Son of Fortune

by Victoria McKernan

  “Candy is his word for anything good,” Daisy explained. “This is the candy cat.” She pulled the enormous orange cat up and dropped him onto Peter’s lap. “The word for bad is tsin—for medicine. That one”—she pointed at the striped cat—“is the cat he doesn’t like. That is the medicine cat. Tsin!”

  Aiden spent the mornings with Peter, often accompanied by Daisy, who was considered too young to join the older ducklings’ lessons. Charlotte, Annabelle and Annalise were tutored for two exact hours by a cheerless woman who valued penmanship above all other virtues and wielded alphabet cards at them like a crusader’s sword. She wore stiff black dresses, always clasped at the throat with a brooch the size of a vulture’s egg. Two days a week, the science teacher came after lunch, and the dancing and arts teacher the other three. The science teacher, Professor Tobler, was a genial old German at least seventy years old who took the girls for walks in the garden, collecting things to look at under the microscope, or tried to get them to copy the parts of a plant from the illustrations in a pebbled-leather folio. They generally preferred to draw volcanoes and lions.

  Aiden’s friendship with Christopher grew easily; it was mostly enjoyable and definitely never dull. Their lives could not have been more different. In his seventeen privileged years, Christopher had never slept on the ground, killed any animal larger than a fly or gone hungry unless he was feeling too lazy to walk down to the kitchen for some bread and jam. Aiden could never quite forget that he was paid to be Christopher’s companion and protector, but they might have been friends anyway, although Aiden would have indulged his exasperation more frequently.

  Christopher was either summer or storm. He drank too much. He gambled outrageously. He was kind to the servants and sometimes vicious to his friends. He smuggled sweets to the ducklings and bribed their nannies to let them out for adventures with him, then ignored them completely for days. He loved to roam the city and would talk to anyone about anything with genuine interest, but he also started senseless arguments, which often turned into fights that always left Aiden with more bruises. He was easily bored and often restless, physically vigorous but loath to suffer any discomfort. There were some excellent riding horses on the estate, and he loved to go for long gallops west across the open country to the sea, riding hard for hours. But once home, he fussed like a child if his slippers were not warmed and a hot bath was not ready immediately.

  He flirted with every pretty girl he saw, society girl, picnic girl and waiter girl alike, and felt no guilt about breaking their hearts.

  “They know how I am.” He shrugged. “I can’t control their hopes.”

  Even after attending several parties and meeting most of Christopher’s friends, Aiden could never speak to a girl much beyond “Hello” and “Lovely weather.”

  “How do you think of things to say to a girl?” Aiden asked Christopher after one unsuccessful party where he had thought one particularly pretty red-haired girl would be interested in the details of loading a knacker’s cart.

  “You’ve read three shelves of poetry books by now,” Christopher said with a laugh. “Plus all of Shakespeare. If you can’t come up with sweet talk, you should probably just throw yourself off a cliff.”

  “It’s different outside of books. You don’t just go up to a girl and smack her with Shakespeare.”

  “True. There’s rule number one, then—no smacking with Shakespeare. So, rule number two—pay her compliments. Say that her skin is like porcelain and her arms graceful as a young plum tree waving in the summer breeze and her hair spun gold as gossamer!”

  “What is porcelain?”

  “Fancy china.”

  “Like china plates?”

  “Yes, but thinner and finer—like my mother’s best teacups. You can see light through the bottom of a porcelain teacup.”

  “So girls want to look like teacups?”

  Christopher shoved him.

  “And what if her hair is black?”

  Christopher gave an exaggerated sigh. “Well, then, say it looks like a woodland pond shimmering under a full moon! Just use lots of poetry words and pay her compliments. But start off easy—hold off on the porcelain and plum branches at first. Start with her beautiful eyes. Eyes are perfect. Unless she’s totally crazy cross-eyed or something, you can’t go wrong with the eyes. Hands are good too: ‘What lovely hands you have’—no, elegant is better. That can go easily into ‘Do you play the piano?’ And there—you have something to talk about.”

