Your mom and dad was meant to be checked out by eleven a.m., comprende?” The receptionist at the Wellcome Arms no longer wore her name badge. Her sleeves were jammed above the elbows. She was chewing gum. And she was rude.
Carter had detected the same fraying of propriety in New York. Police shuffled their beats in open collars and dirty shoes. Doormen didn’t open the door for frail tenants or offer to carry groceries, and their livery looked slept in. Sometimes the changes were subtle—a maître d’ didn’t see you to your table, but jerked his head irritably to indicate you could sit anywhere—but the touch-and-feel transformation of daily life was substantial. The voiding of some rules seemed to have opened the floodgates to the voiding of them all.
“Checked out?” he said. “This isn’t a hotel.”
“Is a business, chico,” she said, smacking. “A for-profit business and not a charity, which I’m immense tired of explaining to you people, wanna know the truth.”
“I can’t imagine there’s a long line of applicants for my father’s compound, is there?” Carter dropped the pen from a height. The formality of signing in now seemed daft. “You should be grateful for residents who’ve hung on as long as my father, thanks to whom you still have a job.”
Surfaces revealed that a cutback in staffing had already begun. The baseboards were lined with black dust. Carter’s shoes didn’t squeak as he strode the marble hallway, where the reek of urine was piercing—despite half the doors along the corridor listing open, the units unoccupied. Out the back door leading to the premier-class compounds, the lawn was six inches high. The previous June a riot of pansies and marigolds, the borders were now plain dirt. He didn’t hear any horses. He wouldn’t be surprised if they’d been shot.
The front door of Douglas and Luella’s compound also lolled agape. Alarmingly, framed book covers bound in bubble wrap were propped along the hall; none of these decorations would fit in the car. The crimson carpet was trod flat and specked with sod.
Carter found his father once more in the library. The shelves were bare. Douglas stood staring aimlessly, surrounded by towers of cardboard cartons. His cream suit was rumpled, and he wasn’t wearing an ascot—an affectation that may once have grated, but whose absence was worse. He didn’t look natty and trim but feeble and underweight. His posture had collapsed. At last, Douglas Elliot Mandible looked every day of ninety-eight.
Carter asked with a sweep of his arm, “Pop, what’s all this?”
“The library, of course.”
“Well, clearly we’re in the library,” Carter said patiently.
“I haven’t turned into Luella, son. The books, not the room.”
“If you’re of such sound mind, then you also remember what I told you. A few clothes, your medications and toiletries, maybe a handful of keepsakes. Small keepsakes, not the sort that would fill a U-Haul.”
“I assumed you’d be renting a vehicle appropriate for the task.”
“I came up in the BeEtle—into which you, Luella, and a small amount of luggage will barely fit. We don’t need to incur any unnecessary expense right now, and our house is already crammed with crap. You can download everything in these cartons onto a chip the size of a ladybug. It’s the ideal time to join the modern world.”
“But these are signed first editions! If it’s money we need, this library is worth a deep six figures!”
“New York is awash in old print books, Pop.” Carter tried to say this kindly, but exasperation got the better of him. “Your generation’s left behind truckloads of hardbacks, and younger people don’t want them. So collectors have their pick. More to the point, what collectors? Do you know one real person who’d part with cash right now for stained wood pulp? If not, all these boxes stay behind.” The sternness was unabashedly parental. Yet having at last been granted the status of full adulthood was not as gratifying as Carter once had hoped.
Tipping backwards toward his armchair by the bay window, Douglas fell more than sat. “Chucking a collection of this quality into a Dumpster is sheer barbarism.”
Carter kneeled at the chair. “What’s important about these objects you can take with you. You read them, right? They’re in your head.”
“All that’s left in my head is grief and muddle.”
As his father grew weepy, Carter laid a hand on his shoulder, which felt too narrow and too sharp. “Jesus, have they been feeding you?”
