“And Daddy too?”
“I can invite him over, if you want.”
“And then on Saturday, we’ll all get up and . . .”
“If I invite him over, Ethan, you know he won’t be staying here. But I will ask him over if you want.”
He didn’t answer me, and I didn’t push the issue. As if by silent mutual agreement, we let the matter drop and returned our attention to the television screen. A few minutes later, he pulled my arms more tightly around him . . . his own unspoken way of telling me just how difficult he found this world of divided parents.
The next morning, after dropping Ethan off at school, I returned to the apartment and phoned Peter Tougas. Though I knew he had been my mother’s lawyer for the past thirty years, I never had any dealings with him (I’d used an old Amherst friend, Mark Palmer, to handle my divorce and other judicial pleasantries). Mom didn’t see much of Mr. Tougas either. With the exception of her will, there was little in her life that had required legal counsel. When I called, his secretary put me straight through.
“Great minds think alike,” he said. “I had it down to call you in the next day or so. It’s time to get things rolling on the probate front.”
“Could you fit me in around noon today? I’m out of the office until Monday, so I figured we might as well get together now, when there’s no work pressure on me.”
“Noon is no problem,” he said. “You know the address?”
I didn’t. Because I only met Peter Tougas for the first time at Mom’s funeral. As it turned out, his office was in one of those venerable 1930s’ buildings that still line Madison Avenue in the lower fifties. His was a small-time legal practice, operating out of a three-room no-frills office, with just a secretary and a part-time bookkeeper as staff. Mr. Tougas must have been around sixty. A man of medium height, with thinning gray hair, heavy black glasses, and a nondescript gray suit which looked about twenty years old. He was the antithesis of my uncle Ray, and his white-shoe patrician lawyer credentials. No doubt, Mom chose him exactly for that reason . . . not to mention the fact that his rates were reasonable.
Mr. Tougas came out to greet me himself in the little anteroom where his secretary worked. Then he ushered me into his own office. He had a beat-up steel-and-wood desk, an old-style steel office chair, and two brown vinyl armchairs which faced each other over a cheap teak-veneered coffee table. The office looked like it had been furnished from a Green Stamps catalog. No doubt, this sort of frugality also appealed to Mom. It reflected the no-frills way she lived her own life.
He motioned me to sit in one of the armchairs. He took the other. A file marked “Mrs. Dorothy Malone” was already in position on the coffee table. It was surprisingly thick.
“So, Kate,” he said in an accent with distinct Brooklyn cadences, “you holding up?”
“I’ve had better weeks. It’s been a strange time.”
“That it is. And excuse my directness—but it’ll probably take you longer than you think to get back to normal. Losing a parent . . . your mother . . . is a very big deal. And never straightforward.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m finding that out.”
“How’s your son . . . Ethan, isn’t it?”
“He’s fine, thanks. And I’m very impressed you know his name.”
“Whenever I saw your mother, she always talked about him. Her only grandchild . . .” He stopped, knowing he’d made a gaffe. “Or, at least, the only one she saw regularly.”
“You know that my brother’s wife didn’t . . . ?”
“Yes, Dorothy did tell me about all that. Though she didn’t come right out and say it, I could tell just how much it upset her.”
“My brother is a very weak man.”
“At least he came to the funeral. He seemed very upset.”
“He deserved to be upset. ‘Better late than never’ doesn’t work as an excuse when the mother you virtually ignored for years is now dead. Still . . . I actually felt sorry for him. Which rather surprised me—given that I’m not exactly known for my benevolence.”
“That’s not what your mother said.”
“Oh please . . .”
“I’m serious. The way she talked about you . . . well, I could tell that she considered you a very loyal daughter.”
“Mom often got things wrong.”
Mr. Tougas smiled. “She also said that you were very hard on yourself.”
“That she got right.”
“Well,” he said, picking up the folder, “shall we make a start?”
I nodded. He opened the folder, withdrew a thick document, and handed it to me.
“Here’s a copy of your mother’s will. I’ve got the original in the office safe, and will be sending it to probate court tonight—as long as you, the sole executor, approve it. Do you want to take a moment to read through it, or should I summarize everything?”
“Is there anything personal in the document I should know about?”
“No. It’s all very straightforward, very clean. Your mother left everything to you. She put no stipulation on how you should disburse her estate. She did tell me, in our conversations, that she knew you’d be sensible about how you dealt with the trust. Were you ever aware of the trust’s existence before your mom’s death?”
I shook my head, then said, “I’ve been finding out about a lot of things over the past couple of days.”
“Who told you about it? Miss Smythe?”
I flinched. “You know her?”
“Personally? No. But your mother did tell me all about her.”
“So you knew about Miss Smythe and my father?”
“I was your mother’s lawyer, Kate. So, yes, I did know about the background to the trust. Do you mind if I take you through its financial history?”
“Fine by me.”
“Well,” he said, pulling out another batch of documents, “the trust was created in nineteen fifty-six, with . . .” He flicked through a bunch of pages. “An opening capitalization of fifty-seven thousand dollars. Now your mom drew down the interest from the principal for twenty years. But then, in nineteen seventy-six . . .”
