Five Fortunes (19 page)

Hunt said, “I’m waiting for the punch line. Did she do it?”

“Of course!” “Yo!” “Yes!” The children all answered at once.

Hunt turned his whole body away from the fire, and took a good look at his daughter.

ALBERT STROUSE, SAN FRANCISCO

PHILANTHROPIST, DEAD AT 83

ran the headline on the
New York Times
obituary. The account, which ran twelve column inches, went on to describe his rise from department store clerk to manager to founder of The Surplus chain of clothing stores, now to be found on every continent except Antarctica. It mentioned his work with the OSS during the Second World War, his love of sports, especially the Cal Bears and the San Francisco Giants. It dwelled at length on his service on a score of boards and the work of the Strouse Foundation. It mentioned his first marriage to Ruth Rose, his children, Albert, Jr., and daughter Eloise, and six grandchildren. It mentioned his second marriage to the former Janet Thigpen Keely, known as “Rae.” It said that he had died at home, after a long illness.

S
imilar notices ran in most of the major papers across the country, and the
San Francisco Chronicle
carried an even longer version, with a very jolly picture of Albie dressed as a singing milkmaid during a performance at the Bohemian Club. None of the notices mentioned the nature of his illness or the manner of his death, and for that Rae was intensely grateful.

In the long day while she waited for the children and grandchildren to arrive, she and her son, Walter, had begun the task of going through Albie’s papers. They found that he had been preparing for 142

Five Fortunes / 143

death throughout his life. He’d left a file describing exactly where all his real estate records, bank accounts, insurance records, invest-ment and tax papers were, with names and telephone numbers of agents and executives. It was the work of a man who would have been horrified to fail in protecting and providing for his loved ones.

Rae noticed that the last changes in this folder were dated three years ago. She cried only once, when Walter found a more recent paper that had been tucked under the blotter. On it, Albie had been practicing writing his own name.

The obituary asked that in lieu of flowers, donations be sent to the Strouse Foundation. Mountains of flowers arrived at the house anyway. Rae had the tulips Albie had bought her carried upstairs to their bedroom. The rest were stationed around the library and the living room, and the perfume was becoming bewildering.

Letters began to arrive in piles, and the phone rang constantly.

Rae and Walter took turns answering it.

“Carter Bond?” he asked, with his hand over the mouthpiece. Rae reached for the receiver.

“Hello, dearie,” said Rae.

“Kiddo, I’m so sorry,” Carter said.

“Thank you. He was a wonderful man. I’m sorry now that you’ll never know him.”

“I’m sorry too. But I’m a little worried about the spook part.”

“It was only during the war. I thought it was rather dashing.”

“Tell me the truth though…how are you?”

“I’m all right. I’ve been doing my grieving for a long time, and now it can end.”

“I’d worry you were being brave and noble if I didn’t know about that cartwheel.”

“I
am
being brave and noble, and it’s a relief to be able to admit it.”

“So what’s the drill right now? Who’s with you?”

Rae described the schedule for the next few days. Albie’s children and Rae’s daughter would arrive, with grandchildren. The funeral was to be at Temple Emanu-El the day after Thanksgiving. It was wrong to wait so long, but it was taking time for the family to arrive, and it

144 / Beth Gutcheon

seemed equally wrong to make people who wanted to be there choose between honoring Albie and giving thanks with their families.

Everyone would be gone by Saturday.

“And then what will you do?”

“I have no idea.”

“Okay,” said Carter, “I’ll call you Sunday.”

“Thank you.”

When she hung up, she was smiling. “Who was that?” Walter asked.

“One of my fat-farm buddies,” said Rae.

Amy called, and so did Laurie.

“Mother, it’s Laura Knox Lopez,” Walter said, curious.

“Dearie,” said Rae, taking the phone.

“I wish I were there to give you a hug,” said Laurie.

“I wish you were too. And then you could talk to Walter about your campaign.”

Laurie laughed. “You are relentless.”

“He’s right here, do you want to talk to him?”

There was a pause, and then Laurie said, “Sure.”