“Not much. Not since the eviction notice. Forget asparagus and béarnaise. It’s a few hard rolls they all but throw at you, and some sort of dog-foody ham. Which I might have tolerated, had the staff not raided my bar. All they left is a liqueur—some dreadful benefaction, orange peel macerated in gasoline.”
“Since when do the orderlies help themselves to your property?”
“I’ve overheard grumbling about their wages not keeping up, so they’ve started to steal. Speaking of which, the one thing you must find room for in that midget car of yours is the Mandible silver service.” Douglas tapped a rectangular mahogany box on the long central table. Carter was familiar with its contents; the curlicue M on each heavy piece of cutlery was distinctive. “It could come in useful, for the metal alone—unless the feds confiscate silver next. For weeks, I’ve not let it out of my sight. I sleep with that box under my pillow, and I can’t tell you how uncomfortable it’s been.”
“If you’d told me this joint was going to the dogs, I’d have rescued you sooner.”
“Best to put this off as long as possible for your sake, son. I fear the novelty of caring for Luella is apt to wear off quickly.”
“You’re seeing Mimi again. Mimi, see me. Don’t think I don’t know it!”
Speak of the devil. Luella had wandered in wearing what might once have been a stylish frock, but the hem was shredded from her having torn at it, and the sky-blue fabric was encrusted with food. The bloop of her stomach echoed the bulge of an adult diaper at the rear. Carter had grown accustomed to this decayed incarnation of his father’s second wife, but fifteen years earlier the shock had been profound. Sure, he’d resented the way the younger woman moved in on her employer in 1992, making herself oh, so indispensable in every department. He’d suspected at the time, too, that his father’s financial situation had made the twenty-two-year age difference easier for Luella to excuse. But when Douglas first remarried, Carter had conceded that the woman was a looker: an unapologetic five ten, slender and stately, with plumb posture, impeccable nails, and a sharp eye for clothes. He could hardly blame his father (though of course he had). Even at seventy-something she hadn’t entirely lost her figure—just everything else.
“That woman has airs,” Luella added, with the occasional cogency grown more disconcerting than the nonsense. “But I descend from the Warrior Queen of the Ivory Coast, Nana Abena Pokuaa! Who ruled the Baoule Kingdom of the Akans for thirty years! Dirty fears! I am royalty, and Mimi is common. Lemon ramen! From traders and shopkeepers. Raiders and peepers!” She leaned accusingly into Douglas’s face. “Don’t think I don’t know it.”
“She’s intermittently convinced I’m seeing your mother again,” Douglas explained. “Which is thrilling, because in that event she seems to know who I am. Otherwise, whatever greeting-card part of the brain that conjures up rhymes remains intact.”
“Hi, Luella,” Carter said pointlessly. “Today, we’re going on a trip.”
“Trip, flip, conniption fit. Today, hooray!” She giggled girlishly, placing a shy hand to her cheek, then tonguing the air as if trying to catch a fly. This rapid flicking and licking motion was one of Carter’s least favorite of Luella’s ticks.
“Is it going to be hard to get her in the car?”
“She can throw tantrums with no warning,” Douglas said. “But maybe we’ll get lucky. I’m sorry about the state of her, but after we missed the first payment the orderlies went on strike. I don’t have the strength to change her dress more than once a day. Are you certain Jayne is up for this?”
“Oh, Jayne’s a trouper,” Carter said reflexively. But what he’d wanted to say was, “Does it matter if Jayne is ‘up for this’? What’s the alternative—leave your wife in a basket on somebody’s doorstep?”
Because in truth Jayne was beside herself. Getting it all over with at once, Carter had delivered a one-two punch: that inheritance they’d been counting on for their retirement? There wasn’t one. His father hadn’t fled the market fast enough to save his shirt. The bonds could have been claims on the Brooklyn Bridge. The gold and gold stocks were confiscated. Most of the cash was absorbed by debt, since years before some idiot had talked Douglas into investing on margin. The Wellcome Arms sucked up the tiny remaining liquidity to the tune of $27,500 per month. Surprise number two: guess who’s coming to dinner.
