No exaggeration: this was among the top-ten most gratifying moments of Patty’s life.
“Walter was a great provider,” she demurred. “Just a great man. That helped.”
“And your kids . . . ? Are they . . . ?”
“They’re like Walter. They know how to work. And Joey’s about the most independent kid in North America. I guess maybe he got some of that from me.”
“I’d love to see more of . . . Joey,” Joyce said. “I hope . . . now that things are different . . . now that we’ve been . . .” She gave a strange laugh, harsh and fully conscious. “Now that we’ve been forgiven, I hope I can get to know him a little.”
“I’m sure he’d like that, too. He’s gotten interested in his Jewish heritage.”
“Oh, well, I’m not at all sure I’m the right person to talk to about that. He might do better with—Edgar.” And Joyce again laughed in a strangely conscious way.
Edgar had not, in fact, become more Jewish, except in the most passive of senses. In the early nineties, he’d done what any holder of a PhD in linguistics might have done: become a stock trader. When he stopped studying East Asian grammar structures and applied himself to stocks, he in short order made enough money to attract and hold the attention of a pretty young Russian Jew, Galina. As soon as they were married, Galina’s materialistic Russian side asserted itself. She goaded Edgar to make ever larger amounts of money and to spend it on a mansion in Short Hills, New Jersey, and fur coats and heavy jewelry and other conspicuous articles. For a little while, running his own firm, Edgar became so successful that he showed up on the radar of his normally distant and imperious grandfather, who, in a moment of possible early senile dementia, soon after his wife’s death, greedily permitted Edgar to renovate his stock portfolio, selling off his American blue-chips and investing him heavily in Southeast Asia. August last revised his will and trust at the height of the Asian stock bubble, when it seemed eminently fair to leave his investments to his younger sons and the New Jersey estate to Ray. But Edgar was not to be trusted with renovations. The Asian bubble duly burst, August died soon after, and Patty’s two uncles inherited next to nothing, while the estate, due to the building of new highways and the rapid development of northwest New Jersey, was doubling in value. The only way Ray could hold off his brothers’ moral claims was to retain possession of the estate and let Edgar and Galina live on it, which they were happy to do, having been bankrupted when Edgar’s own investments tanked. This was also when Galina’s Jewish side kicked in. She embraced the Orthodox tradition, threw away her birth control, and aggravated her and Edgar’s financial plight by having a bunch of babies. Edgar had no more passion for Judaism than anybody else in the family, but he was Galina’s creature, all the more so since his bankruptcy, and he went along to get along. And, oh, how Abigail and Veronica hated Galina.
This was the situation that Patty set out to deal with for her mother. She was uniquely qualified to do it, being the only child of Joyce’s who was willing to work for a living, and it brought her the most miraculous and welcome feeling: that Joyce was lucky to have a daughter like her. Patty was able to enjoy this feeling for several days before it curdled into the recognition that, in fact, she was getting sucked back into bad family patterns and was competing with her siblings again. It was true that she’d already felt twinges of competition when she was helping to nurse Ray; but nobody had questioned her right to be with him, and her conscience had been clean regarding her motives. One evening with Abigail, however, was enough to get the old competitive juices fully flowing again.
While living with a very tall man in Jersey City and trying to look less like a middle-aged housewife who’d taken the wrong exit off the turnpike, Patty had bought a rather chic pair of stack-heeled boots, and it was perhaps the least nice part of her that chose to wear these boots when she went to see her shortest sibling. She towered over Abigail, towered like an adult over a child, as they walked