are better than they were the last time I saw you.”
I was silent. I’d met this person?
“It was a bad time,” said Mr. Bracegirdle, correctly interpreting my silence.
The velvety, fluent voice struck a chord. “Okay, wow,” I said.
“Snowstorm, remember?”
“Right.” He’d appeared maybe a week after my mother died: oldish man with a full head of white hair—snappily dressed, striped shirt, bow tie. He and Mrs. Barbour had seemed to know each other, or at any rate he had seemed to know her. He’d sat across from me in the armchair nearest the sofa and talked a lot, confusing stuff, although all that really stuck in my mind was the story he’d told of how he met my mother: massive snowstorm, no taxis in sight—when—preceded by a fan of wet snow—an occupied cab had plowed to the corner of Eighty-Fourth and Park. Window rolled down—my mother (“a vision of loveliness!”) going as far as East Fifty-Seventh, was he headed that way?
“She always talked about that storm,” I said. My father—phone to his ear—glanced at me sharply. “When the city was shut down that time.”
He laughed. “What a lovely young lady! I’d come out of a late meeting—elderly trustee up on Park and Ninety-Second, shipping heiress, now dead alas. Anyway, down I came, from the penthouse to the street—lugging my litigation bag, of course—and a foot had fallen. Perfect silence. Kids were pulling sleds down Park Avenue. Anyway, the trains weren’t running above Seventy-Second and there I was, knee deep and trudging, when, whoops! here came a yellow cab with your mother in it! Crunching to a stop. As if she’d been sent by a search party. ‘Hop in, I’ll give you a ride.’ Midtown absolutely deserted… snowflakes whirling down and every light in the city on. And there we were, rolling along at about two miles per hour—we might as well have been in a sleigh—sailing right through the red lights, no point stopping. I remember we talked about Fairfield Porter—there’d just been a show in New York—and then on to Frank O’Hara and Lana Turner and what year they’d finally closed the old Horn and Hardart, the Automat. And then, we discovered that we worked across the street from each other! It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, as they say.”
I glanced over at my dad. He had a funny look on his face, lips pressed tight as if he was about to be sick on the carpet.
“We talked a bit about your mother’s estate, if you remember,” said the voice on the other end of the phone. “Not much. It wasn’t the time. But I had hoped you would come to see me when you were ready to talk. I would have telephoned before you left town if I’d known you were going.”
I looked at my dad; I looked at the paper in my hand. “I want to go to private school,” I blurted.
“Really?” said Mr. Bracegirdle. “I think that may be an excellent idea. Where were you thinking about going? Back east? Or somewhere out there?”
We hadn’t thought this out. I looked at my dad.
“Uh,” I said, “uh,” while my father grimaced at me and waved his hand frantically.
“There may be good boarding schools out west, though I don’t know about them,” Mr. Bracegirdle was saying. “I went to Milton, which was a wonderful experience for me. And my oldest son went there too, for a year anyway, though it wasn’t at all the right place for him—”
As he talked on—from Milton, to Kent, to various boarding schools attended by children of friends and acquaintances—my dad scribbled a note; he threw it at me. Wire me the money, it said. Down payment.
“Um,” I said, not knowing how else to introduce the subject, “did my mother leave me some money?”
“Well, not exactly,” said Mr. Bracegirdle, seeming to cool slightly at the question, or maybe it was just the awkwardness of the interruption. “She was having some financial troubles toward the end, as I’m sure you’re well aware. But you do have a 529. And she also set up a little UTMA for you right before she died.”
“What is that?” My dad—his eyes on me—was listening very closely.
“Uniform Transfer to Minors. It’s to be used for your education. But it can’t be used for anything else—not while you’re still a minor, anyway.”
“Why can’t it?” I said, after a brief pause, as he had seemed to stress the final point so much.
“Because it’s the law,” he said curtly. “But certainly