Jayne wasn’t an ungenerous person, but she was private, and since her breakdown found the company of other people stressful beyond measure. She seemed to have lost the simple facility of concocting spontaneous topics of conversation, while at once suffering an unholy terror of social silence. Before friends arrived for a drink, she would grill Carter for an hour on what on earth they might talk about—a waste of preparation, since socializing didn’t work that way, and none of these premeditated topics would ever arise naturally. In a panic, she would insert them arbitrarily and bring any small, successful interchange in its infancy to a halt. For Jayne, the prospect of having to interact with live-in guests in perpetuity was horrendous.
Besides, for any woman of sixty-nine to adopt Luella, barely older than Jayne herself, meant confronting daily her greatest fears for her own future. As for Douglas, he’d never really noticed Jayne, who was a sensitive, intelligent, intuitive person but even in her less phobic days never especially loud. Her character was built on too small a scale for Douglas, who’d therefore blithely accepted her hospitality for decades, and blithely dispatched it in return, while paying little heed to who exactly was filling his glass or whose glass he might be filling. Penniless at ninety-eight, her father-in-law might never have seemed less intimidating, but neither in-law could draw on a long shared history of mutual warmth.
In short, they were looking at disaster, of the worst sort: not a single cataclysm like 2024 from which assorted parties might recover, but an ongoing, borderless nightmare ended only by death. Within the week, Carter could be clamoring to go first.
What about Medicaid?” Jayne had raised immediately, groping for any way out of this. “If Douglas is destitute, he qualifies for state nursing home care.”
“Six months ago, you’d be right,” Carter said. “But I told you: they’ve changed the rules. If you have immediate living relatives with assets, Medicaid won’t pick up the tab. Our 401(k)s and pensions have been slaughtered, but we do own this house.”
“How about Nollie? Why are your father and his deranged wife all our problem?”
“You know my sister’s in France.”
“Make her come back from France. You’re the one who’s been visiting New Milford for years.”
“That’s right, because it’s the decent people who always get fucked. Nollie didn’t only end up in Europe out of pretension. That ocean between her and the family is a firewall. It’s got her out of weddings, funerals, birthdays, and Christmases for decades—not to mention slogs to the Wellcome Arms.”
“But she must have some resources squirreled away. From that supposed ‘international bestseller’? Even from afar, she could cover the bill for a nursing home. Maybe not one as opulent. But with so many seniors insolvent, cheaper facilities must have places going begging all over the country.”
“Nollie and my father have both been cagey about the scale of her royalties. Though she can’t be pulling in much now. With fiction a free-for-all, everybody writing it and nobody reading it—and absolutely nobody buying it—what do you want to bet she’ll cry poverty? Whatever her real finances, it’s a plausible line.”
Jayne started unloading the dishwasher so she could have plates to slam. “I’ve never forgiven her for completely shutting down the discussion when you finally brought yourself to hazard that maybe, just maybe, a childless, solipsistic old woman and a younger brother with three children and four grandchildren shouldn’t split an enormous inheritance fifty-fifty. I mean, what was she going to do with that money, buy an island and install it with another toy boy to service her dried-up loins? When poor Florence has to take in a tenant—”
“That doesn’t matter now,” Carter cut her off. In truth, the depth of that sibling rift was now a source of chagrin. The acid argument over whether he was morally entitled to substantially more than his sister when Pop died, because after all he had issue and she did not, now seemed like an evil version of “The Gift of the Magi.”
“Douglas should have changed his will as soon as it became obvious that Nollie was a barren spinster—”
“That terminology is beneath you. And I did bring it up with Pop, only because you insisted, and you remember—it was very awkward. He shut me down. He said we got college funds for the kids and grandkids, and help with our down payment, none of which Nollie got, and that was enough; he didn’t want to ‘play favorites.’ But we’ve talked about this ad nauseam, and it’s a moot point now.”
“I don’t care if the money’s gone,” Jayne continued obliviously, crashing silverware into a drawer. “Your sister’s greedy, take-no-prisoners position still means something. That huffy, ‘But it’s my half to do with what I want!’ All that righteous indignation over how it was your choice to have children and she ‘shouldn’t have to pay for it’ just because she was too self-absorbed to become a mother herself—”
“Enough!” Carter cried.
