The Family Fortune by Laurie Horowitz Page A

at heart. The feeling was so deep I could barely reach it, let alone recognize it.
    â€œYou’ll ruin his career and your life,” she said.
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œHe’ll have to spend his time figuring out how to support you both. It will leach his energy away from his writing and he’ll resent you for it.”
    â€œBut I have the trust fund. And I can work.”
    â€œThe trust doesn’t kick in until you’re thirty and you’ve never worked. Besides, do you think any man wants to live off his significant other or partner or whatever you’re going to call yourself—even today? You think he’ll be proud of himself if his history reads that he married his patroness? Think about the word patronize, Jane. Patron and patronize are from the same root.”
    â€œHe didn’t ask me to marry him. He asked me to go to California.”
    â€œWorse. At least if he asked you to marry him, you’d have some respectable connection, such as it is. This way, he’s free to drop you whenever he wants to. I’m only thinking of you. I’m standing in loco parentis, saying what I think your mother would have said.”
    â€œMy mother wouldn’t have tried to protect me from life.”
    â€œYou’re wrong. She tried to protect you from everything unpleasant in life. Even with her illness. She was sick long before she ever told you. She didn’t want you to suffer. She never wanted you to suffer,” Priscilla said.
    â€œWell, it didn’t work. I suffered all the same. People do, you know.”
    â€œI know what she would have wanted. I knew her best. You don’t understand anything about men. You never have. I’d be more likely to trust Miranda with something like this.” I didn’t bring up Guy Callow, but then no one knew what really happened with him—and Miranda hadn’t suffered much. “You and Max come from different backgrounds. He’s just beginning on what is a very difficult career. Give him a chance. If the love is strong, a few years won’t change it.”
    I didn’t believe her. Romantic songs and books prattled on about eternal love, but I knew that if I didn’t go with Max now, I’d lose him.
    When I called Teddy, who was on the Vineyard, to tell him my news, he told me that he wouldn’t give me any money (not that I had asked for any) and that, of course, I’d have to give up the foundation.
    â€œThe Fortune girls don’t run off to California. Not on my watch,” he said. “Besides, you won’t like it. It’s not your kind of place.”
    How would he know? He’d never even been there.
    Â 
    Priscilla came out of the lecture and saw me leaning with my forehead against the wall. She put her hand on my back.
    â€œBuck up,” she said. “The thing with that writer was so long ago. You really should have forgotten about it by now.”
    I lifted my head from the wall. Priscilla stood there with her solid stick figure encased in a tweed skirt. Perhaps any normal person would have forgotten, but it wasn’t as if so much had happened to me since to make me forget.
    â€œI wasn’t thinking about Max,” I said.
    â€œI just thought that since we were escaping the house so we wouldn’t have to see his sister, he might be on your mind.”
    â€œIt was hot in there. That’s all.”
    â€œThe windows were wide open. I actually felt a chill.”
    â€œI was hot,” I said.
    â€œWhatever you say, dear.” Priscilla peered over her half-glasses with a look so tolerant I felt like I’d shrunk to the size of the buckle on her shoe.
    We walked home from the library and entered the house, where Miranda and my father were having drinks in the sitting room.
    â€œYou should have stayed, Jane,” Miranda said. “They were really interesting people.”
    â€œNothing like what you’d expect in show people,