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

by Alice Hoffman

  Esther the Black locked up her register and walked to the soda fountain at the front of the store. She did not realize that Cohen was there until she was already seated at the counter; then she looked the other way. She had always trusted Cohen before, but her escape from the Compound was too important, and each time she tried to talk to him about Esther the White, he told her not to be disrespectful. So Esther the Black quickly ordered a lemonade. She stared straight ahead, at the menu which hung above the grill. The overhead fan moved in heavy circles. Though she loved him, Esther the Black wished that Cohen would go blind. She couldn’t risk her grandmother’s anger if Cohen should spill the beans. And she wished that he would go blind instantly, at the Woolworth’s soda fountain. As customers and waitresses gathered around the blinded Cohen, Esther would skip right past him, out to freedom, out the door.

  “Over here,” Cohen called from his stool at the far end of the counter. “Esther, over here.”

  Esther the Black picked up her glass of lemonade; her straw bobbed like a pigeon. She still wore her pink smock, with Esther embroidered over her right breast. She sat next to Cohen but did not look at him.

  Cohen pointed to his steaming porcelain cup. “Tea,” he told Esther. “Because I’ll tell you right now, coffee in a place like this is death.”

  “Cohen.” Esther the Black clamped her teeth down on the striped straw between her lips. “Don’t tell anyone that you caught me.”

  Cohen sipped tea. “All right,” he agreed.

  They sat in silence, the overhead fan droning, flies landing on the polished counter top.

  “Don’t tell anyone I caught you doing what?” Cohen asked.

  “That you found out I’m working here.” Esther the Black pointed to her pink smock. Cohen had not missed Esther the Black, he had not guessed she had found a job; he was waiting for Esther the White, who had locked herself in her room for days after the doctor’s appointment. Finally one hot afternoon, she had come out to sit on the wide porch with a cup of jasmine tea resting on her knee; but she had stared right through Cohen when he walked past on the green, and her eyes were so heavy and so huge that they were closed and dreaming in the sun, and Cohen was left to imagine hundreds of ailments and diseases that Esther the White was too proud to mention.

  Cohen glanced at Esther the Black. “Very pretty,” he said of the smock.

  “And whatever happens, don’t tell my grandmother.”

  Cohen frowned and shook his head. He had been the one to introduce Esther the Black to gardenias, to tea boiled from orange lilies, to the dozen sorts of seaweed and grass which grew in the harbor. And now, she thought only of leaving after he had taught her so much; and there was no way to tell her that he thought she misjudged her grandmother, without letting the girl know too much of his secret, too much of his love. “No one will hear your secrets from me,” Cohen told Esther the Black. “Suddenly you don’t trust me?” He shook his head.

  Esther the Black was silent; she sipped at the last of her lemonade.

  Cohen rose from his seat. “Let’s go,” he said. “Even the tea here is bad.”

  Esther the Black followed Cohen out to the street where Mischa’s Cadillac was parked. She leaned deep into the maroon leather. They drove down Route 16 with all the windows open. She looked over at Cohen as he stopped the car to let two deer cross the road; she studied his face, the wrinkles, the lines.

  “I’m sorry,” Esther the Black said; she patted his hand. “I trust you,” she said.

  Now it was Cohen who felt like a traitor; he wondered how the girl would react if he told her that he loved her grandmother; that he had always loved her. He watched as Esther the Black lit a cigarette, then he started the Cadillac down the road and he thought, What a shame. I love her like a granddaughter, but what a shame she doesn’t take after her grandmother at all. The hot afternoon wind moved through the car, from window to window, and no long blond hair flew out into the air; instead, Esther the Black’s short dark hair rested in motionless curls as she puffed on her cigarette. Still, she was a good kid; she was smart, Cohen thought; perhaps she had inherited that from Esther the White.

  “What’s she like?” Esther asked over the wind.

  Cohen stepped on the gas. Was the girl able to read his mind? Perhaps they had spent too much time, too many years together. “Who?”