It was staggering how the enmity over who-would-get-what could survive beyond the point at which there was nothing to get. Perplexingly, Jayne’s feelings about his inheritance had always run higher than his own—as if avarice once removed grew the sharper for the prize lying a few more tantalizing inches out of reach. Yet in no other context had Carter known his wife to be grasping. The ferocity with which she’d coveted the legacy may have derived from her father-in-law’s disregard: she might as well get something out of a relationship that otherwise made her feel inadequate and uninteresting. Or perhaps the rapacity was a product of her powerful partisanship in respect to the ongoing tensions between her husband and sister-in-law. Alas, spousal bias has a blunt, crude quality, and misses all the nuance. Jayne took sides in a subtle, conflicted rivalry—Carter’s simultaneous resentment and admiration of his sister combined into a unique emotion he couldn’t name—and reduced it to plain antagonism. Thus she often forced him to defend his sister when he’d have preferred to carp.
He did take exception to Jayne’s implication that in not fighting Nollie harder for a fairer share of his inheritance, he had failed to support his family. Jayne was left an only child after her younger sister committed suicide in adolescence (a tragedy, yes, but one whose psychic statute of limitations might have run out by now—not that you’d get his wife to relinquish the trauma, which seemed to confer the special-protection status of landmark architecture). According to Jayne, only assurance that their one remaining offspring would be well provided for by Mandible Engine Corp. had made her parents feel free to spend down their savings in retirement. It would have been unseemly to object to the couple’s availing themselves of their own earnings, so he and Jayne had held their tongues as the two went on vacations in Bali and took out a reverse mortgage. When the pair died in a ballooning accident in Morocco a few years ago, his in-laws left nothing behind but debt. Somehow this, too, was all Carter’s fault.
He and Jayne had been married for forty-three years; they had grandchildren. Be that as it may, he’d let slip about the Mandible estate while they were still dating. Subconsciously, he may have dangled the money as a lure. Their union had stood the test of time, but sometimes he sympathized with his father—having to live with that worm of a question mark over what about your companionship was really so entrancing.
“She’s a vain, selfish woman,” Jayne said summarily, banging a final sauté pan home, “who for once in her life should be forced to pitch in.”
While Carter was still debating how to coerce his older sister into behaving like the member of a family, that very evening his fleX tringed. Behold, Nollie proposed not so much to help solve a problem as to become another one.
“You would not believe the anti-Americanism in this country,” his big sister began. “And I thought it was bad before. I no sooner open my mouth—”
“I thought your French was so perfect that no one could tell,” Carter said dryly.
Once fine and silky, now listless, his sister’s dyed butterscotch hair had thinned further, exposing glimmers of scalp. At seventy-three, she still pulled off an imperious manner and youthful boisterousness. From a lifetime of sarcasm, the left-hand crease around her mouth was slightly deeper than the right. Yet her slight, wiry build hadn’t prevented the inexorable jowling that befell their mother. Nollie’s neck—the one part of the human body that never lies—had striated, with an incipient puffiness under the chin. No doubt his sister was conducting a similar assessment of her brother’s image, with the same bittersweet mingling of triumph and sorrow. Carter had been passably handsome in his day; Nollie was once a stunner. Funny, he had dully accommodated himself to the sagging of his own cheeks, the weediness of his own locks. He found any disintegration of his domineering older sister’s appearance a shock. You always imagine you’ll savor these icon-cum-nemeses’ undoing. You’re always wrong.
“I said nothing of the kind,” she said. “You’re always imputing all manner of posturing to me merely because I live in Paris. My accent is slightly better than the average American’s, meaning it’s short of ghastly. I never said my nationality was undetectable. I wish. They’ve always hated us for being crass, and for ruling the world. Now they hate us for not ruling the world. Now we’re two-faced thieves who brought the entire international monetary system to the brink of collapse, and only Putin and Co., with his brave bancor, rode to the rescue. It’s become weirdly personal. The French are taking it out on expats because there aren’t any American tourists now that a baguette costs the equivalent of fifty bucks. Last night a woman in the supermarché dumped a pot of crème fraîche on my hair.”
