Freedom [267]
One thing she soon found herself particularly appreciating about Walter was his indifference to money. As a kid, she’d been lucky enough to develop her own indifference, and, in the way of lucky people, she’d been rewarded with the further good luck of marrying Walter, whose non-acquisitiveness she’d enjoyed with minimal thought or gratitude until Ray died and she was plunged back into the nightmare of her family’s money issues. The Emersons, as Walter had told Patty many times, represented a scarcity economy. To the extent that he meant this metaphorically (i.e., emotionally), she could sometimes see that he was right, but because she’d grown up as the outsider and had excused herself from her family’s competition for resources, it took her a very long time to appreciate how the forever lurking but forever untappable wealth of Ray’s parents—the artificiality of the scarcity—was at the root of her family’s troubles. She didn’t fully appreciate it until she pinned Joyce down, in the days following Ray’s memorial service, and extracted the story of the Emerson family estate in New Jersey, and heard about the quandary in which Joyce now found herself.
The situation 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