The Wrong Kind of Money

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “Yes,” Carol said, her eyes flashing. “But as Mrs. Noah Liebling, I intend to change all that!”

  Hannah Liebling smiled at her for the first time. “Dream on,” she said. “But I must say I admire your spirit, my dear. Shall we have our coffee in the library? We can talk to Papa’s portrait there.”

  As they were leaving the dining room, Carol paused in front of one of the two Boule sideboards. “This is a lovely Ming Yellow jar,” she said, touching it. “Chinese Export porcelain is something of a hobby of mine.”

  “My husband’s ashes,” Hannah said.

  But, remembering all this, Carol sometimes asks herself: Have I really kept my promise? Have I really succeeded in changing anything? Nearly twenty years later, Georgette Van Degan wants me to give a party with her. Is that the kind of change I was talking about? Will that change anything at all?

  When she got home that night, Noah took her in his arms. “I suppose she gave you her standard Liebling Facts of Life lecture,” he said.

  “Yes, but she smiled at me, and she called me ‘my dear.’”

  “It doesn’t matter. We have each other,” he said.

  A few months later, they were celebrating Noah’s thirty-first birthday, and were opening his birthday cards, which were mostly from other people in the company. There were a great many cards. The company, Carol had discovered, operated rather like a large college fraternity, with Hannah Liebling as its fond but firm house mother, a role similar to the one she had played when Noah’s father was alive. There was a strong feeling of family in the company. People kept track of one another’s birthdays and other special days, and a certain number of people in the company were actually Noah’s relatives. Jules Liebling had had an older brother, Nathan, who had been severely crippled by polio as a child. Still, a position had been found for Nathan, and now Nathan’s three sons all worked for Ingraham in various capacities. And there were other cousins, some of them so distant their relationship was barely traceable—young men who had arrived from the old country, looking for work in “Uncle” Jules’s business—and jobs had been created for most of these people and, in time, for their sons and in-laws. Jules Liebling had been a benevolent despot. He rarely fired anybody, unless it was for some gross malfeasance, such as stealing. When it was felt that an employee had reached his fullest potential, he was not let go. He was just kept on in whatever capacity he had ended up in and was promoted no further. Thus the old gentleman who supervised Ingraham’s mail room was some sort of Liebling “cousin.” For social life most Ingraham employees entertained one another. Thus, Frank and Beryl Stokes would become Noah and Carol’s closest company friends. It was a comfortable, if somewhat closed and insular society, as Carol’s mother-in-law had warned her. On formal occasions, such as at meetings with one of the company’s worldwide network of advertising agencies, the company was usually referred to as “the house” or, even more formally, as “the House of Ingraham.” But among those who worked for Ingraham, the company was nearly always called—almost lovingly—“the mill.”

  They sat in the living room of their first apartment, at 25 West Seventy-second Street, and Carol slit open the envelopes, read off the salutations on the cards, and then handed them to Noah, who identified the senders.

  “George and Barbara,” Carol said.

  “That would be George Billings. Shipping Department. Toronto.”

  Then Carol opened a card and paused, reading the inscription a second time. “This one’s signed, ‘All my love, Bathy.’ Who is Bathy? And what a strange name!”

  He quickly snatched the card from her and tore it up, tossing the pieces in a wastebasket. “Never mind,” he said.

  “Darling—who is Bathy?”

  “None of your business,” he snapped.

  “Who is she? Some old girlfriend of yours, I suppose?”

  “I said it’s none of your business!”

  “I thought we weren’t going to have any secrets from each other,” she said. If you stay married to him, her mother-in-law had said. “I want to know who Bathy is, Noah.”

  He still looked very angry. “Her name is Bathsheba Sachs,” he said at last. “She’s my mother’s younger sister.”

  “You mean she’s—your aunt?”

  “She has no business writing to me.”

  “Why on earth not? Your own aunt?”