Nollie had always been wildly opinionated, and Carter wouldn’t be surprised if she was assaulted by crème fraîche because she wouldn’t keep her views to herself even in a supermarket. In her time, Enola Mandible had been quite the performer, speaking to countless literary festivals in the wake of her sole big success. He’d seen her speak once at the Ninety-Second Street Y, addressing that kind of soft crowd that you didn’t have to win over—that was already pleased as punch with the main attraction and yearned only to grow more so. So she could toss out perceptions that for any halfway intelligent person constituted run-of-the-mill dinner-party fare, but that scanned to her band of pumped fans as life-altering revelations. Likewise she could crack the odd lame joke, and because writers had a well-earned reputation as stuffy and tedious, these pre-delighted folks thought she was hilarious.
“That’s all very interesting,” Carter said. “But we have to talk about Pop—”
“Sure we do, but we can talk face-to-face. That’s the point, Carter. I’m coming home.” Nollie hadn’t referred to the United States as home for decades.
“Coming home where?” Carter asked warily.
“Well, with all your extra bedrooms … I thought, you know, as usual, I could stay at your place.”
“No can do. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Pop and his batty sidekick are moving in here. He can’t pay for that larcenous feedlot anymore. I sure hope you weren’t counting on it, because the Mandible ‘fortune’ is finished.”
“Jesus fuck! I hope you mean—it’s depleted?”
“I mean it’s gone.”
The silence, hardly Nollie’s preferred form of communication, spoke volumes: she had been counting on it. Of course she had. They all had. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised,” she said glumly at last. “Why should our family be any different.” It wasn’t a question. “Christ, are there any rich Americans left?”
“If so, they’re keeping their heads down. So if you do come back here, don’t complain and keep your mouth shut. Which doesn’t come naturally to you, so you’re going to have to be mindful. The whole country is convinced that the ‘über-rich’ have walked off with the store. The truth of the matter is that to be robbed, you have to have something to steal. So the folks who’ve been really burned are necessarily the people whom nobody feels sorry for.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t expect sympathy,” Nollie said, rousing, “when we never deserved the money anyway—”
“Can the pious poppycock with me, sister. Jayne and I had been thinking about decamping to a ranch in Montana once the Mandible ship came in. Now we’re crammed into the same old shit box in Carroll Gardens, looking at second careers as full-time geriatric nurses.”
“Well, you do have those two other bedrooms—”
“Pop can’t sleep with Luella, who needs her own room, because she apparently suffers from ‘nighttime agitation.’ So Jayne will need her Quiet Room more than ever.”
“Oh, right, I forgot. Jayne’s Quiet Room.”
“Don’t be snide. You take up a lot of space yourself, friend. If you need a place to crash, why not make up with Momma? That apartment’s the size of a football field.”
In the divorce settlement, Douglas was awarded the appointments that hailed from Bountiful House, but their mother retained the couple’s four-bedroom on West End and West Eighty-Eighth Street. Alas, Mimi’s fury that Nollie applauded their father’s “rediscovery of desire” in 1992 proved to have the shelf life of radioactive waste. Nollie had hardened in response, and wouldn’t care to admit it even now, but being disowned by her mother and banished from the home where she grew up had been deeply wounding. The feud helped to explain her flouncing off to Europe a few years later—on the proceeds of a scarcely fictionalized novel that recapitulated the Mimi-Luella-Douglas triangle in terms sure to keep their mother’s grievance fresh.
“We’re not getting into that,” Nollie said. “Besides, she’d see right through any rapprochement contrived to secure me a free bed. She’s old, she’s not an idiot.”
“Maybe you should stay in France.”
“I can’t. For an American, anywhere in Europe is physically dangerous. We’re being assaulted. And not only with crème fraîche.”
