Dear Money (12 page)

Heath was a big man filled with a doctor's bravado and a small, adorable boy's desire not only to please his father but to outperform him. He looked at Theodor and said without a trace of irony, "We
are
the Joneses."

"He didn't say that," Emma said to Theodor, bubbling with laughter; and then everyone laughed. You could pretend all you wanted to be beneath the Joneses, but God forbid if you place yourself up there with them. What kind of a person would do that?

"Power to your brother," Will said, stroking his strong chin, pushing back in his chair, admiring my brother for the boldness of his character, finding the complexity in something seemingly silly. "At least he calls a spade a spade."

"The Joneses," Win said, turning them over in his mind. On his plate lay the lobster carcass, picked clean, even the head. Will had instructed all of us to dig into the small crevices of the head to find the lobster's best meat. "They always fall. The trick in trading is to assess when, understand how and when the illusion will get the better of them, you know, in terms of the general feel of the market. There's a whole subcategory of bonds designed for the collapse of high-end mortgages, bonds that thrive on the failure of the Joneses."

Win sat there with his pink shirt and his glistening cuff links, perched high above the rest of us.

"True enough. But for now he's a Jones, and for now he knows it," Will said. And my brother was deflated and inflated in what I could see was a dialogue about their perspectives on the market. Will worked in the present. Win worked in the future. And character, as it always seems to be, was at the center of the argument.

***

Again, in my bed, I awoke to a thunderstorm violently ripping the night sky, lightning darting about, streaking light here and there. I heard water dripping onto the plastic above my head. I lay watching the storm out the window. Theodor had moved to the girls' room to comfort them. The water would become too heavy for the plastic and the tape. Eventually it would all fall into the bed. I would drape more plastic over the bed in order to protect it and then move to the couch.

But for now I lay here listening to the sound of the leaking water that made our lives possible, allowed us to live well. Was there a category of bond for us? Of course not, for we were renters. Even Lily Starr made it into Win's fabulous subcategories of mortgage bonds. She'd be good and reliable and stalwart. The crash of thunder was so violent and loud it seemed New York was being carpet-bombed. The thunder obliterated the drip. For so long I had been outside the forces of the market. I, my family, a stealth force, operating beneath the surface, unable to be tracked. If Win was above it, we were beneath it. In either case, we were both outsiders, able to sit back and watch the play unfold at a distance, with perspective. For all my longing and indulgences, I was fascinated by the mechanics of the system, all our minor yet essential parts in creating desire's narrative.

I
N HIGH SCHOOL,
a teacher of mine, Miss Fine, gave me an extra-credit assignment to help me improve my grade in language arts. She asked me to describe my bedroom, to go home and look at it carefully, to observe the details. I lay on my four-poster bed, my back pushing into the thick, full down comforter, looked into the crocheted canopy above me and studied the design therein. For a long time I looked only at the canopy cover—four-inch circles, each like the eye of a cobweb, spun by hand and repeated a thousand times. The canopy cover was enormous. It spanned the four posts and draped down each side to meet at the mattress. My great-grandmother had made it for my grandmother's bed when she was a toddler, some eighty years before. I never knew my great-grandmother, but I could see her hands as they worked the crochet hook and the needle, sewing the canopy cover together. She was an elegant woman named Margaret, and she lived with her husband and two daughters in Philadelphia. Her husband, Heath (like my brother, his namesake), was a financier heavily invested in railroads and in the city's infrastructure—trolley cars and garbage disposal and the like.

Margaret was a young woman when she worked on the can opy cover, her hands less marked by age than my own, at thirty-eight. Smooth, white, unblemished. She did not wash her own dishes. The eye of the web was detailed with balls (popcorn, the stitch is called), the fine cotton yarn teased to form a cluster of eight. If there were a thousand circles, and each circle had eighty tiny balls, that would make at least eighty thousand balls stitched by her hands. It took her less than one year to make the canopy cover. She worked on it in her parlor by the fire while her husband read the evening paper, while my grandmother India was still in a crib and while Margaret's baby, Nora, was in a bassinet.