  “It’s a long story,” he said. Then he told her about the trouble with Bathsheba Sachs.

  10

  Rumney Depot

  Having grown up in the little town of Rumney Depot, New Hampshire, the only rich people Carol Liebling—who was Carol Dugan then—had known were her friends the C. R. McClarens, who lived in a big white colonial house on Cobble Hill Road. C. R. McClaren ran a prosperous dairy business, and owned a prize herd of Golden Guernsey cattle. The milk cartons on the Dugans’ breakfast table always bore the label of McClaren Farms and featured a picture of one of Mr. McClaren’s most famous cows which, reportedly, commanded a breeding fee of thirty thousand dollars. At the Laconia First National Bank, where Carol’s mother worked, and where C. R. McClaren did his banking, Mr. McClaren always tipped his favorite teller fifty dollars at Christmastime. Unfortunately, Carol’s mother was not that teller.

  C. R. McClaren was even nationally famous, or almost, since he was president of the American Guernsey Cattle Association and, it was said, United States presidents occasionally asked his advice on agricultural matters.

  Carol remembers one Halloween, when she was in the fifth or sixth grade, when the rumor circulated to the effect that the McClarens were handing out twenty-dollar bills to trick-or-treaters. She and three friends, in their costumes, trekked up to Cobble Hill, under the big porte cochere, and nervously rang the front doorbell. A maid appeared and asked them to go around to the back of the house, to the kitchen door. There the children were handed hot chocolate in paper cups. Through the kitchen they were able to glimpse Mr. and Mrs. McClaren at their dinner table.

  Because of their prominence, the McClarens’ doings were heavily chronicled in the weekly Laconia News-Leader and to Carol, growing up, these reports made heady reading. When Mr. and Mrs. McClaren left for Europe for the summer, the newspaper printed the story, and the McClarens’ stately progress from one European capital to another was also dutifully reported. When they returned, there was always a headline, WELCOME HOME, CYNTHIA AND C. R. MCCLAREN! When the McClarens and other business leaders in the state were entertained at the governor’s mansion in Concord, this news made the front page of the News-Leader.

  The McClarens had three daughters, Beth, Monique, and Stacy—all several years older than Carol. Of the three, Monique McClaren was Carol’s favorite. It was something about her name, alliterative, with all those smart, clicking consonants. Her second favorite was Stacy, who, though she didn’t have Monique’s glamour, sounded peppy and lots of fun. Beth McClaren sounded a little dull. When, one by one, the McClaren girls went off to boarding school and college, or became engaged, or were married, these events were also reported, with weddings again making the front page, and Carol read about them avidly.

  Carol Dugan had never actually met any of the McClaren girls, though she had occasionally seen them speeding by in their snappy little sports cars, and her mother had once waited on C. R. McClaren at the bank, when his regular teller was on vacation. Still, having read so much about them while she was growing up, in a little town where not much happened that wasn’t McClaren-oriented, she began to feel she knew them well, that they were her special friends, the beautiful Monique, especially. This feeling was so strong that, years later in New York, meeting a man from Laconia at a party, Carol found herself asking him, “And how is Monique McClaren? Is she still married to Tim Tyler? Are they still living in Boston?” It was not that she was envious of the McClarens, exactly. It was just that their lives seemed so much more interesting than hers.

  Her own Roman Catholic upbringing was strict and, as she looks back at it, also downright strange.
Her mother, Anna Dugan, was proud of her position at the bank because tellers were required to be well mannered, well spoken, well dressed, and ladylike. Gum chewing was grounds for dismissal. Also, no teller was permitted to leave the bank at night until every penny in her cash drawer, from that day’s transactions, had been accounted for. “My drawer has always balanced out,” her mother used to boast.