“The year I graduated from college.”
“That’s right. Dorothy once mentioned that to me. Anyway, in seventy-six, she stopped drawing any income from the trust.”
“Because the trust fund was depleted, right?”
“Hardly,” he said, looking at me with a certain paternal amusement. “If your mother was only drawing down interest from the trust for twenty years, it means she never dug into the principal. In other words, the principal remained intact.”
“I don’t understand . . .”
“It’s very simple. After nineteen seventy-six, your mother never touched the trust again.”
“So what happened to it?”
“What happened to it?” he said with a laugh. “Like the rest of us, it matured. And, fortunately, the people handling it . . .” (he mentioned the name of a big brokerage house), “they invested wisely on your mother’s behalf. A largely conservative portfolio, with a small amount of adventurous stocks that paid off very nicely indeed.”
I was still finding all this difficult to comprehend. “So, what you’re saying is—after I left college, my mom left the trust alone?”
“That’s right. She never touched a penny of it . . . even though her investment guy and myself both encouraged her to draw down some sort of income from it. But she always maintained that she was perfectly fine on what she had to live on.”
“That’s not true,” I heard myself saying. “Money was always tight for her.”
“I kind of sensed that,” he said. “Which, quite frankly, made her decision never to invade the trust rather baffling. Especially as—given the way her portfolio was structured—the principal doubled itself every seven years. So, by ninety-five, the trust had grown to . . .” He peered down at some figures. “Three hundred and fifty-two thousand dollars, and a couple of pennies.”
“Good God.”
/>
“Hang on, I’m not done yet. Now in ninety-five, her investment guys took a couple of smart positions on all these new information-technology companies, not to mention one or two emerging web browsers. And, of course, from ninety-six onward, the market has been nonstop bullish. Which, in turn, means that they actually doubled the existing principal in five years.”
“Doubled?” I whispered.
“That’s right. And, at close of business last Friday . . . which was the last time I asked them to give me an update . . . the trust stood at . . .”
Another squint at a column of figures.
“Right, here we are . . . Seven hundred and forty-nine thousand, six hundred and twelve dollars.”
Silence.
“That can’t be right,” I said.
“I can show you the computer printout of the current balance. Your mother had money, all right. A lot of money. She just chose not to touch it.”
I was going to blurt out: “Why didn’t she?” But I knew the answer to that question. She chose not to touch it—because she was saving the money for me. Not that she would ever have even hinted at such a legacy. Because (and I could almost hear her telling this to Mr. Tougas), “I know far too many perfectly nice young people who have been ruined by a little too much money a little early in life. So I don’t want Kate to know about this until after my death—at which point she should have already learned a thing or two about the value of money, and about making her own way in the world.”
Always one for the big moral lesson, my mom. Always one for denying herself everything. Always refusing to buy new clothes, new furniture, even a couple of reasonably modern, modest appliances. Even though—as I now knew—she could have afforded herself so much material comfort, so much that would have made her life that little bit gentler. But, oh no, always the stoic. Always the proper puritan who answered each one of her difficult daughter’s entreaties with: “I really do have enough, dear . . . I need so little . . . you must put yourself first, dear.”
And knowing the way her mind operated, I also understood the logic of her decision. Meg was right: she was the ultimate pragmatist . . . yet one with a deeply ethical streak. So though she might have felt compelled to accept that woman’s money to pay for her children’s education, there was no way that she was ever going to use a penny of the trust for her own needs. Because that would have undermined her complex sense of pride. Perhaps (as Meg had intimated) she did eventually forgive Sara Smythe . . . but once Charlie and I were no longer her dependents, she decided to act as if the trust no longer existed. Instead, she concealed it like buried treasure, to be discovered after her death. The last of the big bombshells to be landed on my doorstep in the days after her funeral.
Seven hundred and forty-nine thousand, six hundred and twelve dollars. It made no sense. No sense at all.
“Kate?”
I snapped back to the here and now. Mr. Tougas was reaching over to his desk and retrieving a box of Kleenex. He put it on the coffee table, gesturing toward it. That’s when I realized that my face was wet. I pulled a tissue from the box. I dabbed my eyes. I muttered, “Sorry.”
“No need to be,” Mr. Tougas said. “I’m sure it’s all a bit of a shock.”
“I don’t deserve it.”
He allowed himself a small laugh. “Sure you do, Kate. You and Ethan. It’ll make things a lot easier.”
“And Charlie?” I said.
“What about Charlie?”
“I was just wondering: what’s his share in all this?”
“His share? As I explained earlier, he has no share. Your mother cut him out of the will. Didn’t she tell you . . . ?”
“Oh, she told me that Charlie was not going to be inheriting anything. But she also said that there was virtually nothing in her estate.”
“I guess she wanted to surprise you.”
“She succeeded.”
“Anyway, your mother was very specific about the fact that the trust was yours, and yours alone.”
“Poor Charlie,” I said.
Mr. Tougas shrugged. “You reap what you sow.”
“I guess that’s true,” I said and stood up. “Is there anything else we need to discuss today?”
