Property Of, the Drowning Season, Fortune's Daughter, and At Risk

by Alice Hoffman

  Chapter Two

  IN the morning, when her granddaughter was reporting for her first day at work, Esther the White was awakened from her light sleep by a pain as sharp as an alarm. Whatever her illness was, Esther the White could no longer ignore it. She had always been an insomniac, but now she could not sleep at all, and except for a few soft hours in the earliest morning, sleeplessness had become as common as night. Often, she spent hours staring into the dark and remembering her past; and the memories and insomnia intertwined and confused her, even in the daylight hours, so that she never knew past from present; sometimes, as she walked over the Compound lawn, Esther did not know if her heel would fall into harbor sand or into the frozen winter earth of her childhood.

  The pain which had forced her to the doctor’s office last winter was cold and metallic; it made Esther dig her fingernails into her own palms, until bloodlines formed. She had run out of codeine, she had run out of time, she could put it off no longer. She summoned Cohen.

  “Of course,” she told Cohen, when he met her at the foot of the porch steps, “you’re not to tell anyone where you’ve driven me.”

  Cohen could never say no to Esther the White; he would not have even tried. He was insulted that she did not trust him to keep his mouth shut, after the secrets they had shared. “What am I?” he said, as he opened the back door of the car, and Esther the White gathered her linen coat, and slipped into the back seat. “A spy, maybe? A member of the CIA?”

  “Dear man,” Esther the White said, and Cohen cringed at her tone, “I thought it was a perfectly reasonable request. A well-phrased request.”

  “The phrasing was perfect,” Cohen agreed. “Very nice. I couldn’t fault it.”

  “Thank you,” Esther the White said, and she stared out the window as Cohen drove down the Compound road. When he stopped at the iron gate, Esther leaned forward and tapped his shoulder. “Go ahead,” she said. “Drive.”

  Cohen turned to face the back seat. “Certainly,” he said. “I’d like to. But tell me, Mrs., where am I driving to?”

  Esther the White gave Cohen the address of the doctor’s office on one of the high, sloping residential streets of St. Fredrics. And although the day was warm, and jays flew in circles around the Cadillac’s antenna, Esther the White felt chilled, even in her linen coat, and she asked Cohen to keep his window rolled up.

  “You want the heater on, too?” Cohen shrugged.

  A cigarette was constantly caught between Cohen’s lips, and ash fell down the front of his short-sleeved shirt as he talked; he always wore a black beret as his driving cap. Esther the White laughed at herself, and conceded; just because she was cold did not mean everyone else was, too; Cohen could open his window. But, she kept hers closed; she preferred to look at the landscape through the closed glass. As they drove down Route 16, Esther pinned up stray strands of hair which had fallen from her chignon. When they stopped at a light, Esther caught a glimpse of herself in the rear-view mirror. Her hair had somehow turned from platinum to white, wrinkles had jumped like lizards onto her face, her eyes were nearly colorless.

  “Cohen,” she sighed. “I’m old.”

  Cohen swallowed; he was afraid to look, he was afraid that she was right; but, when he raised his eyes and saw her face in the mirror, she was young, as young as she had ever been. The light turned green, but Cohen forgot to step on the gas.

  “You’d better drive,” Esther the White suggested, when the cars behind them began to honk their horns.

  Cohen steered toward the high, green streets of the oldest section of town. They drove in silence, each thinking about their own separate arrivals in New York, until Esther tapped her fingernails on the leather upholstery and said, “This is it.”

  Cohen pulled over to the curb in front of a large yellow Victorian which had once belonged to a sea captain who had died, quite slowly, in the attic early in the century. Now, a separate entrance led to an office, and the doctor’s name and business hours swung from chains on a wooden post.

  Cohen was busy staring at himself in the rear-view mirror; he wondered if Esther the White thought he also was growing old. He hadn’t given himself time to shave, he had planned to spend the day in the fishermen’s campground, playing cards and drinking bourbon, until Esther summoned him. And now the stubble of hair which grew on his chin was gray. In the rear-view mirror Cohen could see that Esther’s eyes were closed, and her pale hand stroked her throat, as if something strange had been caught inside, under her tongue. Cohen looked at her, and then at the sign on the doctor’s office. He was an idiot; Esther was ill, and he should have seen it before. He might have, but every time he looked at her he saw a younger Esther, the one who stood in the kitchen fixing lemonade the first time he spoke to her.

