was this: as Ray’s surviving spouse, Joyce now owned the country estate, which had passed to Ray after August’s death, six years earlier. Ray had been constituted to laugh off and ignore the entreaties of Patty’s sisters, Abigail and Veronica, to “deal with” the estate (i.e., sell it and give them their share of the money), but now that he was gone Joyce was getting a daily drumbeat of pressure from her younger daughters, and Joyce was not well constituted to resist this pressure. And yet, unfortunately, she still had the same reasons that Ray had had for being unable to “deal with” the estate, minus only Ray’s sentimental attachment to it. If she put the estate on the market, Ray’s two brothers could make a strong moral claim to large shares of the sale price. Also, the old stone house was currently occupied by Patty’s brother, Edgar, his wife, Galina, and their soon-to-be-four little kids, and was unhelpfully scarred by Edgar’s ongoing DIY “renovations,” which, since Edgar had no job and no savings and many mouths to feed, had so far not advanced beyond certain random demolitions. Also, Edgar and Galina were threatening, if Joyce evicted them, to relocate to a West Bank settlement in Israel, taking with them the only grandchildren in Joyce’s life, and live on the charity of a Miami-based foundation whose in-your-face Zionism made Joyce extremely uncomfortable.
Joyce had volunteered for the nightmare, of course. She’d been attracted, as a scholarship girl, by Ray’s Waspiness and family wealth and social idealism. She’d had no idea what she was getting sucked into, the price she would end up paying, the decades of disgusting eccentricity and childish money games and August’s imperious discourtesy. She, the poor Brooklyn Jewish girl, was soon traveling on the Emerson dime to Egypt and Tibet and Machu Picchu; she was having dinner with Dag Hammarskjöld and Adam Clayton Powell. Like so many people who become politicians, Joyce was not a whole person; she was even less whole than Patty. She needed to feel extraordinary, and becoming an Emerson reinforced her feeling that she was, and when she started having children she needed to feel that they, too, were extraordinary, so as to make up for what was lacking at her center. Thus the refrain of Patty’s childhood: we’re not like other families. Other families have insurance, but Daddy doesn’t believe in insurance. Other families’ kids work afterschool jobs, but we’d rather have you explore your extraordinary talents and pursue your dreams. Other families have to worry about money for emergencies, but Granddaddy’s money means that we don’t have to. Other people have to be realistic and have careers and save for the future, but even with all of Granddaddy’s charitable giving there’s still a huge pot of gold out there for you.
Having conveyed these messages over the years, and having allowed her children’s lives to be deformed by them, Joyce now felt, as she confessed to Patty in her quavering voice, “unnerved” and “a tiny bit guilty” in the face of Abigail’s and Veronica’s demands for the liquidation of the estate. In the past, her guilt had manifested itself subterraneanly, in irregular but substantial cash transfers to her daughters, and in her suspension of judgment when, for example, Abigail hurried to August’s hospital deathbed late one night and extracted a last-minute $10,000 check from him (Patty heard about this trick from Galina and Edgar, who considered it highly unfair but were mostly chagrined, it seemed to her, not to have thought of the trick themselves), but now Patty had the interesting satisfaction of seeing her mother’s guilt, which had always been implicit in her liberal politics, applied to her own children in broad daylight. “I don’t know what Daddy and I did,” she said. “I guess we did something. That three of our four children are not quite ready to . . . not quite ready to, well. Fully support themselves. I suppose I—oh, I don’t know. But if Abigail asks me one more time about selling Granddad’s house . . . And, I guess, I suppose, I deserve it, in a way. I suppose, in my own way, I’m somewhat responsible.”
“You just have to stand up to her,” Patty said. “You have a right not to be tortured by her.”
“What I don’t understand is how you turned out to be so different, so independent,” Joyce said. “You certainly don’t seem to have these kinds of problems. I mean, I know you have