by Lolita Files
Penn had the astonishing ability to recognize complex patterns and immediately calculate probabilities and solutions within those patterns. Dane would often play chess by himself as a means of concentration, and after young Penn kept harassing him, he taught the boy how to play. By age six, Penn had won his first national championship. Five more followed. He eventually lost interest in formal competition, but it didn’t stop him from being challenged by anyone who heard he had a knack for the game, especially when he was in college. He would trounce them in seconds, with swift, one-handed moves, sometimes while drinking a beer or watching a game on TV. He won twenty thousand dollars the first time he played Texas Hold’em with a group of trust fund brats at prep school. They tried to convince him to compete in the World Series of Poker, but Penn wasn’t interested. Chess, piano, and poker were for sport. He would always toy around with them, but he had greater pursuits in mind.
He finally discovered his IQ when he was almost eighteen, after the plane carrying his parents went down over the Central Pyrenees, making Penn an instant orphan. They had been on holiday in France and were en route to Spain. Penn was away in boarding school at Choate at the time, just two months shy of graduation. He immediately came home upon hearing the news.
The executor of their estate, Peter Fleming, Esq. of Messrs. Fleming, Hunt, and Stein, informed Penn that all assets, properties, and monies, some seventy million dollars’ worth, would be liquidated and given to charity.
Penn had been dumbstruck. He stared blankly at the executor, unable to process the meaning of his words.
“Mr. Hamilton?” said Fleming. “Do you understand what I’ve said?”
“You said something about charity. They’re giving some money to charity?”
“They’re giving everything to charity, Mr. Hamilton.”
Fleming flipped through papers in a folder, avoiding eye contact.
“It was important to your parents that you have a full understanding of what it means to forge your own way, should anything ever happen to both of them before you came of age. They were people of principle who worked hard for what they—”
“I know what kind of people they were. I don’t need you to tell me about my parents.”
“Then you should understand that this is what they wanted.”
Fleming opened and closed the folder. He would never get used to the delivery of bad news about money. People seemed to take it harder than they did death itself.
“There are provisions for a basic living allowance, and all expenses associated with your education will be covered, of course, as long as you choose to pursue it. The stipend will end once you’ve finished with school. The first semester’s tuition to Harvard has already been paid.”
“How much is the living allowance?”
“Three thousand dollars.”
“Three thousand dollars!” Penn shouted. “That’s nothing!” He took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, shook his head. “That’s barely enough to get me food and clothing if I need it. God forbid something drastic comes up. At least I won’t have to worry about rent. I’ll just stay in the apartment in the city. I guess I’ll just have to scrounge for everything else.”
Fleming’s brow was growing moist. This kid just didn’t seem to understand.
“I’m afraid, Mr. Hamilton, that you will have to worry about rent. Not during your college years, of course, the dorms will be covered, but thereafter, once your formal education terminates, you’re on your own. Everything is being liquidated. That includes the Park Avenue triplex, the estate in Lloyd Harbor, and the apartment in Paris. The will calls for them to be sold and the money turned over to various charities.”
Penn stared at the folder in Fleming’s hands, unconvinced.
“But I’m a charity! What about me?”
Fleming’s face was hot. The beads of water on his brow were full enough to run down his face. He pulled a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and dabbed at his forehead.
“I don’t believe I’m making myself clear.”
“Well, speak up, then. What gives here?”
Fleming coughed, loosened the strangling knot of his tie. He coughed again. He still couldn’t bring himself to look at Penn.
“Everything is being given away. Except for money for school and your living expenses while you pursue your education, you will get nothing else.”
Penn’s back was rigid as he sat across from Fleming, who was mighty glad there was a desk between them.
“What about the place in London?”
“The Belgravia town house is being sold. Everything is being liquidated.”
Penn’s head was swimming.
“There is good news, however.” Fleming’s lips lifted at the edges in what he hoped would be construed as a smile.
“I can’t imagine.”
“Your father left you his car.”
Penn brightened.
“The Porsche? Awesome! I was beginning to think that he didn’t give a shit.”
Fleming wiped his face with the handkerchief. This was awful. He wanted it over.
“I’m afraid it’s not the Porsche,” he said, inadvertently correcting Penn and agitating him further. POR-sha. Penn had said Porsh. “He left you the Ford.”
Penn’s nostrils flared. He was borderline combative.
“That ten-year-old Taurus?”
He was standing now, his palms pressed flat on the desk as he leaned toward Fleming. “Are you fucking kidding me? That thing is a wreck. One pothole and it’s over.”
The Ford had been Dane’s practical car. The one he drove everywhere for everything. The Porsche was for special affairs, rarely driven, and as such, was in mint condition. Why couldn’t his father have left him that?
“What’s going to happen to the Porsche?” Penn asked.
“It’s being sold and the money is going to charity.”
Penn stared at the man.
Fleming nervously slid a bulky manila envelope across the desk toward him.
“Here are the keys, along with the check for your living allowance. The checks will arrive every first of the month. The car is parked at the garage across the street. The valet ticket is in the envelope.”
