Early Warning

PAUL HAD INVESTED “their” money from the farm in something called a Money Market Fund, at almost 9 percent, first for six months, then for another six months. He had longed for the money and been happy to get it, but he was preoccupied by it — he made sure that Gray and Brad, thirteen and ten, knew the difference between a Certificate of Deposit and a Treasury Bill, but Claire did not know the difference, and didn’t care. All she knew was that her original $240,000 was bubbling up, and the effervescence amounted to about twenty thousand a year. Paul insisted that the wisest thing to do was to let the interest compound, and he taught the boys the Rule of Seventy-two. Even Brad now knew that if you left your money in the bank at 10 percent interest per year, and then divided seventy-two by ten, the resulting figure was how long it would take for your money to double. If you had, say, $240,000, he said to Brad, by the time you were eighteen you would have $480,000, and by the time you were twenty-four or twenty-five, you would have almost a million, but you couldn’t touch it. It had to stay in the bank. The great thing was geometric compounding — at thirty, you would have two million; at thirty-seven, four million; etc. Brad could figure it out from there. And Brad did — if retirement age was sixty-five, then at retirement you would have more than sixty-four million dollars!

When Claire brought up the idea of inflation (that sixty-four million dollars wouldn’t be the same in fifty-some years as it was today, look at Germany before the war, or…), Paul said that they would save that for another time — best not to discourage him at this point.

As for Claire, for the first time in her life, she understood the old phrase “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die.” She thought of that measly little $240,000 (as compared with the future sixty-four million) and she wanted some of it. In fact, she wanted all of it. In fact, she saw it as the door that could open and let her out of Paul’s tight, neat, suffocating house. Now that her mother was dead, she had no one she would have to justify this to. All she had to do was make up her mind.

It was not the boys holding her back. Maybe if they had been girls she would have had a second thought (she imagined girls actually talking to her, letting her brush their hair, asking her questions, and taking advice, though she had never done any of these things with Rosanna), but boys, at least her boys, hardly seemed to notice their mothers. At a party, she had heard one woman laugh and say, “Oh, boys! You can be wonderful to them every day of their lives, and this is what they say: ‘Mom! I love Mom,’ and that’s all. They only think about Dad, no matter whether he was a saint or an asshole—‘My mom was great, but Dad! Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.’ ” And it was true of Gray and Brad: their eyes followed Paul wherever he was. Yes, it was partly in fear, since he was demanding, but all three of them treated her more or less as if she weren’t really there, or, she might say, weren’t importantly there.

—

JANET OPENED her eyes and noticed two things — the window to her right, across the sleeping (and snoring) body of Jared, was pale but not light, and the apartment was enveloped in silence. Emily Inez (named after Emily Brontë and Jared’s mother) was still sleeping, and well she should be, given that Janet had nursed her twice already, once at ten and again at three. Since the apartment had only one bedroom, Jared had taken the doors off the spacious hall closet and fixed it up as a nursery, visible from the kitchen, the bedroom, and the living room, but Janet knew they would have to move eventually. Janet didn’t mind waking up every four hours. Emily had such a strong personality that she had inserted herself quite efficiently into Janet and Jared’s easygoing existence, and organized everything around herself. Janet faithfully read Penelope Leach (sent to her by Debbie), and did as Emily told her.