Rae handed Walter the phone. Walter listened briefly, then said,

“This isn’t a joke, is it?” After another beat he gave a shout of laughter, slapped his hand on the tabletop, and said, “I’m in. I’ll see you in Boise on Monday.”

Rae was watching him with a wide smile on her face.

“What on earth goes on at that place?” Walter asked her.

“She’s going to do it?”

“She is.”

Rae shook her two fists in the air, the gesture Albie had used to cheer hooray.

The second morning Rae even got sympathy e-mail.

Pretend this is fancy letter paper with a blue monogram,
said the text on the screen.

I’m so sorry about your husband. I don’t know
Five Fortunes / 145

what else to say. You’re going to miss him. Write back if you
want. Love, Jill.

Albert Junior and his wife, Cordie, flew in from Boston. They installed themselves at The Clift. Their three children were all at different colleges and so all arrived at different times throughout the day. James was deployed to the airport repeatedly to meet them.

Albert Strouse, Jr., was a nice person, but a conventional one. His father had sometimes remarked dryly that they had sent Bert to Yale and he’d never gotten over it. He had been an athlete in his youth.

Now he worked as a stockbroker. He worked hard, but found it slow going. He often wished for the nerve to take early retirement, but his father had contempt for men who lived on their private incomes, so Bert soldiered on.

Bert had respected and loved his father without ever being much like him. Albie had loved people and games and sports and politics and travel and history and action. Bert liked systems. What made Bert happy was new electronic equipment. The latest Loran for his boat, for example, and a big, thick manual on its operation.

Bert’s children were also mysteries to him. His daughters, Susan-nah and Mary, took after their mother. They were plump, sunny, and popular, and viewed their father as a somewhat comic figure.

Their brother, Harton, had arrived from Kenyon this afternoon with his hair a vivid shade of green. This had set off a clatter of mortified yammering from parents and sisters.

“You’re going to your grandfather’s funeral with green hair?!”

“Yes? So?”

“Harton!”

“Harton, whatever possessed you?”

“I didn’t go, like, I think I want green hair, Ma. I was trying to bleach it.”

“Well, what happened?”

He shrugged. “I’m not a hairdresser.”

“But why didn’t you fix it?”

146 / Beth Gutcheon

“Dad, chill. It will grow out.”

“You mean you’re going to your grandfather’s funeral with green hair?”

And so on. His sisters thought this was
too
funny.

Bert’s annoyance over Harton’s hair was made very much worse by the fact that the children of Rae’s daughter, Harriet, were all well-groomed, apparently sane, and exhibited easy good manners. Bert’s children tended to huddle together and talk only to each other, as if adults belonged to some alien species that needn’t be acknow-ledged.

Bert’s sister, Eloise, arrived with little Trishie at dinnertime Wednesday, and took over one of the guest rooms at the Broadway house.

Her son, Strouse, had arrived by bus from Oregon during the afternoon.

Eloise Strouse Threadgill had been in tears much of the last two days. She had worshiped her father, and had never forgiven him for outgrowing the idyll of her childhood, when nothing in the world had been more important to him than she was. Her mother had been busy with the stores, and her brother, Bert, had regarded her as about as interesting as pond slime, but Albie had somehow managed to be an unfailing source of patient concern. Eloise was therefore disoriented when, after her mother’s death, her father had remarried and commenced a new and apparently joyful life in which his grown daughter not only did not occupy the position of the sun, she seemed to have entered an orbit in his universe somewhere in the neighborhood of Mars.

Eloise had never seen this state of affairs as appropriate, let alone permanent. She believed that the intended state of the constellations was the one she had first encountered as a babe in arms. Eloise as center of universe, father rotating patiently within reach, always ready and waiting to turn in her direction. But he had failed to return to his assigned position, and her relations with him had gotten strained. She had developed a strong, sulky resentment at Albie’s failure to be pre-occupied with her needs, although she had a husband of her own, and a circle of friends, and soon two small children.

Eloise found in time that her husband failed, as her father had, to
Five Fortunes / 147

provide the ceaseless interest in her that she believed was in order, and her marriage slowly and tediously foundered. When she decided to forgive her father for failing her so she could turn to him in her exciting hour of need, she found to her horror that he was no longer completely there. Or he was there, but no longer completely her father.