  The afternoon was at its latest; clouds moved in the sky; and Esther the Black wondered what Esther the White would say when she awoke one morning to find that all her prisoners, Phillip and Rose, and Esther, herself, were gone. “My grandmother,” Esther the Black said.

  Cohen laughed. “Why ask me? You’re the relative. How should I know? You think I’m magic? You think I know everything?”

  “I was just interested,” Esther the Black said, as she slipped off her pink smock and crumpled it into the large leather bag she carried. “I wanted the opinion of an outside observer.”

  Cohen stomped down on the gas pedal after they rounded a curve on the road. He considered himself an observer, but not outside, never outside. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said to Esther. “Maybe you’re suffering from overwork.”

  They entered the iron Compound gate; and as soon as the Cadillac drove onto the path, the odor of honeysuckle fell like a curtain. It was the beginning of twilight, the time when the Compound was its sweetest. “You talk nonsense, Esther,” Cohen said. “You always want to leave, but you’ve got such beauty here, and you don’t even see it. That’s the word of this outside observer.”

  Esther the Black looked up, and agreed; the lighting—which could turn the branch of a tree bright and then dark in seconds—was beautiful at this time of day. Along with Cohen, she stared at the fading rose-colored houses, those the family lived in, and those which had never been anything but empty and which were now swept with pale sand and tiny green crabs. It was so cool and quiet, as the beginning of an evening fog moved over the Compound, that Esther almost forgot why she wanted to escape. And when Cohen stopped the car in front of her grandparents’ house, Esther the Black was remembering the time Cohen had taught her how to press sea lavender between glass. She smiled over at him, she trusted him completely, but Cohen was looking away, he was looking at the harbor.

  “Esther,” he said, “look.”

  The family was gathered at the sea wall. Mischa, who stood six-foot-one, and his brother, Max, who was dressed in a boy’s flowered bathing suit, both waved frantically at the harbor. Behind them stood Max’s wife, Lisa, holding a beach towel. Rose had already climbed atop the wall; she waved clenched hands, as if she were praying into the dull, gray air. They were all calling together; but it was the time when the gulls and the pipers shared the air with the sparrow hawks and owls, and Esther the Black couldn’t hear their words. The shadows which fell onto all of the porches grew longer now; the blood sea star and the snail moved in the harbor.

  “It’s your father,” Cohen said. “It’s Phillip.”

  Cohen opened the car door, he ran to the sea wall. The others remained, calling and waving, as Cohen reached the place where the earth suddenly turned to sand. He climbed over the stones, almost as if he were a young man; over the algae, the barnacles, the rust. And when Cohen scrambled over the stones on the beach, the spell was broken; the others began to move. Mischa unlocked the sea-wall gate, and then he and Rose untied the rowboat, as Max jumped up and down, excited as a child.

  When Esther the Black sat down in the white wicker chair on her grandparents’ porch, Cohen was already kicking off his shoes, diving into the water, and chasing after Phillip, who, once more, had followed some old sea-wish down into the harbor. Esther the Black rocked back and forth in her chair; Drowning Season had become a part of her internal clock. She wondered if she would even exist in another place, if her plans of escape were worthless. She stared at the stone beach, where the gills and tails of bluefish and flounders the fishermen had caught moved without power, until the gills were quiet, the tails calm.
Esther rocked back and forth; she had watched a drowning every summer of her life; and she watched again now, as Cohen’s arms encircled her father.

  The Compound was dark, except for a flame across the lawn, where a blue gas fire that Lisa had forgotten to shut off heated a copper kettle. Esther the Black was staring at the blue light when Esther the White came out to the porch. Out there, in the harbor, Mischa had begun to row toward the circular current where Cohen lifted Phillip’s head above the tide. Esther the White wrapped a woolen sweater around herself, and still she was chilled, she was cold as ice as she stared out to the lights of Connecticut. Max was now screaming instructions as the rowboat weaved crazily through the harbor—Mischa hadn’t gained control over the oars. And Cohen waited patiently, holding Phillip’s head above the waves, as Esther the Black’s father stared upward, at the still, gray night.