  Carol’s father, she was told, had simply disappeared. Her mother would tell her nothing more, and Carol has only a vague, blurry memory of a man in the house, who she supposes must have been this disappeared father, though she is not even sure whether this is a true memory or a dream. Once, on television, she had watched an old movie called The Invisible Man and this is still the way she imagines her father’s disappearance—simply being made invisible through some mad scientist’s alchemy, yet still able to make his presence felt through an ability to make objects move mysteriously about the house. A pair of pinking shears left on her dresser would reappear on the kitchen table. The Invisible Man had moved them.

  At the all-girls’ convent school that Carol attended, the nuns told their charges that if they touched themselves there all their fingers would fall off. Today, though she knows better, that thought still manages to frighten her. Carol once asked her mother where babies came from, and her mother replied, “From the river.” Sometimes, after school, Carol would wander along the banks of the Pemigewasset River, hoping to find a baby ready to be scooped out. Finding a baby would certainly relieve the boredom of her days. She also asked her mother if boys were any different from girls, and her mother told her, “All children are alike and identical in the eyes of God.”

  Anna Dugan spoke of God often, and also of something she called the Eternal Verities. In the paintings she did in her spare time—watercolors of towns and landscapes recalled from memory, wistful renditions of Christ’s suffering on the cross, or of the Blessed Virgin holding the Infant Jesus—she was always trying to express the Verities: Truth, glittering like a sword in the shadows; Virtue so unchallenged as to defy the lightest touch of humanity; Honor, like a flower bursting forth from the rubble of the world. Anna Dugan rarely spoke of her own past, though when she did she implied that her family origins were genteel. Looking back, it sometimes seems to Carol that her mother existed not only in another century but on another planet—a planet surrounded by angels. “I am sure the angels heard that,” she said every night as she and her daughter knelt by the sofa in the living room of the little house that Anna Dugan owned outright—“free and clear,” without a mortgage (mortgages, even though she worked for a bank, Anna considered an invention of the devil)—to say their prayers.

  Aside from her daughter, her no-gum-chewing job, and her paid-for house, the only other comfort in Carol’s mother’s life was Father Timmons, who called nearly every evening after work. Father Timmons and Anna Dugan sat on the sofa, evening after evening, sipping perhaps a little cream sherry that Father Timmons often brought with him. Cream sherry was not drink, Father Timmons explained. It was no different from sacramental wine, which was Our Lord’s blood, and therefore holy. And so the two of them sipped their holy wine, and sometimes got a little giggly while they discussed the affairs of the human mind and soul. Discussing the Immaculate Conception, Anna Dugan sometimes became a little shrill. “I’m having a vision!” she would suddenly cry out.

  Anna Dugan always had an urge to do a particular religious watercolor—her interpretation of the Ecstasy of St. Teresa, she had had a vision of it—and the two of them often discussed that project. “I’m still not quite ready for it, Father,” she would say, “though I feel I’m getting closer to it.” And closer to it she always got, though never, finally, close enough. It was her conscience that bothered her most. After all, who was she to think she could express on paper what poets and mystics and princes of the Church had been trying to get straight in their minds for centuries? And Father Timmons, wisely, did not encourage her to begin, but always advised her to wait until she was sure, absolutely sure, that she had her vision as clear as crystal in her mind’s eye before attempting anything. And so, instead, they would perhaps discuss one of Anna’s completed watercolors, and Father Timmons would comment on the use of color and chiaroscuro, or the effect of sunlight she had managed to achieve across the waves or on a barn roof. “I just dabbed a little yellow right there—and there it was, just like that!” she would explain. “A complete accident.”

  But nothing was ever an accident, no, Father Timmons would insist, for everything was part of a plan, and the plan Anna’s picture had was merely an expression, on a smaller scale, of a larger one. And sometimes their talk would turn to Carol, and how well she was doing at St. Catherine’s School, and how much the sisters liked her, and how bright she was (which was true), “though a bit too independent-minded for her own good” (also true, Carol supposes). And perhaps Carol would be brought into the room then, and the three of them might sit, quietly talking, and then perhaps Father Timmons would put some of his old 78 r.p.m. records on the old windup Victrola that Anna had bought at a yard sale, and they would listen to old songs. If cream sherry had been served, Carol’s mother and Father Timmons might dance the fox-trot. During these times Carol would be able to see, and believe clearly, that there was indeed, somewhere, a shady nook by a babbling brook.

