Freedom

It was only when the family filed out, at the service’s end, that Patty saw the assortment of unprivileged people filling the rear pews, more than a hundred in all, most of them black or Hispanic or otherwise ethnic, in every shape and size, wearing suits and dresses that seemed pretty clearly the best they owned, and sitting with the patient dignity of people who had more regular experience with funerals than she did. These were the former pro-bono clients of Ray’s or the families of those clients. At the reception, one by one, they came up to the various Emersons, including Patty, and took their hands and looked them in the eye and gave brief testimonials to the work that Ray had done for them. The lives he’d

rescued, the injustices he’d averted, the goodness he’d shown. Patty was not entirely

blown away by this (she knew too well the costs at home of doing good in the world), but she was still pretty well blown away, and she couldn’t stop thinking of Walter. She now sorely regretted the hard time she’d given him about his crusades for other species; she saw that she’d done it out of envy—envy of his birds for being so purely lovable to him, and envy of Walter himself for his capacity to love them. She wished she could go to him now, while he was still alive, and say it to him plainly: I adore you for your goodness.

One thing she soon found herself particularly appreciating about Walter was his indifference to money. As a kid, she’d been lucky enough to develop her own indifference, and, in the way of lucky people, she’d been rewarded with the further good luck of marrying Walter, whose non-acquisitiveness she’d enjoyed with minimal thought or gratitude until Ray died and she was plunged back into the nightmare of her family’s money issues. The Emersons, as Walter had told Patty many times, represented a scarcity economy. To the extent that he meant this metaphorically (i.e., emotionally), she could sometimes see that he was right, but because she’d grown up as the outsider and had excused herself from her family’s competition for resources, it took her a very long time to appreciate how the forever lurking but forever untappable wealth of Ray’s parents—the artificiality

of the scarcity—was at the root of her family’s troubles. She didn’t fully appreciate it until she pinned Joyce down, in the days following Ray’s memorial service, and extracted the story of the Emerson family estate in New Jersey, and heard about the quandary in which Joyce now found herself.

The situation was this: as Ray’s surviving spouse, Joyce now owned the country estate, which had passed to Ray after August’s death, six years earlier. Ray had been constituted to laugh off and ignore the entreaties of Patty’s sisters, Abigail and Veronica, to “deal with” the estate (i.e., sell it and give them their share of the money), but now that he was gone Joyce was getting a daily drumbeat of pressure from her younger daughters, and Joyce was not

well constituted to resist this pressure. And yet, unfortunately, she still had the same reasons that Ray had had for being unable to “deal with” the estate, minus only Ray’s sentimental attachment to it. If she put the estate on the market, Ray’s two brothers could make a strong moral claim to large shares of the sale price. Also, the old stone house was currently occupied by Patty’s brother, Edgar, his wife, Galina, and their soon-to-be-four little kids, and was unhelpfully scarred by Edgar’s ongoing DIY “renovations,” which, since Edgar had no job and no savings and many mouths to feed, had so far not advanced beyond certain random demolitions. Also, Edgar and Galina were threatening, if Joyce evicted them, to relocate to a West Bank settlement in Israel, taking with them the only grandchildren in Joyce’s life, and live on the charity of a Miami-based foundation whose in-your-face Zionism made Joyce extremely uncomfortable.