  Esther the Black rocked back and forth, she rocked faster. Although she knew her grandmother stood behind her, she did not want to turn. Esther the White watched her granddaughter’s shoulders, she watched the dark, tight hair, as if the girl were a statue. Alien. A head carved in stone, in Greece or in Spain, centuries before. Stone that would not turn even when Esther the White breathed into the girl’s hair, and wished as hard as she could that Esther the Black would turn to her. Esther the White ignored the harbor, where her husband rowed toward Phillip and Cohen; she watched her granddaughter, thinking that if they were not such strangers the girl might hold her, and then the chill might disappear; and then Esther the White felt foolish. She straightened her back and stood behind her granddaughter’s chair.

  “Fools,” Esther the White said, looking out into the hazy harbor. It might have always been a mistake to fight Phillip; perhaps they should finally let him have his way, let him float peacefully into the soft sand at the deepest part of the harbor. “Always bringing the same drowned man back to shore,” Esther the White sighed.

  Slowly, Esther the Black nodded; they should let him be, she thought, as she watched Phillip struggle in the waves, in the dim moonlight. The girl stared out at the night harbor, and she felt her grandmother run her pale, thin fingers across the back of the chair as if the wicker were skin. Esther the White was wishing that they could both stop holding back their tears, but they were silent, their eyes were dry. And the two women watched the family come to shore on the other side of the sea wall; on the dark porch, between the shadows and the stones, together they watched the rescue.

  Part Two

  NATURAL HISTORY

  Chapter One

  EACH summer, after Phillip’s drowning, the family sighed with relief. Everyone hoped that he would make the attempt early in July, so that for the remainder of the summer the watch could be relaxed. It was a fact that Phillip drowned only once a season, once a year. He was predictable. And afterward, his dosage of Valium could be reduced, and the family no longer shuddered each time the tides changed, each time the odor of seaweed and clams drifted over the lawn. Only Esther the White felt no relief; for this summer, after the drowning, she began to dream, nearly every night, of her son.

  Often, in her dreams, Esther the White saw her own pale hands slipping her infant into the hands of Inge, the nursemaid, fluent in German and English, who had taken care of Phillip in London. On the night of the drowning, perhaps because of the pain in her side, perhaps because of the codeine, Esther the White dreamed that she had never wanted her son born. For years, Esther the White had forgotten that when she learned she was pregnant, her first reaction was to greedily eat the skin of young onions, for unmarried girls in her village had whispered about the use of onions as a spell against unwanted pregnancy. Even after her marriage to Mischa, when her stomach had begun to swell, Esther the White had sat for hours in hot baths, so that the steam might enter her, find its way to her womb, and suffocate Phillip. Her breasts had become so large that Esther did not want them touched; her hair grew coarse; she sat before a mirror, watching for other changes. And now, she dreamed about Phillip nightly, she suffered between her sheets, but it was the truth; she had not wanted him born.

  Esther the White had worried that a child of hers might be marked. He might appear with a rose at his tiny shoulder, with a butterfly on his forehead, a cross beneath one knee. She did not know if Mischa was the father; but she suspected that the tattooed man, Solo, had left something growing inside, something to remind her that she had once felt something, that she had once been in love. She cried slow tears as she sat in the porcelain tub which rested upon four lion’s claws, and she imagined that her womb was filling with rising steam. Often, in her dreams, Esther the White saw her body turning a ghostly white, her skin becoming soft as apricots, the ends of her long pale hair turning a faint, watery green.

  They lived then in a section of Notting Hill, and it was on the Bayswater Road that Mischa saw the hand-painted sign in a heavy leaded-glass window of a rooming house. Inge advertised herself as a bilingual nanny, nurse, housemaid, babysitter, and cook. When Mischa interviewed her, in the dark brown sitting room of the boarding house, Inge wore a black dress spotted with blue and yellow flowers. She wore the same dress when she aided in Phillip’s birth, that day when Esther the White refused midwives, doctors, and hospitals, in the hope that the delivery in the parlor of their flat might give her a better chance, and Phillip a worse one.