  “I don’t know anything about piano,” Aiden said.

  “Well, she will, so just nod and listen. Of course, don’t go to piano if she has stubby little fingers.”

  “Of course not,” Aiden said. “I’d say what useful hands for a washboard, and has she ever thought about taking in laundry.”

  “You asked for my advice,” Christopher said in a wounded tone. “You asked about girls, and I know about girls. If I wanted to know about…farming, I would—well, I’d never want to know about farming, really.”

  “All right, compliments and piano.”

  “Though you do have to be careful,” Christopher went on. “A really beautiful girl is distrustful of compliments, and the ugly ones know you’re faking. But for the average pretty-enough girls, just focus on their good bits. You don’t have to get specific, just say something is flattering: ‘That color is so flattering on you.’ ‘That hairstyle flatters you.’ You’re not lying, because it doesn’t mean anything, really. A bow on the forelock will flatter any nag.”

  “You’re awful,” Aiden said, though he couldn’t help laughing. “I wish you could be ugly for just one day.”

  “It wouldn’t matter,” Christopher said. “I’d still be rich. And American. And a man.”

  Aiden said nothing. It was simple truth.

  For all his protestations about dry old dusty books, Christopher actually did well in school. He had an eager mind and pursued anything that interested him, but he had to work hard at the duller subjects required for graduation: Latin, chemistry and ancient history. Aiden had never gone to a real school, so in every subject that required actual book learning, his knowledge was spotty. He was exceptional with geography and foreign cultures, thanks to reading, at least a thousand times, the Atlas of the World. He had a decent command of history, but Christopher knew more about the Civil War, even though Aiden had lived on its doorstep and lost a brother to the fighting.

  “There’s one professor at the academy who followed every battle and reenacts them in class with little lead soldiers and tiny paper flags,” Christopher explained. “He’ll go on for hours with this charge here and that flanking there. It’s to teach us military tactics, though I don’t know why. It’s not like any of us are ever going into war!”

  “What if you had to?” Aiden asked.

  “Had to what? Go to war?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe there was something worth fighting for?”

  “Well, anything worth fighting for, we would just buy,” Christopher said, genuinely puzzled. “Or pay the politicians to give it to us! Why ever go shooting people? Unless, I suppose, you’ve invested in guns and powder or cannon factories—then a war does make sense. But even if, for some reason, some stupid reason, we absolutely had to have a war—well, we would simply pay some armies and generals who know what they’re doing, right? I mean, I don’t have to personally know about flanking anybody!”

  Aiden was still never exactly sure how much Christopher was teasing him. The little circle of wealthy families certainly did seem rich enough to buy pretty much anything they wanted, including armies and the governments that made them work. The real question, Aiden realized, was exactly how did they get that money in the first place? And—as he grew more used to the luxury it offered—how could he get some himself?

  Christopher spent every afternoon working in the office with his father, so Aiden had a few hours alone in the library. Here the world was opening up to him in ways he
could not have imagined. It was like he had an axe and was chopping his way through all of civilization. He burrowed through the stacks, from the Magna Carta to the American Constitution.

  Then, at three or four each afternoon, Elizabeth would come home and here would be a whole other world altogether. Even after a month, Aiden had no idea what to make of her. Sometimes she flirted and teased him like a pretty waiter girl would; sometimes she wanted to discuss Darwin for hours. Sometimes she felt like a sister, sometimes like his heart’s desire. How was a man ever supposed to know? When he was around her, Aiden felt nervous and peaceful, happy and confused, all at the same time. There really needed to be an Atlas of Girls, he thought. For all her dainty posturing, Elizabeth was a physical girl who came home each day restless and eager for exercise. Her choices were limited, of course. There would be no wild gallops to the ocean with her, certainly no rambles through the city, but within the protection of the estate, they were allowed to walk together or play tennis on the lawn. They often walked through the zoo, talking of nothing at all, just happy to be away from the prying eyes and ears of the servants.

