Caroline's Daughters Read Online Free

Liza’s kids, who threw up. And Ralph and Saul are packing leftovers into Saul’s old Ford wagon, directed by Fiona—as Jill buzzes off in her yellow Mercedes.
    And Sage announces her walk. “I’ll be back in an hour or so to pick up my car, but you guys will probably be taking naps by then.”
    â€œThat sounds right.”
    Has she always, all her life, been in love with Jim McAndrew? Sage has wondered this, and she took it up, repeatedly if not very fruitfully, with the psychiatrist to whom she briefly went—at the end of a love affair with a man of about Jim’s age, a married man, a father. Roland Gallo, a well-known local lawyer-politico, a semi-friend of Ralph’s.
    But it did not much matter what name she gave to her strong, surviving emotions in Jim’s direction, both she and the shrink concluded.Entering her life when she was at the very tender, very vulnerable age of less than three, as the first San Francisco suitor of her widowed mother, Jim was and has remained for Sage the ultimately desirable and finally unavailable person. “Friends” is the word she generally uses to describe her connection with Jim, and very likely that is how he too thinks and speaks of it, if he ever does mention this connection. “Sage and Jim have remained the greatest friends; it’s slightly odd, I suppose, but extremely nice, and quite natural when you think of it. After all, he was her father for all those years,” is how Caroline has been heard to describe it.
    Sage did not much like the lunch party. Or, she wonders, are her nagging, ill-defined worries over both Noel and her work enough to prevent her enjoyment of anything, even in this soft blue April weather? It is easier to ascribe the mild depression that she now experiences to the multiple presences of her sisters, her three half-sisters. Three halves: the very phrase suggests wrongness, no one should have three half-sisters, much less four.
    Not for the first time Sage considers the fact that of all those women it is Caroline, her mother, who seems most truly her sister. Although she is indeed fond of Liza, and of the absent Portia.
    Suppose she did a group of those female figures? Suddenly seeing that possibility, seeing the circle of small clay figures—perhaps at a table? chairs? No, standing would be better, more scope for individual postures—Sage stops in her tracks, stops right there on the sidewalk, which happens to be at the crest of a hill, the height of Pacific Heights. She stops to think, and to see.
    How amazing, really, that she has not thought of this grouping before. Or for that matter not done it long before.
    But now she will.
    From where Sage stands, had she been looking down to the bay she would have seen a flutter of white sails, all over the blue. A Sunday regatta, through which, all slow and stately, a long black freighter moves deliberately outward, toward the Pacific, the East. Bearing exports, probably, to Japan.
    Much closer to Sage, in fact she can smell them, are the thick dark woods of the Presidio, the eucalyptus and pines, the weird wind-bent cypresses.
    She is or has been taking the long way around to Jim’s condominium, where she is not due for almost half an hour (she called; she does not drop in on Jim, a busy bachelor-doctor). She takes this route both to kill the time and because she has always walked this way. Below her on Pacific Avenue is the row of large, dark and quite splendid houses, some Maybeck, a Julia Morgan, an Esherick, in one of which Roland the married lover lives, there across from the playground and the woods, with his view of the bridge and the bay. In the bad old days of the end of that affair Sage used to disguise herself in scarves and bulky sweaters (she hoped she was disguised) and to haunt the small area of playground just across from his house, trying to read messages from its handsome façade: lights in what must be the master bedroom (that