Looking into the canopy, it was as if I were sharpening my eye. There was nothing extraordinary about the room. It was a girl's room, the walls a pale shade of pink, a bookcase filled with classics, another with small Madame Alexander dolls, a closet filled with dresses, some of them having belonged to my mother as a girl. On my dresser I had a doll's bureau for hair ties and ribbons and clips. A few pictures hung on the walls: Mother as a small girl in Europe with her parents, my brother and I as babies, an antique mirror in a gilt frame, a painting of Mother Goose. The mirror had belonged to my mother's mother. In the closet as well was a doll's pram that had been my mother's. There were riding boots and hat, a tennis racket, ice skates, a soccer ball, a couple of lacrosse sticks. I did not know true discomfort. I did not know true longing. At that point in my life I longed for little, and I understood, lying on my bed, that this stuff passed down to me by a few generations was a form of wealth. I understood that I, in a centrally air-conditioned ranch house in suburban Maryland, not far from horse farms where I had ridden as a younger girl, had so very much.

I lay on the bed for a long time, staring into the concentric pattern as my great-grandmother's hands grew old, a bit knotty, riddled with arthritis. The canopy cover had been made to outlast her, made of the finest Italian cotton thread reinforced with Como silk. The canopy cover had been folded neatly and stored in plastic, protected by mothballs, and had moved with my grandmother to Baltimore when she married—a financier too, invested heavily in telephones and automobiles. The window of my room looked out on a garden cared for by my mother and that bloomed from May through September. It was February now and snow covered the garden bed, a fine, thin white layer.

Studying the room it occurred to me that something fundamental about who I am was missing: my father. He was not present in the room at all, and thus, like an equation, there was a missing factor that, once known, would complete the story of who I am:
x + ? = y.
There was nothing of him as a child, no picture, no toy. He was absent entirely, as if he did not exist, or as if he were irrelevant. My mother and her fancy past were all that mattered here, as if they wanted to wipe his struggle clean from the slate. He was always who he is now: the hard-working, well-paid doctor.

My mother and father met at university when he was in medical school and she an undergraduate studying the history of art. He was a strong man, and she liked that he told her what to do. She had always been told just what to do. She wanted a man to complete what her father had begun, and so when my father saw her for the first time, sitting on a bench reading about Michelangelo, studying for an exam, her hair pulled back with a black velvet bandeau, her blue eyes round and hopeful and ready for adventure, he sat down beside her and said, "I'm taking you for lunch. You need a break and I'm taking you for lunch." She smiled ever so slightly, stood up and followed him. She did not bother to ask his name until they were halfway through their meal.

My father's past had nothing to do with hers. He was the son of an alcoholic from Scotland who came to this country at the turn of the last century because there was nothing left for him there. My grandfather was poor and close to illiterate. He used an
X
to sign his name. Even so, he was a dreamer, and dreamed of becoming a poet. In the evenings when his children were little, they sat around the kitchen table and my father listened to his father spin tales about the Hebrides and the Mull of Kintyre and the Irish Sea, sing achingly beautiful ballads. My father's mother dutifully cleaned as her husband sang, wiped down the counters, her hair pushed back with a kerchief, her housedress and thin frame wrapped in an apron.

As my father grew up, watching the alcoholic nose of his father become redder and more bulbous, watching his mother weighed down by his father's life, he formed a decided opinion about art and its creators. He studied to become a medical doctor, something practical and sound. And here is where tragedy intersected his life, as it will, it seems, all lives. As an intern in a local hospital, he was invited to observe as a more seasoned doctor operated on his mother, a procedure my own mother was too embarrassed to name: "a female concern." It was my grandmother's uterus that was in question, I later came to understand. A hysterectomy. My father sat in the operating theater with a group of other young doctors in training, dressed in their sterile suits, hands covered, mouths covered. Observe he did, as the surgeon made a small mistake.