  Aiden’s days fell into a comfortable routine. He worked with Peter, played with the ducklings and tidied up after Christopher, defusing or winning his battles as needed. He escaped for easier nights with Fish whenever his friend was in town between trips. He read books until his brain hurt. He watched this new world and tried to understand it. And so the months passed in the house of riches.

  For most of Aiden’s life, the turn of the calendar page from February to March had always been a day of grim cheer. It was a mental leap toward spring, but in reality, the snow was still waist-deep and the winds promised only more harsh days. Real spring, the end of winter’s attempts to kill you, did not usually come until April.

  But in San Francisco, March was a real shift. It helped that the winter was mild to begin with, but even with that, there were such quick changes day to day that spring felt generous and real. There was lettuce growing outside by April, and fresh peas at the end of May. He watched jealously as the kitchen girls sat out in the sun shelling them, their quick fingers splitting the pods open and spilling the sweet contents into copper bowls. The first few dinged like hail, but after that, with a cushion already at the bottom of the bowl, the peas made a soft tattoo. When he saw a girl pop one into her mouth, he nearly died of desire. He was both amazed by the bounty of the spring and oddly angry. Scarcely one year ago, he was a stick man of a hundred pounds, with nothing to eat but clay and grasshoppers.

  t was June 25, the night of Christopher’s graduation. One of his friends was hosting a grand house party, but Christopher was in a strangely dour mood and not eager to go.

  “It’s everyone I’ve seen all my life,” he said. “And celebrating only what we were supposed to do all our lives, and what we are now supposed to go on to do with the rest of our lives, which is all laid out and all the same. University, then business, then more business, then die.”

  “There may be a bit more to it than that,” Aiden laughed.

  “Not for me,” Christopher said. “My future is fixed.” He spun a gold collar stud around on his dressing table. “And infinitely dull.”

  “Dull? But you can do anything you want.”

  “What should I want?” Christopher flung back. “Maybe I’d like to be a farmer. I’ve never dug a hole—is it satisfying?”

  “No,” Aiden said. “Not at all.”

  “But then you get to plant seeds and watch them grow.”

  Aiden stifled a laugh. “That’s plowing. Holes are what you dig for fence posts. Holes are just work.”

  “Well, exactly my point—if I don’t even know a plow from a hole, how can I know what else I might like to do?”

  “Believe me, you wouldn’t like plowing.”

  “Still, I’m tired of my future being all laid out,” Christopher said. “And I don’t want to go to this party.”

  “You’ve got to at least make an appearance,” Aiden said, well versed in protocol by now. “It would be rude not to.”

  “What good is it being rich if you can’t be rude sometimes? Anyway, it’s early. The party will go on forever. Let’s go play a few hands at the Elysium.” Christopher pulled out his pocket watch. “It’s barely eight o’clock. We can arrive at the party by ten and no one will even blink. We can make it eleven with a good story. Come on—we’ve plenty of time!”

  Of all his “guard duties,” the most difficult for Aiden at first was playing poker. He could not avoid the game, for there was no excuse for him to go out with Christopher for an evening and just sit idle for hours while his friend played. He had learned to play in the lumber camp, but only enough to know how much he didn’t know. So he found a book about poker in the library and began to deal practice hands with Peter and the ducklings. Aiden wasn’t sure if the boy could discern the suits, or even red from black. He had tried twenty different ways of communicating with the boy by now: a giant chart of letters; colored blocks, red for yes, blue for no. He had tried wrapping a pencil in rounds of cloth to make it easier to hold, even tying it to Peter’s hand and guiding him to make letters, but Peter would only scribble madly or smash the pencil so hard it broke. Aiden brought in a box of damp sand that he thought Peter might trace in, but when he pressed the boy’s finger into the sand, Peter howled and jerked back as if a wasp had stung him. Peter had a bell on his chair, but Aiden could not get him to ring for yes or no.