  Esther the White refused to look at the child. For the first week of Phillip’s life she breast-fed him in the dark—at night, or in an unlit room. Slowly, she began to examine him. She touched his stomach and his arms while he gurgled or cried. She searched for markings—raised skin, strange colors, pigmentations. But he appeared to be unmarked. His eyes were brown, like Mischa’s, his skin was as white as Esther’s own. When he cried in his crib, and his gums changed from pale pink to red, Esther thought he looked like a howling rabbit.

  Esther the White did not go to America. “Travel with an infant?” Mischa had said. “Let’s wait till he gets a little bigger. Pneumonia is easy to catch on a ship. Wait.” And Esther waited, but Phillip was catching mumps and flu, but Phillip was growing up, and Mischa’s business was doing well. The child might have been a punishment for her affair with the tattooed man, so Esther the White did not complain; she continued to wait, until London became as familiar to her as the village of her childhood, until New York was a place she no longer mentioned, until she nearly forgot the jade pendant which could buy her passage on an ocean liner.

  Inge, the nursemaid, did not believe Phillip was either adorable or horrid. He was a child. She had held dozens of them. What they needed was discipline and structure and a smack on the head. Phillip’s crib was at the foot of Inge’s bed; and he seemed to cry each time she invited a lover into that bed. But that was not extraordinary, and Inge would quickly rise from the bed and smack Phillip’s hands; then his cries would turn to small hiccups as he forced himself to be silent. By the time Phillip spoke his first word (“No”—not at all an unusual first word), Mischa and Inge had become lovers.

  Esther the White had decided that she wanted a life separate from Mischa’s. She did not take lovers, for she was afraid that her body might again be claimed by some child growing inside. But she did have men. “Go ahead,” Mischa would tell her, “go off with your boyfriends.” He would sit and sulk in the parlor until Esther the White returned from her meetings at restaurants or parks or cinemas. Yet, Esther did choose her friends with the thought of bettering the family’s situation. Often, they were men of property—building inspectors, contractors, or landlords. Men who were blue-eyed and pale-skinned, and who could help Mischa obtain a mortgage, or wire a flat that had faulty electricity, or find a cheap piece of property in the East End. Often these men were handsome, more often they were not. But all of them believed that Esther the White was beautiful; so beautiful that to be seen with her pale hand hanging onto their arms at the theater or at parties where sherry and scotch and cucumber sandwiches were served was well worth the price of making Mischa rich.

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nbsp; Still, Esther the White was not happy. She knew of Mischa’s affair with Inge, and she was relieved by it. She cared a great deal for Mischa: she arranged her own affairs to his profit, she stroked his hand in darkened rooms when he was depressed about business, but she wished to sleep alone; the thought of making love chilled her, turned her eyes cold with the fear of pregnancy. When her spells of melancholy grew into sorrow, Esther the White decided that London itself was causing her unhappiness.

  She came to despise anything British. Little Phillip had begun to speak, and when Esther discovered that his accent was English, she pounded a fist on an oak table top.

  “Make him stop talking that way,” she shouted at Inge. “I won’t allow him to sound British.”

  When Phillip addressed Esther as “Mummy,” Esther threatened to fire Inge, convinced that the nursemaid had taught her son to speak in a manner which would infuriate her.

  Luckily, Mischa’s business was prospering, for Esther would no longer speak to British businessmen, let alone dine with them. Now the men she went out with were all foreigners: an Indian with whom she visited museums, a French Jew who read his poetry to her and tried to convince her to rejoin the religious tribe she had rejected. Yet throughout her sadness and her dissatisfaction with England, Esther continued to kiss Phillip goodnight, to watch for peculiarities, and to have as near to nothing to do with him as possible. He was not particularly handsome, but that was no crime. All in all, Esther was satisfied with Phillip as a child. However, when Phillip was six and began primary school, Mischa discovered that Inge’s disciplinary methods included holding the child’s head in a brimming sinkful of water. Mischa was horrified that the woman who cooed sweet German words to him while making love was holding his terrified son’s head under water for any minor infraction of discipline.

  “Pig,” he said to her. “Are you crazy? Am I paying a madwoman to torture my son?”