Caroline's Daughters (29 page)

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.”

“O
f 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
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.

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 amazing 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
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, I felt.”

“Exactly what I—Well, she is, I guess you would say, quixotic?”

They both laugh, tentatively, briefly, neither yet quite sure of the other's real meanings, or language.

“She reminded me a little of some old American leftists I knew in Jerusalem,” Hilda Daid told Portia. “Emigrés. How they talked! How hopeful and good they were.”

“You're Israeli?”

A smile. “No. Lebanese. I grew up in Jerusalem, though. One of the niggers.” Another, briefer smile. “And then I went to school in England,” she says.

After a tiny pause, during which Portia has been wondering what to say next, she asks Hilda, “You've been here long?”

“Three years. We had some relatives. Here and in England. They were most kind, all of them.”

Should she leave now? Nothing about the conversation and nothing in the demeanor, the body language of Hilda indicates that she should; only Portia's innate shyness, which is extreme, makes her wonder, Should I go? She says, “I've never been to Israel. My father has, though. And he's an old leftie. But not Jewish. A Texan.”

“Actually I should not have said that Lebanese are niggers,” Hilda Daid contributes. “Actually we are more like Indians. Native Americans.”

“My father's been involved with Indian movements.” Portia relaxes, a little. Maybe it's all right to stay and talk? Maybe Hilda enjoys it too, and does not have something else very pressing to do just now?

“Does he know Mrs. Kaltenborn, your father?” Hilda asks.

“No, and he's not very well, he's pretty sick now. But I'm sorry, I wish—” I wish I could ask Hilda to dinner, is what Portia is thinking. On the way home I could stop off at Real Food and get some fish and things for salad and cookies and—Good God, this is crazy. I feel crazy. I feel in love with this woman I don't know at all, I just met her, and she is so beautiful, all that dark skin and so much heavy hair, and her eyes. A woman. So, I am a lesbian? Well, that would explain quite a lot.

“Well—” says Hilda Daid, looking at Portia.

“Well. Oh, I'm sorry. I was really enjoying, I forgot—” Portia feels a humiliating blush on her face, as though all her thoughts were there too, for Hilda to read.

“Oh, I too very much have enjoyed,” Hilda tells her.

By now they both are standing, the two thin young women, quite similar as to height—and perhaps it is that very accidental similarity (so few women she knows are that tall) that encourages Portia to say, “Maybe sometime you could come to the house for dinner? It's really nice, but of course you must have been there.”

“Actually I have not. She always meant—but not. And I would like that very much.”

“I suppose you're busy tonight, though.” Bringing out that sentence
was for Portia an act of enormous courage. She had to throw out all the words in a rush, with all her breath.

Hilda Daid's dark skin has darkened, a flush of blood appears in her cheeks. “Tonight would be very nice for me.”

“Oh, really? Well, great! Well, you know where it is? Should I draw you a map?”

“I have in fact this street map that serves me very well. I rely on it always.” A smile. White teeth.

“Well, that's great. Great! About seven?”

“I shall so much look forward. Thank you.”

“Oh, thank you!”

And Portia, the heiress, walks out of the seedy office and into the bright pure sunlight, the new spring day. How handy that this building is so relatively near Real Food, she can so easily walk. And she does, in that oddly mixed neighborhood, new cheaply built speculation condos, with their unseemly combinations of wood and plaster, juxtaposed with the graceful old Victorians, some quite gaudily restored but others not, left to rot away in their tree- and plant-crowded yards, beds of flaming orange California poppies and broken pots from which hardy geraniums strive, neglected and thriving.

In Real Food, as always, Portia buys much too much. She is irresistibly tempted by tiny new lettuces, small new green spinach leaves, fresh herbs and new potatoes, by whole-grain breads and nourishing cookies, and fish, the most beautiful swordfish. She leaves the store with an almost bursting brown bag. She decides to get a cab on Van Ness, then remembers that her car is parked on Pine Street, near the lawyer's office. Near Hilda.

Driving home, she sobers up a little, even with the heady thought that it is indeed “home” to which she is driving. Her house. And she admonishes herself that she must not confuse the person of Hilda Daid with the fact of home ownership. Hilda Daid is simply a very nice shy intelligent and appealing young woman, who happened, simply happened to be the bearer of great news. And to be very beautiful.

It does, though, make quite a difference to think that she actually owns the house. And a cat, for Pink is now solely hers (the other
two have disappeared), as surely as the house is. Thinking this as she walks from room to room, Portia stares fixedly at walls and windows, as though expecting the difference to be manifest there. (Ostensibly, though, she is looking for the cat.) And then, understanding what she is doing, her own nutty expectation of change, Portia further considers the larger sense in which nothing is ever owned, perhaps least of all houses, with their curiously autonomous lives, their ineradicable personal characters. As could be said of cats.

Nevertheless, in immediate, practical terms, she does own this house, and now she goes to the phone to dial Caroline's number, to tell her about it. To tell Ralph.