“What about my things? I have stuff at all our residences. Will I at least be able to go get them? C’mon. This is sick. It’s cruel. Why would they do something like this to me? My granddad didn’t do this to them. My father got all that money, all of it at once, when Grandsdad died. Granddad wasn’t cruel enough to give it away to charity.”
“Your father was an adult when your grandfather died. Your grandfather believed he sufficiently understood the value of money.”
“I understand money!” Penn barked, slamming his hand down on the desk.
“Your things from all the houses have been packed up and placed in storage,” Fleming said, refusing to be sucked into further debate. “The key and the address to the storage unit are also in the envelope.”
Penn snatched the envelope.
“I don’t have to take this. I’ll contest the will.”
“You have no grounds. This is the way they wanted it. Any court in the state of New York will uphold this document as legally sound.”
Penn’s chest heaved as he glanced around the room. Fleming feared he was looking for something to break or throw.
“I assure you,” Fleming sputtered nervously, “your parents had only your best interests at heart…”
Penn’s eyes were sky-blue icicles.
“I’m quite confident that you will be very successful in life, in spite of this…” Fleming couldn’t stop himself. He wished his mouth would just stop working. “They spoke of you often, you know, of how proud they were of your—”
“Let me ask you something,” said Penn. “What would have happened if just one of them died? Would I have come into any inheritance?”
Fleming hadn’t anticipated this. He didn’t know why. It wasn’t an uncommon question.
“That’s no
t really relevant now, is it? What good does it serve you to know something like that?”
“I’d like an answer.”
Fleming went through the folder, shuffling through assorted legal documents until he came across the one he was seeking. He scanned through a few pages.
“Here it is.” He didn’t look up. “If one of them died before or after you were twenty-one, you would have received an amount equal to half the value of the estate when you turned twenty-five. If you were twenty-five or older at the time of death, you would have received your share of the inheritance immediately. If both died after you were twenty-one but before you were twenty-five, you would have received the assets in their entirety.”
“At twenty-five.” It was more confirmation than question.
“Yes. At twenty-five. But if they both died before you turned twenty-one, you were to receive nothing but the stipends for school. The rest was to go to charity.”
Fleming knew this was torture for the boy. It was torture for him, so he could only imagine. There was no way to minimize the harshness of how things had played out.
Penn was still standing, disgusted by the entire ordeal. He shook his head, his lips pressed pencil-thin.
“I can remember quite clearly discussing this with Dane and Liliana,” said Fleming, tapping the document with his index finger, still avoiding Penn’s face. “The rationale was that as long as one of them was alive to assure you had a practical understanding of finances by a certain age, then you could be entrusted to receive your inheritance.”
“Do you agree with what they’ve done?”
“It’s not my place to set the dictates of my clients’—”
“Tell me the truth. What do you think? Do you think this makes sense?”
“Mr. Hamilton, these questions aren’t going to solve any—”
“I just need to know,” Penn bellowed.
Fleming’s collar was ringed with sweat. It was at least sixty-eight degrees in his office. He liked it cold, although the paralegals complained. He wanted to buzz someone, anyone, to get the temperature lowered even further. A few minutes more and he would combust.
“Your mother in particular had some concerns about what it would mean for you to have that type of financial access without their guidance. They were confident in their ability to be your moral compasses into adulthood, but were unsure of what it would mean for you if they died before that. Liliana feared you would be unduly influenced by outside forces, or that perhaps you’d find the money a bit intoxicating, which, admittedly, it can be—”
“My mother. So this was my mother’s doing.”
“Yes, but your father agreed that—”
“Of course he did. He was her fucking slave. We all were.”
The room was beginning to feel like a sauna to Fleming. He removed the tie. The stretch of silk that had encircled his neck was soaked. His underarms were circles of sweat. So were his back and his waistband.
“Your parents didn’t want to see your future squandered. This is just a safeguard for your protection. You’ll come to see that one day.”
“They fucked me is what they did. They flat-out fucked me.”
Fleming’s mouth hung open.
“One last question for you,” Penn said. “What would have happened if they both had lived? When would I have seen my inheritance?”
“Mr. Hamilton—”
“Tell me!”
Fleming swallowed a hot ball of discomfort and flipped through the folder. His voice was a monotone, robotic, when he spoke.
“You were to receive two million dollars when you graduated from college. Another fifteen million was to be released when you turned twenty-five, along with a transfer of the title to the town house in Belgravia. The remainder was to be disbursed in accordance with the deaths of either or both of your parents if it occurred after you were twenty-five.”
“None of it makes any sense,” Penn said.
He turned away abruptly, heading for the exit. His eyes were steamed over and blurred with rage.
“There’s one other thing,” Fleming said.
Penn stopped at the door, wordless, waiting.
“There were several cases of papers in the attic of the house in Lloyd Harbor. The will detailed in great length how everything was to be liquidated, down to clothing and shoes, but there were no provisions for the cases of papers. It was determined they should go to you. They’ve been placed along with your things in storage.”