  He panicked, he forgot himself, he called her by name for the first time in twenty years. “Esther?” he said.

  The way he said her name, the mere saying of her name after all the years, when they barely spoke, when he was careful not to look at her, not even when she poured him a glass of wine at the Friday-night meal, pulled at Esther. She raised her eyes; in the mirror, floating above his face, above his clear gray eyes, was the face of a younger man. He hadn’t aged a bit, he was the same man he had been years ago.

  “Don’t look at me,” Esther the White said. “Don’t look at me that way, there is nothing wrong.” She had said almost the same exact words when Cohen had waited at the curb of an apartment building in Forest Hills, while Esther the White took the elevator up to the abortionist who would get rid of whatever Mischa had planted inside of her. But that had been years before, and Esther the White had not been afraid herself.

  “If there’s nothing wrong, why don’t you want anyone to know where you are?” Cohen asked.

  “That’s the way I am.” Esther shrugged. “Private. You should know that by now.”

  “Esther,” he said her name again. “Who are you kidding? This is me, Cohen.”

  “And this is me,” Esther said, as she reached for the door handle.

  When Cohen heard the click of the door handle, when he knew she was about to walk out of the car, he stopped her. He had not taken the elevator with her up to the third-floor abortionist’s office twelve years before. This time he would accompany her. “Listen,” Cohen said. “Let me come with you. Who sits alone in a waiting room?”

  Esther the White let go of the door handle; she sat far back in her seat, and gripped one hand with the other. This time she was frightened.

  “I don’t think so,” she told Cohen.

  “Frankly,” Cohen said, “there are dozens of magazines in that doctor’s office I haven’t gotten around to reading yet. It would be a treat for me.”

  The pain was throbbing in her side, and she was already late for her appointment. She imagined walking up the brick path, leaning on Cohen’s arm, with her head light as air. She reached over and opened the door. “You’re a gentleman,” she said. “As usual.”

  One of Esther’s feet was already outside; her heel was balancing on the hot pavement. Cohen stuck his head out the open window. “All right,” he said. “But don’t forget I’m here if you change your mind. Especially if they have Sports Illustrated. I love that. I could read that for hours.”

  Esther the White smiled. “All right,” she said. “I’ll remember.”

  As he watched her walk away, Cohen rested an elbow on the steering wheel, and then he lit another cigarette. He sighed; he thought about time. He wished he had a pocket calculator; he had always wanted one. But, even without a calculator, by the time Esther the White had walked down the brick path to the old Victorian house, Cohen had figured out her age. He had known it was impossible for her to be old. In the hot Cadillac, with cigarette ash dotting the front of his white shirt, Cohen had figured that he and Esther the White were, within a year or two, the same age.

  His figures began with the year 1956; it was then, three years before Esther the Black was born, and two weeks after Esther the White
’s fortieth birthday, that Cohen arrived at the Compound. It was winter when he took a taxi from the ferry to the iron gate, and the ground was hard, ice-coated sand, and Cohen did not know then if he had been graced with a challenge, or fated to be a landscape artist in a place where nothing would ever grow.

  It was Esther the White who kept Cohen at the Compound, long after he discovered that the earth was far too sandy for a landscape artist to have any duty other than a continuous replanting of what was already dead. He had been a wanderer since the day he had fled Russia, he had traveled to Europe and South America and Florida; but when he fell in love with Esther the White he became rooted in the Compound for the rest of his life. After that he no longer protested that he served not only as a gardener, but a guard as well, keeping the poachers away from the Compound beach. After falling in love he did not complain that his residence was the lighthouse. And anyway, he had had night jobs and day jobs on three continents as a short-order cook, a salesman, a clock repairman, and a tailor; so he had no preference for day or night, and he ignored the light which blinked constantly, whether he was asleep or dreaming, or studying the horticulture books that would teach him the skills he had already promised Mischa he had. And even now, years later, as he raked the beach of debris, or worked on the yard in the sunlight, he suffered from hallucinations which were black and white spots dancing before his open eyes.

