The Pursuit of Happiness (2001)

by Douglas Kennedy

‘Or didn’t see me play Sister Sarah in my school production of Guys and Dolls?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said with a slight smile. ‘I was there.’

  ‘And were you sneaking glimpses at Charlie throughout his childhood as well?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Naturally, I was pleased that the trust helped pay for his education. But I really didn’t follow his progress as closely.’

  ‘Because he was the child who kept you from my dad?’

  ‘Perhaps. Or maybe because you were the child I was supposed to have with your father.’

  Silence. My head was swimming. I suddenly craved sleep.

  ‘I’ve got to go. I’m very tired …’

  ‘Of course you are,’ she said.

  I stood up. She followed.

  ‘I’m glad we finally met, Kate,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sure you are. But I want you to know something: this is the last time we will ever do so. You’re to stay away from Ethan and myself. Is that clear?’

  She remained impassive. How the hell did she manage that?

  ‘Whatever you want, Kate,’ she said.

  I headed towards the door. She walked ahead of me and opened it. She touched my arm and held it.

  ‘You’re just like him, you know.’

  ‘You know nothing about me …’

  ‘I think I do. Because I also know that, unlike your brother, you were always there for Dorothy. Just as you are still there for Meg - who utterly adores you. She just wishes you were happier.’

  I gently disengaged my arm from her grip.

  ‘I wish that too,’ I said. Then I left.

  Two

  AS SOON AS I was outside her building, I walked halfway up the street. Then I suddenly sat down on the steps of a brownstone until I had composed myself. A thousand and one chaotic thoughts went swirling around my brain - all of them skewed, troubled. And I couldn’t help but wonder: were these the same steps upon which my father sat down and wept when Sara told him it was over?

  Another thought preoccupied me: the urgent need for sleep. I forced myself up. I found a taxi. I went home. I called Matt at his office. We had a civilized, neutral conversation. He told me that he’d taken Ethan to a Knicks game last night, and that our son was longing to see me this afternoon. I thanked Matt for looking after Ethan during the past few days. He asked me how I was doing.

  I said, ‘It’s been a curious time.’ He said, ‘You sound tired.’ I said, ‘I am tired,’ and mentioned that I appreciated his thoughtfulness over the past week. Matt started to say something along the lines of how he hoped we could be friends again. I said nothing, except: ‘No doubt we’ll be in touch about Ethan stuff Then I hung up the phone and climbed into bed. As I closed my eyes and waited for sleep, I thought about that wartime photo of my dad, taken by my mom when they were both stationed in England. He was young, he was smiling, he was probably thinking: in a couple of weeks, I’ll never again see the woman taking this picture. No doubt, similar thoughts were shared by that woman as she peered through the viewfinder. Here’s one for the scrapbook: my wartime fling. That’s what now so haunted me about that photo: the fact that an entire story was about to engulf the man in the picture and the woman behind the camera. But how could they have known? How can any of us recognize that inexplicable moment which seals our fate?

  The image vanished. I slept. The alarm clock woke me just before three. I got dressed and walked over to collect Ethan from school. En route, I found myself once again trying to make sense of Sara’s story. Once again, I failed - and instead started feeling overwhelmed by just about everything. When Ethan came bounding out of Allan-Stevenson’s front door, he quickly searched the crowd of parents and nannies. Finding me, he smiled his shy smile. I bent down to kiss him. He looked up at me with worry.

  ‘What’s wrong, Ethan?’ I asked.

  ‘Your eyes are all red,’ he said.

  I heard myself say: ‘Really?’

  ‘Have you been crying?’

  ‘It’s Grandma, that’s all.’

  We started walking towards Lexington Avenue.

  ‘You’ll be home tonight?’ he asked me. I could hear the anxious edge to his voice.

  ‘Not just tonight. I told Claire she didn’t have to come in until Monday. So I’ll also be picking you up at school tomorrow. Then we’ll have the whole weekend to hang out, and do whatever you want.’

  ‘Good,’ he said, taking my hand.

  We stayed in that night. I helped Ethan with his homework. I made hamburgers. We horse traded: after he agreed to play two games of Snakes and Ladders with me, I granted him thirty minutes on his Game Boy. We popped popcorn and watched a video. I unwound for the first time in weeks. Only once was there a moment of sadness … when Ethan, snuggled up against me on the sofa, turned and said, ‘Can we go see the dinosaurs after school tomorrow at the Museum?’

  ‘Whatever you want.’

  ‘Then can we all watch a movie here tomorrow night?’

  ‘You mean, you and me? Sure.’

  ‘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-roomed no-frills office, with just a secretary and a part-time book keeper as staff. Mr Tougas must have been around sixty. A man of medium height, with thinning grey hair, heavy black glasses, and a nondescript grey 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 l
onger 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 onwards, the market has been non-stop 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 print-out 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.