Penn chuckled bitterly. His hand was on the doorknob.
“Great. They shaft me when it comes to money and shelter, but all the meaningless shit comes straight to me.” He turned to Fleming. “Papers, huh? And who knows what doozies are lurking in there. Maybe I’ll find out I’m adopted. That’d be the perfect turn of the screw, don’t you think?”
Fleming’s entire body was sticky with sweat. Everything about the boy was giving him the creeps.
He was immensely relieved when Penn walked out. He raced from his chair and bolted the door for good measure, then poured himself a double of scotch.
Fleming hadn’t been lying. There were papers. Many, many cases of papers.
One was filled with nothing but sketches. Drawings Penn had done when he was a child. They were filed by age. The first was a rendering of his yellow bath toy, Rubbiduck. Rubbiduck had been his favorite, in the tub and out of it. It was a decent sketch. The shape of the duck’s bill was accurate, as well as the head and body. Flecks of red were drawn on the sides to indicate shading. Rubbiduck floated on a rippled surface of blue.
“This is cool.”
He noticed his mother’s delicate scrawl in the lower right corner.
“Pennbook A. Hamilton. Nineteen months.”
“Shit.”
He riffled through all the sketches. A self-portrait at five. A detailed drawing of the Louvre at six. A surprisingly exact picture of his father at work at his desk, done when Penn was three and a half.
He vaguely remembered liking to draw, but he hadn’t done it in years.
He moved on to the rest of the stuff. Case after case of school-related materials, none of it of any real interest.
He was about to put it all off for another time when he came across a case filled with his report cards, medical records, and the results of psychological and academic proficiency examinations he had taken over the years.
There, in a folder marked CONFIDENTIAL: P.A.H., was when he first saw god.
Not the biblical deity.
Himself.
Inside the folder was his intelligence quotient, and the score, when he saw it, was so staggering, so gargantuan, so outrageous to behold, it seemed to rise from the page like a three-dimensional skyscraper. It was Willy Wonka’s elevator, the one that had so much force, they couldn’t make enough floors to contain it, so it burst up and out, beyond cables, shafts, and logic.
It was a pivotal moment. Like Clark Kent discovering he was Superman.
Penn was sitting on the floor of the storage unit when it happened. It took all the breath out of him. He stared at the number so long, his eyes glazed over.
210.
2. 1. 0.
Two-ten.
He could barely wrap his suddenly big brain around it.
This was why his parents kept telling him he wasn’t special. This was why his mother had said, yes, he was gifted, but gifted children were not uncommon. The onus was on him, she said, to make the best of his abilities with hard work and applied learning and blah blah blah blah fucking blah.
It had all been a colossal lie.
“Awesome!” he said, slapping the ground. “Now it all makes sense!”
Chess, poker, the piano, the way he breezed through school. Math, physics, biology. English, Latin, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Norwegian. He could speak nine languages fluently, including Xoo, an African tongue comprised of clicks that he picked up in two weeks during a trip to Botswana with his parents. He was nine at the time. The Africans had be
en afraid of him. They thought he was an evil spirit that had returned in the form of a child.
If it had been left up to his parents, he would have never known. It was one thing for them to leave him with no money, but this was unforgivable. All the warm regard, respect, and adoration he felt for them was destroyed in an instant, as he realized his whole life might have been different but for the knowing of this one detail.
An IQ of 210 was just plain stupid. It was higher than the speculated IQs of Mozart, Darwin, and Galileo. Einstein’s IQ was supposedly 160. Penn’s score was beyond the range of Nobel Prize winners. It put him in the company of Goethe, Leibniz, and Stephen Hawking.
He fell back against the floor, rolling with laughter. He kicked his legs in the air.
There were other documents that confirmed the score. His mother’s scrawl was everywhere, rebutting its value. He came across a letter where his parents rejected an opportunity for him to be skipped three grades, from fifth to eighth.
It is our belief such an action would give our son a distorted view of himself and create an environment where he would be perceived as freakish and unnatural. Nothing good could come of it. We would like him to follow the normal progression of his peers.
It was his mother’s handwriting (again!) on a photocopy. She was the mastermind behind everything. Our belief. We would like. Had his father really agreed with all this? Why would he allow it? What an idiot Dane Hamilton, the theoretical physicist, had proved to be. The man was blinded by his wife’s mesmerizing beauty. Liliana Clarke Hamilton was his mental kryptonite.
Penn was laughing, but it was derisive, more like outrage.
He thought he had known his parents. He was used to them trying to downplay his beauty, even though it proved futile. He knew he was physically exceptional. It was something his parents couldn’t refute, short of having his face and body reconfigured. He excelled at athletics, and everyone fawned over his looks. His face and good body afforded him incredible access—access he was more than willing to avail himself of with the opposite sex. Being the best-looking male in the room for most of his life had been a big deal. But none of that could compare with the IQ thing. It was stupendous news. Reality-altering.