Read Online The Family Fortune by Laurie Horowitz - Free Book Online

on the brocade sofa in one of what Priscilla called the “conversation areas.” I didn’t want to take a seat in the corner. My days of sitting in the corner like a china figurine were over—at least for the moment.
    Littleton perched on a Chippendale chair near me. Miranda sat on a settee. Dolores had stayed at home for once. I glanced at Pris, who was knitting with a fluffy green wool. Teddy was slumped in a wingback chair by the fireplace. He sat just apart from our little group, as if he couldn’t bear to join us.
    â€œYou’ll have to cut out the Christmas party,” Littleton said.
    â€œYou’ve got to be kidding,” Miranda said. Miranda was a renowned Boston party-giver. People jockeyed all year to get onto her Christmas party list. She had three-by-five cards on her dressing table with people’s names on them and she moved them from one pile to another depending on how well disposed she was toward the person on that particular day.
    Though I wasn’t much of a party person, even I enjoyed Miranda’s Christmas parties. They were always done in a Roaring Twenties style with a big band and costumes. I liked watching the couples pull up to the valet in their fancy cars. They’d rush into the cold, the women hobbling toward the house in spiked heels, the men secure in their spats, and arrive at the door all flushed and smiling, blowing the frosty air like smoke.
    Miranda loved to pull the strings of Boston society. She got invited to all the best parties because people hoped that their invitations would be returned. It was as if after my mother died, Miranda and I split her traits down the middle. Miranda got everything that was outgoing and social and I got all that was thoughtful and sedentary. Miranda flourished and became, in her way, a social luminary. Town & Country did a story on her. When Miranda and Teddy went out together, their pictures often appeared in the society pages of the Boston Globe .
    â€œTo be honest, you can barely afford to run this house, and if you are to continue to do it, you’ll have to make some major changes. Perhaps you could take in boarders,” Littleton said.
    Priscilla’s head snapped up. I tried to picture myself as the proprietor of the Fortune Family Bed & Breakfast. We would introduce our guests to the moneyed class of the twenty-first century, the diminishing, foolish, useless moneyed class that didn’t even have the sense to hang on to what they had been given.
    But, of course, the city would never allow it, nor would our neighbors, nor would our sense of propriety.
    â€œTake in boarders?” Miranda whined. “What can you be thinking, Littleton?”
    Littleton was perspiring into the collar of his shirt. He took out a linen handkerchief and wiped it across his neck.
    â€œI don’t understand how this happened.”
    This came from Miranda, whose collection of designer shoes and handbags filled an entire walk-in closet on the second floor. Teddy had some expensive habits also. He collected wines, cigars, antique watches, and first editions of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. He didn’t read the books; he just collected them. But all these things were minor indulgences for us. What had really happened was that for two generations we lived extravagantly and made no money. The family had dipped into the principal of its many trusts little by little until they were dangerously depleted.
    My father also made some bad investments. He would read something in the paper, get an idea, and call his “broker.”
    â€œCouldn’t we remortgage the house?” Teddy asked.
    â€œYou have two mortgages already,” Littleton said.
    â€œWe do?” I asked. I thought our house, which my father inherited free and clear, had remained that way.
    â€œEven if you got another mortgage, how would you pay it back?” Priscilla asked. “You could pay it back when you sold the house, I suppose, but are