“Stay in nights, then. It’s sure to blow over.”
“Besides, this country’s hardly one big wine-swilling soirée. At any given time, half the population is on strike, and what good is a great train system that never runs? They’re apoplectic that they can’t all retire at fifty-two. They all expect their child benefit, their gold-plated pensions, their token-pittance healthcare charges, their truncated workweek, and two solid years of unemployment at a salary most lawyers don’t earn—all of which is a human right. Along with so many holidays and vacations that the fuckers put their feet up for a third of the year. Oh, and everyone wants to work for the government; most of them do. Your basic all-cart, no-horse. So the whole country plops into the hay wagon and wonders why it doesn’t move.”
“It’s got to be better than here,” Carter said.
“Furthermore, the whole Muslim thing is out of control,” Nollie bullied on obliviously. “If I walk down the Champs-Élysées, I’ll get thumped for being a deadbeat. If I walk anywhere less central, I’ll get thumped because I’m not wearing a trash bag. Even in France, they’ve given up on the assimilation shtick, and gone for slavish appeasement instead. Whole tracts of the country are effectively no-go areas for actual French people. It’s the same all over Europe now, so there’s nowhere to go.”
“I’m getting a feel for how popular you must make yourself over there.”
“Oh, it’s just like the US. Everyone’s resigned. America is now Greater Mexico, and the Continent is an extension of the Middle East.”
“Look—do you have any money?”
“Some,” Nollie said carefully. “Fortunately, in bancors.”
“You can’t hold bancors in this country.”
“Boy, land of the free! But officially, you can’t do a lot of things. At least the exchange rate is wildly in my favor—and more wildly every day. What the hell is happening over there? Every time I check, the dollar has sunk again.”
“I was going to say—I don’t want to speak for her—but if you have resources, it’s possible that Florence could put you up. Her tenant isn’t paying nearly market rent, and he’s turned into another of her charity cases. And you and Florence always seemed to get along.” Which is beyond my understanding, Carter did not add.
“I like that kid Willing,” Nollie considered. “I don’t like many kids. Funny, he fleXted me a few months ago. Wanted to know how hard it was to immigrate to France. I told him to forget it, but the question, if peculiar, showed pluck. Anyway, it’ll take me a few months to wrap things up here, so there’s time to explore the options.”
“Think about it. And, you know”—Carter had to push himself—“it’ll be good to see you.”
Recap: he had failed to tempt his sister into any support of their father and his pet wife, either fiduciary or logistical. Typical. Nollie had done as she pleased her whole life. The concept of duty was foreign to her, and it was only the people who acknowledged duty, and who had regard for duty, who got saddled with it.
Carter allowed himself a last walk-through of his father’s compound to say good-bye to a host of objects that had furnished his childhood, discreetly taking memorial snapshots with his fleX. Darkened from hours of absorption in all that future landfill in the library, the padded leather four-seater and its companion armchairs displayed a workmanship the world would never see again. Ditto the claw-footed, curly-maple dining table, from which he and Nollie had been exiled during raucous adults-only dinner parties with the wits and scholars of the day; they probably didn’t make wits and scholars of that quality anymore either. Surfaces were dotted with treasures, the overtly useless but pricey detritus that one gave the well-off, like the ornate clock in the shape of an open book whose tiny numbers were too poorly positioned to tell the time, and whose battery had run out in the 1980s. Presumably staff would hold a giant stoop sale once residents of his father’s ilk had cleared off, but they wouldn’t raise much. Carter had contacted a few estate sales agents about liquidating his father’s effects, but they must have been drowning in similar requests; none of his messages was returned.
Back when imagining Douglas’s overnight impoverishment would simply have been a game of emotional sudoku, Carter would have supposed that the effect of perfectly removing the money from the equation of their relationship would be, say, “considerable.” He’d not have anticipated that it would be more like “earth-shattering.” It turned out that the fortune Douglas had just lost wasn’t merely a large element in their dealings with each other; for all intents and purposes, it had been the only element. Horrifyingly, that lurking lucre had controlled everything that Carter did in his father’s presence, and everything he said.
