propelled by all her earlier fears, redoubled.

  Once inside, although quite out of breath, she picks up the telephone and punches numbers.

  “Stevie? It’s me, Jill. Look, I really need to speak to her. Thanks.” A pause, during which Jill breathes, and waits, barely glancing through the far window at the green shadowed hillside.

  Then, “Fi. Listen, I really need to stay with you for a couple of days, okay? I’ll be there in, oh, maybe an hour. Don’t tell anyone, okay? Not Caroline. No one.”

  Twenty-four

  “Of course, taxes. You understand that when a piece of property changes hands—even by inheritance, as in this case—the rollback from Prop. 13 is eliminated, and the old rates apply. But it shouldn’t be too horrendous for you, fortunately, as you know. You’re staying there now? The place is really sliding down the hill, is it not? Mrs. Kaltenborn never—But I should say no more than—”

  In a beatific haze, in this shabby room on Pine Street, lower Pacific Heights, Portia listens to this barrage of lawyer words and instructions, from a dark, sad-faced young woman: long nose, small pointy chin, large mournful eyes and heavy dark hair. Mrs. Kaltenborn’s lawyer, who has just revealed to Portia that Mrs. Kaltenborn, who was eighty-nine, died “peacefully, in her sleep” on a boat from Venice to Dubrovnik. And that she has left her house to Portia.

  Dazed, Portia is aware that she is taking in no facts, beyond the major fact of this incredible inheritance. Her familiar anxiety over incomprehension (she tends to be vague and often inattentive, to miss things—Portia knows that) is opposed and at last overcome by sheer pleasure, a controlled gratitude (she could easily cry and she probably will, later on). How amazingly kind of Mrs. Kaltenborn, how totally unexpected for Portia. An acte gratuit.

  What feels like spring sunshine streams in through long dirty windows, falling on the lawyer’s long brown hair, and on Portia’s shoulders, warming, like a blessing. The lawyer, Hilda Daid, must be Iranian, or Lebanese? She seems most remarkably nice, but how could she not be, as the bearer and the instrument of such a lucky piece of business?

  The letter in which she summoned Portia to her office, telling her of the death, could have been a clue of sorts to Portia, but it was not; vague Portia, digesting the sad news of the death, only wondered why she should be so summoned—and was pleased that the death had occurred so peacefully, even romantically: she was glad that Mrs. Kaltenborn had been to Venice, of which she had spoken to Portia with love and longing. But Portia did not see why she herself had to visit this lawyer, this “Hilda Daid.” Was something wrong in the house? something missing, books that Portia had forgotten to return?

  As Portia approached the lawyer’s office, the relative shabbiness of the neighborhood was reassuring. This was not like being summoned to the Transamerica Pyramid (to Jill’s horrible, terrifying office), or to one of those spiffed-up brass-trimmed old brick places on Jackson Street.

  And the building that housed the offices (all women, Portia noted from the sign) was a run-down, once-elaborate Victorian: paint peeling from the windowsills, all the fancy trim now broken, neglected—conspicuously not gussied up with bright pastels, as in the many gentrified neighborhoods of Victorian houses.

  At first Portia assumed that the tall, very dark young woman who came to open the door was an assistant, and even as the woman said, “I am Hilda Daid,” the pronunciation threw Portia off: Eelda Dah-eed was not the name that she had heard, reading Hilda Daid. But then, as they entered the book-piled, grimy-windowed, sunny room, Portia and this woman of almost her own height, Portia understood that this was indeed the lawyer, there was no one else around.

  And as they sat down on opposite sides of Ms. Daid’s amazingly cluttered desk, the lawyer spoke these amaz
ing words: “You are, you know, in effect the sole heir. The heiress.” And she smiled.

  “But that’s just amazing, she really shouldn’t, there was no reason—” Portia stumbled about, at the same time fighting to subdue that small urge to cry; she found herself very, very touched.

  “Well, she just must have liked you a lot.” And now Portia can hear the shade of an accent, something foreign in Ms. Daid’s speech. The accents are slightly more English than American, but not really English either. She could be an exiled Middle Eastern princess, Portia thinks. English-educated and trying to sound like an American lawyer. To be one.

  “She had no relatives at all,” this exotic lawyer continues. “That is fortunate. Sometimes, you know, they contest, even when the will is as airtight as this one is.”

  “No, uh, instructions?”

  Ms. Daid laughs, a small shy laugh, and she tells Portia, “She just said, ‘Portia will know what to do with it.’ ” And she shows Portia the line added in Mrs. Kaltenborn’s familiar spider writing, at the bottom of the legal document.

  “Well, that’s really strange, unless she just meant in a quiet way to remind me that I know how to take care of the place. And if I ever get any money I’ll know how to fix it up.”

  “That’s a start.” Hilda Daid smiles.

  “And actually I do have this sort of shack in Bolinas, and if I sold that I could do a little fixing up in Bernal Heights.”

  “Well, there you are.”

  Portia frowns. “Somehow I don’t think that’s what she meant. Or, not all she meant.”

  “Well, perhaps not.”

  “Did you know her very well?” asks Portia.

  “Not so very. In fact that part was also a little strange. She has heard certain things of me, certain difficulties that I and my family had, and she knew the lawyer who was helping us with all that, even she knew someone at the horrendous INS. And then next I understood that I am her lawyer. An acte gratuit, I felt.”