  He had practically raised Esther the Black; and he had studied so well that he was able to teach her the name of every plant that grew in the Compound. It was Cohen, and no one else, who caused Esther the Black to sob when he told her that every jellyfish on the shore was there because it was dead, and not resting in the sunshine the way swimmers did. It was Cohen who explained to her why her father could not walk along the beach in summertime; why Phillip often could not even leave his cottage. And now, all Esther the Black talked about was escape. And each time Cohen would laugh and say, “Escape from the Compound? Do you think there’s something better somewhere else?” although he, himself, had thought seriously of heading back to Manhattan that first week in 1956, before he spoke with Esther the White.

  He knew nothing about gardens, and he was not used to the loneliness of the Compound; when he was alone in the city at least there were other bodies, in Laundromats and coffee shops, touching against him, accidentally or on purpose. Here, the crickets and the frogs made him crazy. And he thought he would go crazier still, with no woman, no liquor store, not even a card game, not even a dog. He thought he would go mad, until he met the fishermen, and Esther the White.

  “Boss, I think maybe I’m going nuts out here in the country,” Cohen told Mischa after only a few days.

  “Don’t call me boss,” Mischa had said. In fact, it had been Esther the White who had chosen Cohen’s letter from among the other job applicants. “Cohen?” Mischa had said. “A Jew with no references? That’s not your style.”

  And Esther the White, who had forced Mischa to Anglicize their last name, and give up every prayer, every inch of Judaism, shrugged her shoulders. “He’ll be more honest than the others,” she said.

  “You don’t believe that,” Mischa said.

  “No,” Esther the White had admitted. But the man was Russian, he might have come from a town close to their own, a town she despised, had nightmares about, a town she was drawn to in her imagining, and could not forget. “Hire him,” she had said.

  And so, Mischa never considered himself Cohen’s boss. “Do your job, take care of the gardens, go out in the rowboat and get rid of the poachers,” Mischa had told him. “You don’t have time to go crazy if you’re working for me.”

  Cohen shrugged; and he rowed out into the harbor. For four nights he watched, as the poachers worked around him. Nets fell into the water; men and women called to each other, and, as the sun rose, all of the boats disappeared from the harbor, except Cohen’s own painted rowboat. On the fifth night Cohen decided he was not only a failure as a gardener and a guard, but as a human being as well. He fell asleep in his boat. When he awoke he heard the movement of another boat’s oars, the raspy breathing of another man’s throat. Cohen tried to light a cigarette, but the match was wet and the flame sputtered and died in his hands, between his fingers. There was no light but half a moon, and Cohen could not see the fisherman’s face, he could see only the reflection of a face which moved in the waves. Cohen briefly closed his eyes; he hoped that he would not drop an oar into the depths of the harbor, he hoped that he would not forget what his job was.

  “What will you catch,” the fisherman said to Cohen, “with no line and no bait?”

  “What we’ve got,” Cohen said across the darkness, “is a situation that’s uncomfortable. Wouldn’t you say that was true?”

  “No trouble,” the other said. “No sweat.”

  “Ah, maybe not for you, but for me …” Cohen touched his heart. “It’s my duty to be the guard of this harbor.”

  “What sort of job is that?” the other shrugged.

  “A job for an idiot,” Cohen agreed. “But a man who’s close to forty isn’t getting younger, and you take the jobs you get.”

  Most of the boats in the harbor had begun to move toward the eastern section of the Compound, which had never been developed; Cohen could not see men and women, only blue bands of material which shone in the darkness—headbands the fishermen wore as talismans to protect them against drowning.

  “Just tell them to keep the Drowned Man away from our harbor,” Cohen’s fisherman said, before he, too, rowed his boat toward land.

  Cohen watched a circle of sun rise above the Sound; and then he rowed back to shore, tethered the boat to the Compound dock, and knocked on the door of Mischa’s study to ask who the Drowned Man was.

  Mischa looked up from the real-estate section of the New York Times. “I don’t give reports to you, Cohen,” he said. “When you start getting results, when those beggars are out of my harbor, then come to me. Then ask me questions.”

