“Pop, an estate in Oyster Bay hardly qualifies you as having led a life of ceaseless self-denial,” Carter grumbled.
“A bunch of money for doing nothing might not have done me any good,” Willing said.
“It could have sent you to college,” GGM countered.
“College might not do me any good. Studying engineering. I think it’s more important right now to know how to garden.”
“I could’ve sent you to gardening school, then.” GGM sounded frustrated. “The best definition of wealth I ever came across is ‘money is stored energy.’ In other words, since ’29 this whole country has been running the air con with the windows open.”
“But the Mandible fortune,” Willing said. “It only accumulated because one of your forebears was good at designing diesel engines. None of you earned it. You guys were lucky. Then in ’29 you were unlucky. But lucky and unlucky have nothing to do with right and wrong. Besides, you’re still lucky. You have Social Security. It’s pegged to inflation. And you have Medicare. Younger people don’t have that. Anyone over sixty-eight is protected. Aside from Nollie, no one at our house is protected.”
“Nollie’s not protected against a sock in the jaw,” Carter grumbled, “if I ever get my hands on her. The prodigal used to have France as an excuse. Now she won’t travel five miles to spell us for a night or two.”
“Nollie does help out at our place,” Willing said. “It’s kind of a zoo there, too.”
“Enola is a free spirit,” GGM said. “And she might find stopping by more enticing, Carter, if you acted as if you wanted to see her, rather than merely wanting free nursing care. I have hopes that coming back to the States will inspire her to start writing again. There’s a great book in this upheaval, and she’d be the ideal chronicler of the times. She’s always had the eye. For most people, what lies outside our front door is tragedy. For Enola, it’s material.”
“Right,” Carter said. “The perfect author for today’s Great American Novel is a fallow lightweight famous for a thinly disguised romantic tell-all who hasn’t lived in the country for decades.”
“But what you were saying, Willing,” Jayne interrupted, yanking her first proper conversation in weeks back on course. “I do think Douglas is right about the moral hazard. The Americans who’ve suffered the deepest losses are the ones who had a conscientious, caretaking relationship to the future. Who saved for the future. Who believed in the future. Who kept reserves on hand, in the expectation that they’d take responsibility for themselves and whatever befell them in the future. The pessimism that’s bothering you, Willing, is a result of that sense of betrayal. The people who believed in the future now feel like dupes. Like victims of an enormous practical joke.”
His grandparents had been fighting to formulate a way of looking at the incineration of Carter’s inheritance that didn’t make them seem like ordinary greedy people who were enraged that now they wouldn’t get their money. After all, for liberal Democrats to have come into a mountain of unearned cash would have been an injustice in the terms of their own politics. Now they could be aggrieved on behalf of “people who believed in the future.” It was clever. He admired the intellectual gymnastics. Performed by ordinary greedy people who were enraged that now they wouldn’t get their money.
“One of the primary responsibilities of government is to provide a functional currency,” GGM was declaring. Jayne and Carter’s averted gazes indicated they’d heard this more than once. “Functionality entails meeting three criteria. It’s a means of account—for keeping track of who owes whom what. Cross that one off, since with today’s rates of inflation, people in hock up to their eyeballs can effectively pay off loans of a thousand dollars with ten cents. Second, a currency is a medium of exchange, which the dollar remains barely—although only if you earn the money in the morning and spend it by the afternoon. Because the third purpose of a currency is to act as a store of value. The dollar has not been a sound store of value in my lifetime.” As he’d aged, GGM had become more emphatic, and almost impossible to interrupt.
Willing raised his palms in dismay. He shouldn’t have to play missionary, but someone had to say it. “I don’t know how, but you’ve all got to get over this. Having been ‘robbed’ is eating you up. It’s like letting the government win twice.”
GGM chortled. “Put it that way, and the boy’s got a point.”
“You’re a very smart young man, Willing,” Jayne said, in a way that made his skin crawl.
“It’s not smart to say something that’s obvious,” Willing muttered.
Right then, Luella got a squeezed look, followed by a beatific smile. “You know I’m chaff! I’m chaff! You know it!”
The smell that always infused the house grew more intense. The other three locked eyes and sighed.
“It’s my turn,” Jayne said, slumping. “But, Carter, you have to be on hand. Last time she got into the kidnapping thing again and kicked me in the shin.”
“Before you go, son?” GGM had pulled Willing aside confidentially and lowered his voice, as if to bestow a final wisdom that might resonate for his great-grandson in the years to come—since at his age any parting could easily be the last. “We can’t seem to locate any laxatives. If you come across a box or two…”
It was literally a world of shit. Willing promised miserably, “I’ll keep an eye out.”
On his return home, Willing walked into a face-off in the living room. “I’m nineteen, and it’s my business,” Savannah was telling her mother.
“Its having become your business is just what I’m afraid of,” Avery said hotly.
Savannah glanced at her cousin, and seemed to make a decision to be shameless. “You’d be careless with it, Mom, so long as I was giving it away for free? That wouldn’t be very smart, under the circumstances.”
“Under the circumstances we’re managing, and you do not have to debase yourself!”
“We’re not managing,” Savannah said. “Have you told them yet?”
His aunt blushed. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I heard you and Dad talking. Your basement boudoir doesn’t have any walls. It’s gone, isn’t it?”
Her mother glanced at the floor, arms bunched.
Turning to Willing, Savannah spelled it out. “The cash, from the sale of the house. It’s finished. Kaput. Pasado. Good-bye domestic contributions, hello abject dependency. Of course, we’ve got a lot of hinges and Q-tips to show for it. Oh, and quite a little stash of wine, though you’d better make it last, Mom. Florence won’t be springing for Viognier when she can barely cover the vinegar for our assholes.”
“You father is searching high and low for another university position,” Avery said. “Meantime I—I’ve thought about running something from the house. If not PhysHead sessions, cooking, even taking in laundry!”
“Mom, please! Nobody’s having dinner parties at all, much less catered ones, and most people wear the same clothes for a month!”
“The only thing I’m too proud to do is what you’re doing.”
“You’re too old for my vocation. And somebody’s got to bring some scratch into this house besides Florence. You want to see inflation work to our advantage for once? Because my prices are going up.” Savannah grabbed her coat and marched out the door.