The Glass Castle_ A Memoir - Jeannette Walls [124]
I told Mom she was the snootiest squatter I’d ever met, and that made her laugh. We sat down on the living room couch. I had something I wanted to discuss with her. I now had a good job, I said, and was in a position to help her and Dad. I wanted to buy them something that would improve their lives. It could be a small car. It could be the security deposit and a few months’ rent on an apartment. It could be the down payment on a house in an inexpensive neighborhood.
“We don’t need anything,” Mom said. “We’re fine.” She put down her teacup. “It’s you I’m worried about.”
“You’re worried about me?”
“Yes. Very worried.”
“Mom,” I said. “I’m doing very well. I’m very, very comfortable.”
“That’s what I’m worried about,” Mom said. “Look at the way you live. You’ve sold out. Next thing I know, you’ll become a Republican.” She shook her head. “Where are the values I raised you with?”
Mom became even more concerned about my values when my editor offered me a job writing a weekly column about what he called the behind-the-scenes doings of the movers and shakers. Mom thought I should be writing exposés about oppressive landlords, social injustice, and the class struggle on the Lower East Side. But I leaped at the job, because it meant I would become one of those people who knew what was really going on. Also, most people in Welch had a pretty good idea how bad off the Walls family was, but the truth was, they all had their problems, too—they were just better than we were at covering them up. I wanted to let the world know that no one had a perfect life, that even the people who seemed to have it all had their secrets.
Dad thought it was great that I was writing a weekly column about, as he put it, the skinny dames and the fat cats. He became one of my most faithful readers, and would go to the library to research the people in the column, then call me with tips. “This Astor broad has one helluva past,” he told me one time. “Maybe we should do a little digging in that direction.” Eventually, even Mom acknowledged that I’d done all right. “No one expected you to amount to much,” she told me. “Lori was the smart one, Maureen the pretty one, and Brian the brave one. You never had much going for you except that you always worked hard.”
I loved my new job even more than I loved my Park Avenue address. I was invited to dozens of parties a week: art-gallery openings, benefit balls, movie premieres, book parties, and private dinners in marble-floored dining rooms. I met real estate developers, agents, heiresses, fund managers, lawyers, clothing designers, professional basketball players, photographers, movie producers, and television correspondents. I met people who owned entire collections of houses and spent more on one restaurant meal than my family had paid for 93 Little Hobart Street.
True or not, I was convinced that if all these people found out about Mom and Dad and who I really was, it would be impossible for me to keep my job. So I avoided discussing my parents. When that was impossible, I lied.
A year after I started the column, I was in a small, overstuffed restaurant across the table from an aging, elegant woman in a silk turban who oversaw the International Best Dressed List.
“So, where are you from, Jeannette?”
“West Virginia.”
“Where?”
“Welch.”
“How lovely. What’s the main industry in Welch?”
“Coal mining.”
As she questioned me, she studied what I wore, assessing the fabric and appraising the cost of each item and making a judgment about my taste in general.
“And does your family own coal mines?”
“No.”
“What do your parents do?”
“Mom’s an artist.”
“And your father?”
“He’s an entrepreneur.”
“Doing what?”
I took a breath. “He’s developing a technology to burn low-grade bituminous coal more efficiently.”
“And they’re still in West Virginia?” she asked.
I decided I might as well go all out. “They love it there,” I said. “They have a great old house on a hill overlooking a beautiful river. They spent years restoring it.