  “He doesn’t need yes or no,” Daisy finally explained one day.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Whatever is usually fine.”

  “Do you mean he doesn’t care? Or he doesn’t notice?”

  Daisy looked down and pulled at her dress. “He notices more.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” Aiden said. “You don’t care if you have applesauce or bread?” Aiden asked the boy directly. “If I read to you or someone plays the piano?”

  Peter only looked up at the draperies, as he often did—mesmerized, it seemed, by the scrolled pattern.

  “Yes and no don’t matter the same way to him,” Charlotte explained, though it explained nothing.

  “In his head,” Daisy said, “he can make anything be whatever he wants.”

  “So he can make bread taste like applesauce in his head if he wants to?” Aiden pressed, frustrated. Peter turned his head back and forth, and Aiden was sure he was laughing.

  “No,” Charlotte said. “It’s that bread has a thousand ways to taste and applesauce has a thousand ways to taste and he hasn’t finished all the ways with either of them yet.” The other ducklings smiled in agreement, happy that their biggest sister had managed to explain.

  “I expect it will change,” Charlotte added. “As he gets older.”

  “After he tastes all the thousand ways?”

  “Yes!” The four little girls nodded together in perfect solemnity.

  “But he does communicate with the four of you,” Aiden persisted.

  “Oh yes.” Daisy nodded, as if it were a silly question.

  “How?”

  “We are inside his head.”

  “Can I go inside his head?”

  The ducklings conferred in their secret way of looks, then solemnly shook their heads.

  “Maybe sometime,” Charlotte offered kindly. “Now you have too many colors.” She brushed her hands alongside her face as if flicking away spiderwebs.

  “Colors?”

  “Mad colors,” the others said in accidental unison.

  “I have no idea what that means.” Aiden sighed. He dealt a new hand of cards out on the table. “But look at his cards and ask him what he wants to bet.”

  Over the months, the nursery room poker games did sharpen Aiden’s skills. The little girls played with both the impulsive glee and the simple logic of children. Annalise and Annabelle didn’t care what cards they were dealt, they just liked to raise each other. Charlotte was good with numbers and tried to figure out her odds. Dai
sy had the simplest strategy, only betting when she had a good hand, never bluffing. She understood the concept of bluffing—but she thought it the same as lying, and lying offended her. This was not for any moral reason, but because she thought it just messed up the games and made them boring.

  These games, however odd, did give Aiden good practice, and soon he began to hold his own in the real games and finally to win more than he lost. His strategy was a combination of Charlotte’s and Daisy’s, though improved by his own discipline. He made only small bets and quickly folded when he had bad cards, but went bold when he knew he had a strong hand. Even if other players recognized this strategy, it didn’t hurt him, since they were more likely to fold when Aiden bet heavily. They knew he didn’t bluff. It drove Christopher crazy. Christopher’s strategy was exactly the opposite. His play was as mercurial as everything else about him.

  This night at the Elysium, Aiden was doing especially well, and after an hour he had a great pile of chips in front of him. They were playing with nine men; bets tended to be fifty cents to a dollar, and few pots topped twenty dollars. Christopher, still in his funk and distracted, had lost almost everything. It was an ordinary night with an ordinary group, but the energy of the table changed when a new man sat down. He was a brown-haired man of average height, clean-shaven, though not in the past few days. He was not soft as a gentleman nor roughened as a laborer, though his hands, Aiden noticed, bore signs of hard use: callused palms, tiny scars, swollen knuckles. But he had no accent to place his speech, no posture or gait that would mark him in any way. He was in fact of such unremarkable appearance that you could spend a week with him and still not pick him out of a dozen other brown-haired men of average height and build. Unless you looked into his eyes. There was a haunting about him.