  Cohen found Lisa, who had arrived at the Compound with her husband, Max, only a few months before Cohen, on the porch of her cottage. She stared at Cohen coolly; she had never liked Russians, and she couldn’t understand why Mischa hadn’t hired a black, like other Americans. “So,” Lisa said. “Now the Russian wants to know about the Drowned Man. Well, that is for me to know and for you to find out.”

  Cohen was now wary. This place is giving me the shivers, it gives me the creeps, he thought.

  He thought about packing his suitcase; he thought he could not last another day. Then, more than twenty years ago, the Sound was clear water, there was no smog over the outline of Connecticut’s shore, no supermarkets or housing developments had yet sprung from the heads of real-estate barons. It was, more or less, the country. And this, for a man who had known Krakow, and Rio, and Manhattan, was depressing. And more—when the crickets sang like whirlwinds, when the fisherman in the harbor whispered about a curse, and the night was without neon lights and traffic signals, the Compound was terrifying. Cohen was chain-smoking; a slight twitch had developed beneath his left eye; and he gave himself twenty-four hours to find out the truth about the Drowned Man, or he would be on the morning ferry to New York City.

  Cohen went to Esther the White. She had been with the rest of the family at the gate to greet Cohen when he first arrived; but a silk scarf had been wrapped around her head, her eyes were covered by dark glasses, she had stared at the earth, and Cohen had barely noticed her, he was too busy shaking hands with Mischa, and his brother, the dwarf. Now, he found her in the kitchen of the main house, and the first words he spoke to her were, “Who is the Drowned Man?”

  Cohen spoke abruptly, because he was standing just inside the door, and he was afraid that the draft from the open door would disturb Esther, who was halving lemons on a wooden cutting board. She was forty then, but the long white streaks in her pale hair which hung nearly to her waist were not visible, and when she stared at Cohen with her sea-colored eyes, and absentmindedly st
irred too much sugar into the pitcher of fresh lemonade, she looked like a young girl. Cohen could not remember seeing anyone like her, not even in Rio or Manhattan. No one’s hand had ever been as light, like a feathered bird which somehow managed to hold a knife. No one’s hair had danced with a draft so softly, not in any summer of Cohen’s life.

  “He’s my son,” Esther told Cohen. “He has a problem with suicide attempts.”

  “Well, then.” Cohen shrugged. “Then we certainly can’t get rid of him just to please the fishermen.”

  “Certainly not,” Esther agreed, as she watched Cohen flee through the brass-hinged door.

  Cohen thought of her all that day, as he drove Mischa’s new Cadillac into St. Fredrics to pick up topsoil at a greenhouse; and later that night he was still thinking of her as he rowed out to meet the fisherman.

  “Listen,” Cohen said. “I can’t help you out with the Drowned Man. The Drowned Man stays. They put him in a special cottage in the summer, so I haven’t met him yet. But he’s the boss’s son, and I can tell you right now, they won’t even consider getting rid of him.”

  The fisherman stared at Cohen without blinking. Then he took a package of thin, black cigars from his pocket and offered Cohen a smoke. When the poachers heard that Mischa had hired a guard, they were ready to defend themselves. The family’s accountant, Solomon Rath, who had purchased the land for Mischa when the family still lived in London, had vowed that the fishermen would never be forced out of the harbor. But as soon as the architects and the builders had finished, Rath had sent out an eviction notice. This time the fishermen were ready to fight back. Some of the younger men drove to Brooklyn and bought shotguns and .45-caliber pistols, even though very few of them actually knew how to fire guns. The families that feared for their children’s safety packed their clothes and their fishing gear and moved on, to the east end of the island, or to Florida, where they lived in trailer parks. But the old men in the encampment who had been threatened by town officials and local citizens for longer than they could remember said, “Wait. Let’s see what happens.” And the old women, when they heard that a guard had been hired, sighed and said, “Wait. We’ll see that nothing will happen.” And now, the fisherman smoked his cigar, and he wondered what kind of guard the family had hired; a guard who not only made reports to his boss, but to a fisherman as well; a guard who sighed and laid back in his rowboat to watch the cigar smoke circle in the clear night air.