“Well, there are still a couple of small points about the probate. But if you’d rather wait until next week . . .”
“Yes, I would like to wait. I need time to . . .”
“You don’t have to explain,” he said. “Give me a call whenever.”
I headed out to the street. I turned right and started walking north. I walked slowly, oblivious to my fellow pedestrians, to the traffic, to the din of the city. As if on autopilot, I made a reflexive right on 74th Street. I let myself back into my apartment, and began to act on the temporary escape plan I had been hatching in my head all the way uptown.
Picking up the phone I called Avis, and arranged to pick up a car that afternoon at their East 64th Street depot. Then I booked a room for that night at a hotel in Saratoga Springs. Powering up Ethan’s computer, I sent an email to Matt:
Ethan and I are going to be out-of-town until late Monday night. You can reach me on my cellphone at all times.
I paused for a moment, then quickly typed:
Once again, thank you for your kindness during the last awful week. It was much appreciated.
Then I wrote my name and hit the Send button.
At three that afternoon, I was standing outside the Allen-Stevenson School on East 78th Street. As Ethan emerged through the front door, he was a little bemused to see me standing there . . . with two small duffel bags parked by my feet.
“We’re not going to the dinosaurs?” he asked, sounding disappointed.
“I have a better idea. A more fun idea.”
“What kind of fun?”
“Want to run away for the weekend?”
His eyes flickered with excitement. “You bet.”
I handed him an envelope, addressed to his homeroom teacher, Mr. Mitchell.
“Run on inside with this—it’s a note to Mr. Mitchell, telling him we’re going to be far away from school until Tuesday.”
“How far?”
“Real far.”
“Wow.”
He grabbed the note and dashed back inside the school building, handing it to the receptionist at the front desk. An hour later, we were driving up the East Side Drive, heading west on the Cross Bronx Expressway, hitting the 287, crossing the Hudson just south of Tarrytown, then joining the 87 toward the depths of upstate New York.
“Where’s Canada, Mommy?” Ethan asked me after I revealed our final destination.
“Canada’s up above us.”
“Above us, like the North Pole where Santa lives?”
“That’s right.”
“But we won’t see Santa?”
“No. We’ll see . . . uh, Canadians.”
“Oh,” Ethan said, sounding rightfully bemused.
Why had I chosen Canada as a runaway destination? No real reason—except that it was the first place that came into my head when I suddenly decided to get out of Dodge with Ethan. Also, it was the first time I had crossed the border since 1976—when I ran off for a pseudoromantic weekend in Quebec City with a then boyfriend named Brad Bingham (well, he did go to Amherst). If I remember correctly, Brad was the deputy editor of the Amherst literary magazine, and was something of a Thomas Pynchon fanatic who harbored dreams about running off to Mexico and writing some big abstract novel. In college, we all entertain such quixotic fantasies about a future without responsibilities. Until we are shoved into the workaday world, and we accept our destiny, and conform to the social norm. Last I heard, Brad was a big-deal attorney in Chicago. There was a picture of him in the Times when he represented some sleaze-ball, multinational corporation in an antitrust case that was being argued in front of the Supreme Court. He’d put on thirty pounds and lost most of his hair and looked so depressingly middle-aged. Like the rest of us.
But, hey, he introduced me to Quebec
City, and he was pretty gracious when, a week or so later, I decided that we should just be pals. Thanks to him, I was now heading north to Canada with my son.
“Does Daddy know where we’re going?” Ethan asked.
“I sent him a message.”
“He was going to bring me to a hockey game on Saturday.”
Oh God, I’d forgotten he’d mentioned this nighttime outing to me weeks ago (as the Saturday in question fell out of the usual two weekends a month which Ethan spent with his father). I reached over to the dashboard, and grabbed my cell phone.
“I could have you up for kidnapping,” Matt said after I reached him at the office. His tone, thankfully, was ironic. Mine was instantly sheepish.
“It was a last-minute idea,” I said. “I’m really sorry. We can turn right around again if . . .”
“That’s okay. I think Quebec City sounds great. You will have him back in time for school on Tuesday?”
“Absolutely.”
“And you told the school he’d be out on Monday?”
“Of course. I’m not that irresponsible.”
“No one’s saying you’re irresponsible, Kate.”
“That’s your implication . . .”
“It isn’t.”
“Fine, fine, fine. Look, I’m sorry if I screwed up your hockey game plans.”
“That’s not the point . . .”
“Then what is the point, Matt?”
“You can never stop, can you?”
“I’m not trying to start anything.”
“All right, all right, you win. Happy now?”
“I’m not trying to win anything, Matt.”
“This conversation’s closed.”
“Fine,” I said, now appalled by the senseless stupidity of this exchange. Would I never get anything right? After a moment’s silence, I asked, “Do you want to speak to Ethan?”
“Please.”
I handed the phone to my son.
“Your dad,” I said.
I listened in while Ethan spoke to Matt. He sounded a little tentative, a little shy—and certainly cowed by the argument he’d just overheard. I felt a horrible stab of guilt, and wondered if he’d end up hating us for fracturing his life; for squandering his stability at a premature age.
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