Caroline's Daughters by Alice Adams

years ago.” With cash, at Wilkes.
    â€œI hope it wouldn’t be out of line if I asked you to dinner?”
    Not out of line, just out of the question, you nerd. “I’d really love to but I can’t.” Jill smiles. “I’m really sorry.”
    Jill’s firm is considering a move from the Transamerica to one of the old brick buildings on Jackson Street, in what used to be Jackson Square, where the antique dealers and decorators were. Jill can’t wait to move; she has never said so to anyone but the views from this building, this pyramid, make her sick, on some days sicker than others, a sort of shifting vertigo. Today, maybe because of the Dalmane, it seems unusually bad. It is horrible to look out at all that distance, out and down to the bay, all that terrible deep water, and closer up all those monstrous dark boxes, the other new buildings. Jill shudders, and sits down at her desk, which faces away from the windows, toward the door.
    One of the messages before her is from her half-sister Sage, which is such a surprise that Jill picks up the phone to make the call right away. And then she hesitates: suppose Noel should answer? Well, that would serve him just right, the cheapo cheat.
    Sage, though, picks up the phone on its first ring. “I need some advice,” she says, sounding happy as anything, really high. “I need a good hotel in New York, and you go there all the time—”
    â€œWhen I go it’s on the firm, though, Sage. So I stay at the Meridien, or the Westbury.”
    â€œI’d like to be downtown. Sort of. Near SoHo.”
    â€œWell, look, Sage, I’ll ask around. Okay?”
    â€œSure. Thanks.”
    Only after hanging up does it occur to Jill that she could have asked Sage why she was going to New York, why she sounded so excited, so happy. And was Noel going to, and for how long? But she couldn’t ask Sage that.
    Looking at her watch, Jill sees that, miraculously, she now has exactly fifteen minutes to herself—or, that she can take fifteen minutes. Which should be exactly right.
    Quickly pulling several folders from a drawer, and opening the
Wall Street Journal
on her desk to the day’s quotations, she begins to jot numbers on a pad of yellow paper. She then makes a few calculations on her handy brown lizard computer, and after seven or eight minutes of this she comes up smiling.
    And she thinks, almost aloud: I have just barely under two mil, dear Noel, if you really want to know. And I’m only thirty-one, just starting out.
    And she adds, I’m five feet seven, and I weigh in at just under ninety pounds. And so, what else would you like to know? Would you like to hear about a game I used to play?

Six
    P ortia Carter looks remarkably like her father, Ralph, as indeed all Caroline’s daughters resemble their fathers rather than herself. “I must have very weak genes,” Caroline has remarked, which no one believes to be true. Portia is very tall and often stooped, she has a look of being bent, like a tree. She has her father’s large white face, long nose and large teeth. She is shy and somewhat strange; her mother and her sisters are divided between thinking her brilliant (the opinion of Caroline and Sage) and somewhat simple (Liza, reluctantly, and Fiona and Jill). Ralph has never been heard to pronounce on his daughter, it is only clear that he adores her. “She hasn’t found herself,” is a sentence on which they all might agree, concerning Portia; brilliant or innocent, or both, she gives a sense of floundering through life, with both more trials and more errors than most people seem to encounter.
    She is not actually a poet, although she is occasionally explained as such. “I do write an occasional haiku,” Portia has confessed to Sage, to whom she is closest, “but that’s just for fun. It’s a sort of meditative exercise.” She allows the rest of them to think of