  And then, at the end of these musical interludes, unless Father Timmons had brought along his multiband shortwave radio (in which case they would listen to music playing from such far-off places as Chicago, Minneapolis, or Atlanta, depending on the reception, which depended on the weather), they would kneel and thank the angels and all the saints and the Blessed Virgin for all the bounties that life bestowed, and for all the heartaches, too, that teach us lessons. And Anna Dugan would rise to her feet first with tears glistening in her eyes and, with a wide gesture of her arms that took in both her loved ones, say to Carol, “You know that God the Father and Father Timmons are the only real fathers you’ll ever have.”

  And this was true enough. And as an adult Carol has occasionally wondered whether Father Timmons might actually have been more of a father to her than that, more than a foolish and doting old family friend in a reversed collar who also happened to be the parish priest. It is a notion, she has decided, that does not bear much thinking about. In the little town of Rumney Depot, she heard it said that her mother was “peculiar.” She set her jaw and said nothing when she overheard comments like that.

  One incident stands out particularly in Carol’s mind from those growing-up years. It was a summer Saturday, when she was nine or ten, and her mother had planned a picnic at Stinson Lake. Father Timmons was to go with them, of course, but at the last minute he had been called to say Mass at a funeral, and so her mother announced that the picnic would be called off, even though the picnic lunch was already packed. In her bitter disappointment Carol had staged a regular temper tantrum. Though Stinson Lake was only a dozen miles north of town, it seemed to Carol as though they never went anywhere, while, from the News-Leader it was clear that the McClarens were always on the go. She screamed and sobbed and stamped her feet and pounded her fists on the kitchen table, and in the end her mother relented, and they drove off for the lake in her mother’s blue Plymouth coupe, though her mother was not in the best of moods.

  Anna Dugan brought her paints and brushes and easel, and set up her easel on the strip of beach, and began painting the mountains on the far side of the lake. Carol sprawled on a beach towel in the sand. Out on the water, a speedboat pulled a girl on water skis, her blond hair streaming behind her, and Carol imagined that this might be Monique McClaren. On the beach, some teenage boys in swimsuits were engaged in a game of volleyball.

  At noon her mother opened the picnic basket, and began laying out their lunch on a blanket on the beach—tuna salad sandwiches, deviled eggs, pickles, olives, potato chips, and a chocolate cake. Carol had been watching the volleyball game. “Mom,” she asked almost idly, “what’s that funny bunched-up bus
iness boys have between their legs?” Her mother seized her by the armpits and jerked her to her feet. “Impure thoughts!” she cried. “You’ve been having impure thoughts!” Then she struck her across the face with a slap so hard it sent Carol flying backward into the picnic lunch, into the sandwiches, into the deviled eggs and chocolate cake. “You are an evil, evil little girl!” her mother screamed at her. “You will rot in hell for your impure thoughts, and your eyes and tongue will be eaten by the devil!” The volleyball players paused in their game to watch this scene, and from nearby on the beach, other heads turned, though of course no one said or did anything.

  Anna Dugan gathered up their ruined lunch, which was now little more than garbage, into the folds of the blanket. “You’ll get no lunch,” she said. “And you’ll get no dinner, either. And you’ll never, ever come to this beach again!” Then she marched Carol, sobbing, back to the car.

  Her mother kept those promises.

  A year or so later, an older schoolmate explained and described to Carol what the funny bunched-up business was, and its function—in perhaps more vivid detail, and in somewhat more colorful language—than was actually required. And somehow, after those basic anatomical facts, and their implications, had been revealed to her, Carol became even more unforgiving of her mother than before.