The surprise of sudden penury wasn’t only the scale of the change, but its character. In retrospect, wealth had contorted Douglas Mandible’s very nature. It made him suspicious, cynical, and aloof; it made him secretive, manipulative, and superior. It exaggerated a father-son hierarchy that in Pop’s advanced age should have been breaking down. These days, Douglas was staggeringly expressive, needy, and direct.
As for Carter: before the elephant left the room, he had no idea how much he resented it. Dancing around the money for decades, being exaggeratedly deferential, dithering about whether to ever allude to the money or to elaborately avoid its mention, questioning himself over why he really made these obeisant pilgrimages to New Milford, however fleetingly looking forward to his own father’s death—the whole package had made him feel venal. Vulgar. Unworthy, scabrous, and morally bankrupt. And he’d resented his father personally—for the man’s complicity in making Carter feel like a weak, dissembling worm, and for his crude abuse of power (take that sadistic delay before the Renunciation Address, when Douglas had toyed with him, dragging out the verdict on what was left of the investments, so clearly enjoying himself: the scene returned to Carter in a rush of revulsion). So while he might have expected to be consumed with fury that Pop hadn’t better protected the family piggy bank, Carter’s far more dominant sensation was relief.
For it was impossible to be angry at the poor guy. Deprived of his mighty financial cudgel, Douglas Mandible was just a very old man with a host of heartbreaking vanities, no influence, and scads of dead friends. Carter felt he could see his father clearly for the first time. There was no colossal edifice to rage against—just a half-broken man who needed his help. Obviously, Douglas could still be exasperating, and the practical consequences of Pop’s insolvency were cataclysmic. But in the main, to his son’s astonishment, on every visit here this year Carter had been flushed with tenderness, sometimes to the point of tears. (Cleansed of ulterior motives, he had continued to visit, had he not? Perversely, the divestiture bestowed a gift: he’d woken one morning to discover that he was not a monster. He hadn’t even realized that he’d felt like a monster. That’s how monstrous he’d become.) In the face of Pop’s blubbering apologies about having mishandled the estate, he’d repeatedly intoned that the events of last fall were unforeseeable, most other Americans of means had suffered the same fate, and the fortune’s annihilation was not his father’s fault. Whether or not Carter quite bought into the lyrics of this lullaby, he was finally able to like his father, and to like himself, too. Freed to be genuinely kind—kindness to a purpose was not called kindness—he was also newly at liberty to act brusque, testy, bored, cross, impatient, and inattentive if not oblivious, like a real person. Only now could he appreciate how much a desire to please imposed distance, created falsity even when a putatively pleasing assertion was perfectly true, and ruined your sense of humor.
Affectionately, Carter remembered to slip the mahogany box of silver into a battered canvas book bag from long-defunct Barnes & Noble. He carried it nonchalantly to his backseat, making sure to lock the car again before returning for the luggage.
To Carter’s consternation, Douglas had hung on to an enormous 1940s leather suitcase plastered with decals from exotic destinations and designed for ocean voyages with swarms of porters. No wheels! No porters, either, since Wellcome’s staff had grown sullen with residents whose accounts were in arrears. At seventy, Carter shouldn’t be hauling awkward loads this heavy, not with the arthritis in his knees and an iffy disc in his lower back. But muscular Lat orderlies observed his difficulties from the reception steps with contemptuous detachment.
Lugged at last to the BeEtle, the cursed case wouldn’t fit in the trunk. Under the merciless gaze of those orderlies, it was humiliating to deconstruct his father’s packing job and stuff the white suits, ascots, monogrammed boxers, and finely stitched cordovans into the canvas shopping hold-alls stuffed under the front passenger seat for trips to Fairway. Jammed between stashes of adult diapers, which Carter had prudently pilfered from the compound’s cupboards, the appurtenances looked like thrift-shop donations. He could not picture Jayne ironing all that linen.