The procedure went terribly wrong, simple as that, because of the incompetence of the surgeon, who cut an artery that did not need to be cut, and my father's mother bled to death before his eyes. The nurse and the anesthesiologist and the others in attendance tried valiantly to right what could not be righted. Blood poured from the wound, absorbed by the cotton covers, towels stuffed against her side to try to stanch the flow. He could feel her kisses on the crown of his head, her king, a shower of kisses. There was nothing he could do; helplessly he watched. The other students filed out, urging my father to come with them, but he became a stone. Once, for a moment, his eyes met those of the surgeon. My father would never forget the look they held. Not a look of culpability, of sorrow, of desperation, or of guilt. Rather, the eyes held blame. The eyes said to my father, big brown eyes edged with red rims, tired, overworked, defiant eyes, they said to him: Had you not been seated there, this would not have happened. The surgeon took off his gloves and tossed them on the table and with the same defiance walked from the operating room.

My father's father drank himself to death soon thereafter. My father had to rise from this, a slum somewhere in Baltimore, a little sister now in his care. Or does the story begin with the birth of my grandfather on a small Scottish island, very cold, where even potatoes were hard to come by and the idea of writing a word, one's own name, was reserved for people of more fortunate means and the only hope was that ship to America?

This was the story my room told. I gave the essay to Miss Fine. The next day she read it aloud to the class. Adjusting her bifocals on the bridge of her nose, she stood before the class with my typed pages in her hand and read the words slowly, patiently, emphatically. It was magic, a swirl in my chest. She asked me to write other stories, and I did. I received an A in the class and the confidence to know that my stories, my words, the effort that went into them, were admirable. I understood something specific, elemental, looking into the canopy cover—the painstaking quality with which those circles were made, a thousand of them, eighty thousand balls, so precise it seemed a machine had to have made them, each one looking like the others, woven together with a needle to turn an ordinary bed into a fantasy for a girl, the cotton reinforced with silk, a smooth and creamy cream, draping the mahogany posts of the four-poster bed—I understood something about patience, and that I would pursue it at the expense of all else. Miss Fine read my essay to the class, and the class was impressed, and the class and Miss Fine thought they learned something more about me and where I came from. They were heartbroken for my father, the stern man they saw only on occasion—if Mother was sick—dropping me off at school. They were heartbroken for me too.

What I did not tell them was that the story was a lie. The Palmers were English, not Scottish; the canopy cover was a bedspread bought by my mother at a flea market. My paternal grandmother lived to be 104. Shall I go on?

That facts were malleable—not irreducible finished goods, but a kind of originating ore, to be shaped and spun and even discarded wholesale for the sake of the story—was a new and powerful discovery. It made me feel powerful, because I understood that people wanted to believe that what they were reading had actually happened, and I believed I could make them feel that even if I was "lying."

I went to a college famous for its undergraduate creative writing program and then went to New York City to graduate school. I read all the young American writers I could find who I believed had talent. I studied them to see what they were doing, if they had the ability to get inside me and move me, and if they did, I studied every word, every comma, to see how they managed the feat. I wanted to do what they did. I studied their careers too, used them as models for my own. I applied for grants and prizes they'd won. I went to writers' colonies they'd gone to. I was calculating. I saw where they were ten, fifteen years down the line from me, imagined myself there, became competitive, imagined I could and should do better. I locked myself in the bedroom of my first small apartment and stayed there until a chapter was finished. I worked until all hours of the night. I rose early, tore my hair out. I wanted this. I did not notice the days slip by. I did not notice the seasons. I went inside myself and in two and a half years pulled out my first novel—the story of a young doctor whose father is an immigrant from Scotland, an illiterate drunk who wanted to be a poet, the story of a young doctor whose mother dies before his eyes during a simple operation, the story of how this young doctor raises his younger sister after the death of both parents—
The Way We Do Things Here.
I met Theodor and together we began to dream.