She had not been much comfort to him or to Rae during the long years that had followed. When she talked to Albie on the phone, and he grew confused, or forgot things he had known only minutes before, she felt acute embarrassment, as if she had walked in on him in the bathroom, or were overhearing him talking in his sleep. She thought of him as “not himself,” as if that meant the affection and duty owed to a father were thus canceled.

It didn’t help Eloise to cope with her present despair, when her daughter, young Trishie, had thrown a tantrum about being dragged up to San Francisco to the funeral of a grandfather she had barely known. To Trishie, Albie had been a kind of horrifying old specimen with huge ears who would ask her the same question he had just asked five minutes before. Peoples’ ears definitely got bigger as they got old. Trishie was royally pissed because she had a big part in the Thanksgiving play, but now she would miss it, and she could have stayed with Chelcie while her mother went to the funeral, but her mother didn’t listen when she explained this.

Harriet Keely Goetz and her family were staying with Walter.

There was not really room for them all at his apartment, so they spent most waking hours at the house on Broadway.

Mealtimes gradually took on the aspect of a camp kitchen for an army on the move. Friends came and stayed, the grandchildren all had jet lag and arrived for breakfast at lunchtime, and were ready for lunch as the cook was serving dinner. Fortunately the kitchen was set up for entertaining on a grand scale, but Rae ordered Doreen and James to lower their standards at least to allow paper napkins.

James went to Costco and bought three dozen Wolfgang Puck frozen pizzas, and Cook roasted a ham and a huge roast beef so that sand-wich production could be maintained around the clock.

148 / Beth Gutcheon

It was, thus, an ill-assorted and subdued family group that gathered together on Thursday night to observe Thanksgiving. They filled the whole long dining room table, and spilled over onto a spare table covered with white linen and set up in the hall. Bert said a blessing, and then he and Walter stood at the sideboard carving the turkey while Doreen and James passed vegetable dishes. The young had been allowed to sit together so the cousins could renew acquaintance and the step-cousins could get to know each other. The middle-aged sat at the other end, surrounding Rae.

Bert and Cordie talked about what on earth Harton had done to his hair. Rae said not to worry about it; she was sure Albie would have liked it: “He liked things to be modern.”

Cordie tried to share parenting woes with Harriet and her husband, Leon, but the Goetz’s difficulties seemed so innocent and minor compared to Harton’s hair and the Strouse girls’ addiction to shopping that it was hard to get a good grudge session going.

Then Eloise, who’d had about eight tumblers of wine, began to cry, and Bert, sitting beside her, put a hand on her shoulder. Rae, on her other side (and always prepared for maternal emergencies), produced a clean handkerchief.

“I wish it had been some other way…” Eloise managed to say.

“I do too,” Rae said. “I wish he could have just said to his doctor,

‘It’s time for me to go.’”

“But it wasn’t time…” Eloise cried. “His heart was strong…he enjoyed his food, he wasn’t in pain…to
drown…
” And she cried some more.

The young, at the far end, were beginning to keep up a steady buzz of conversation. The ones who had seen
Pulp Fiction
were describing it frame by frame to the ones who had not. They were paying no mind to what their elders were talking about. This was good, Rae felt. She had no desire to find herself conducting a seminar for fifteen.

“He
was
in pain,” she said quietly. “He was in pain knowing that his illness was destroying the man he had been. He didn’t want to be remembered as something pitiful.”

Five Fortunes / 149

“So what are you saying?” Eloise demanded. “Are you saying it
wasn’t
an accident?”

Harriet and Walter looked at each other. Finally Rae said, “It was certainly not an accident, and he wanted you to know that.”

“He wanted
me
to know that?”

“He wanted it known,” Rae corrected herself. “He communicated clearly.” She explained about the pajamas while Eloise and Bert and Cordie listened and stared at her.

Bert sat back in his chair and folded his hands in his lap. His wife had leaned forward toward Rae. One hand covered her mouth.