Luella had wandered off. The two men spent half an hour finding her, snagged and whimpering on the perimeter’s barbed wire. Troublingly, rather than help disentangle his wife’s dress, Douglas shuffled back to the car. Thrashing, she re-ensnared herself almost as fast as Carter could release the fabric, crying, “Phasers on stun, Captain!”
Carter clapped his hands once she was free. “Let’s go, Luella! Here, girl, get a move on!” As she heeled, he could see how his father had fallen into the pet thing.
Yet at the car she balked, less like a dog than cattle with a whiff of the abattoir. “Never, won’t, can’t, not!” she screamed, whipping her arms back and forth. Like toddlers, Luella commonly located her sole sense of agency in the negative.
“Best let her exhaust herself,” Douglas advised from the passenger seat. Sure enough, after a few minutes’ flailing, Luella plopped in a heap on the gravel, and Carter was able to lift her into the backseat, eyes rolling back, limbs flopped.
“Are her immunizations up to date?” Carter asked, starting the car. “Because she scratched herself on that rusty wire. There might be a danger of tetanus.”
“We can always hope,” Douglas said.
On the gloomy drive to the city, Carter inquired, “Do you have any income streams right now? Pensions, annuities, corporate bonds?” Now that there was no money, they could talk about money.
Douglas’s chuckle lapsed to a cough. “There’s always Social Security!”
“Don’t mock. Plenty of people are barely hanging on because of Social Security.”
“But where does the Social Security come from? Payroll intake must have plummeted.”
“They have to come across with those checks, or there’d be a nationwide insurrection.”
“At my age, I wouldn’t frighten many bureaucrats on a picket line.”
“You can still vote.”
“For now,” Douglas said. “I know we relics tend to see things bleakly. But I wouldn’t count on anything anymore, and that includes the right to kick the bums out.”
Handwringing about the end of American democracy seemed silly, and Carter didn’t pursue it.
After a journey grown circuitous since the partial closing of the BQE, they drew into Carroll Gardens. “I thought this borough had become a shining citadel of the professional class,” Douglas remarked. “Not as smart as I remembered.”
Every block was blighted with closed commercial properties. Elite restaurants that nine months ago kept long waiting lists had dirty windows plastered with FOR RENT signs. Shops selling upscale trinkets like wind chimes for cribs were boarded shut. The city had cut back on street cleaning, and curbsides fluttered with trash. Panhandlers were not only more numerous, but older and better dressed. Begging always picked up during downturns, but their placards were distinctive to this one: RUINED BY MY OWN GOVERNMENT. ALVARADO CLEANED ME OUT—PLEASE GIVE. MY DAUGHTER AND MEDICAID!! REFUSE TO TAKE ME IN. I COULD BE YOUR GRANDMOTHER.
Carter hadn’t renewed his garage membership, and street parking was encumbered by abandoned cars the cops were sluggish about towing away. Finding a space would take a while, so he dropped off his passengers and their bags in front. Alerted to their arrival by fleXt, Jayne was waiting on the stoop to greet them, her frozen rictus of welcome straight from a horror-movie reaction shot. She was flapping in one of the dark, ankle-length dresses in which she’d huddled since her breakdown—the masses of fabric with which aging women often concealed weight gain, though Jayne was a picky, neurotic eater and disturbingly thin. That tortured expression—what she surely imagined was a look of gladness, openness, and joy—would appear to anyone else like pain. The fact that she dyed her hair a severe jet-black intensified the suggestion of fraudulence. A pity. Jayne Darkly had been a beautiful woman, a truthful woman, and the snapshot was unfair.
But talk about giving the wrong impression: with an elegance that recalled what had originally attracted his father, Luella held the shredded hem of her dress daintily above her knee and stepped regally to the sidewalk. “What a pleasure,” she said, touching her hands lightly to Jayne’s shoulders and kissing her hostess airily on each cheek. “Why, I’m sorry to trouble you, but I could simply murder a cup of tea.”
Jayne glanced at Carter in surprise, and he shrugged. “Don’t get used to it.”