Freedom [268]
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 problems. But you seem . . . stronger, somehow.”
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