SEVENTEEN
Georgiana
When Georgiana woke on Monday morning, her head aching with a potent mix of Klonopin, Blue Arrows, and remorse, she couldn’t remember anything from the night before. She knew she had embarrassed herself, she was awash in shame, but she wasn’t sure why.
She showered and dressed and went to work, sat in the maid’s room where she tried to focus on writing an article, but she couldn’t. Georgiana was tired of herself. She was tired of being drunk and hungover. She was tired of dressing up for parties. She was tired of tennis at private clubs. She was tired of waitstaff asking still or sparkling. She was tired of Berta cooking her meals and mopping her floors. She was tired of clicking away in the smallest room of an enormous mansion pretending to be doing something—anything—that mattered when, in her entire life outside her job, she was yet another cog in the machine that kept everything moving away from fairness and justice and humanity. She couldn’t do it anymore. She couldn’t be this person. She needed to change. But she had no idea how, and it made her so sad she could barely stop herself from crying into her hands.
She had an email on her work account from Curtis McCoy.
Hi Georgiana, It was great seeing you at the event. Would you like to get together this weekend? I hear the Whitney has an exhibit of nudes we can go and feel awkward in front of? You can wear your sunglasses?
Georgiana wouldn’t let herself drag anyone else down with her. She tapped out a quick reply.
Hi Curtis, I have a lot on my plate at the moment so it’s not a great time. Thanks.
She pressed Send and heard the electronic whoosh of her note flying off into cyberspace. She stared out the window, trying to make sense of the night before. Why did she have such a bad feeling? What had happened at the party? When her phone buzzed with a text from Lena, the penny dropped.
Hey George why didn’t you tell me Brady had DIED? I am so sorry. I love you so much and I am here for you. Tell me how I can help.
Fuck. Lena knew about Brady? Georgiana didn’t reply. An hour later Darley sent a text.
Hey, Sasha told us about Brady. Why didn’t you say anything? We need to talk.
Sasha told them? She told everyone? Georgiana’s stomach roiled and she felt she might be sick. Her phone buzzed with a text from her mother.
I’ve booked us for tennis on Wednesday at 6. We can order from Jack the Horse Tavern after.
Humiliation coursed through Georgiana’s body. She had made a scene, something about the stupid binary theme. Her friends and family knew about Brady, they knew what she had done. Suddenly her stomach lurched. She was going to throw up. She stood from her desk and stumbled down the hall into the bathroom with the big map of Cambodia, locking the door behind her. She was spinning, and a darkness was spreading in from the sides, making it so that she could barely see the pinpricks of light before her. It was panic. She was falling, falling, falling, but the floor wasn’t rising up to meet her.
She leaned her body against the door and slid to the bathroom floor, the panic attack taking over. It was like she had been thrown by a powerful wave and her body was being tossed, forced further and further under. As she pressed her eyes closed, she remembered a time when she was in high school and the Henry Street School was scrimmaging a basketball team from the Bronx. As Henry Street scored, her classmates taunted the other team chanting, “Flip our bur-gers! Flip our bur-gers!” She was nine, and Berta took her to drop off a classmate who had missed the bus, and when Georgiana saw the girl’s peeling yellow house she said, “When are you going to get your house painted?” and the girl shrugged and got out. She was twelve at summer camp, and when a counselor told her to clear her dinner plate she sneered and told the older teenager that was someone else’s job. Georgiana had been horrible. She had been so horrible for so long, and she was trying so hard to stop and she couldn’t. Because it hadn’t just started with Brady. Sleeping with Brady wasn’t what made her a bad person—she had always been one, and she couldn’t even be good when she tried. She sat in the dark bathroom, shivering, Brady’s name pounding through her head.
It was the money that made her so horrible. It had made her coddled and spoiled and ruined, and she had no idea what to do about it. Then, with a jolt, she remembered something from the night before. She had taken off her shoes and crawled into her parents’ bed. She had been so upset. So mad at everyone. So frustrated and lost, and she felt there was just nothing she could do to stop being herself and start being someone else. But there, on the nightstand, she saw a newspaper clipping. It was the profile of Curtis, of course.
Georgiana opened her eyes and saw the map of Cambodia. The floor wasn’t moving, she wasn’t slipping sideways anymore. She stood, still slightly dizzy, and looked in the mirror. She was red and hot and she felt like she’d run up twelve flights of stairs, but she was okay.
She used a paper towel to blot her face and walked quietly back to her desk, unnoticed by anyone. She went into her Gmail and found the latest trust statement from the asset manager. She hadn’t opened an email, never mind looked at a statement, in years. She wasn’t sure she had a password, but she went ahead and tried the password she used for everything, from Neiman Marcus to Amazon: SerenaWilliams40-0. It worked. The page was confusing, there wasn’t just one account with a total. It was broken up into different sections, maybe two dozen separate blocks. She pulled a piece of scrap paper from her notebook and added the totals, sure she was missing something, but she just needed a rough idea. She added it together. It looked like she had about thirty-seven million dollars. And so she decided: She would rid herself of the entire inheritance. She would give all her money away just like Curtis, and it would be like ripping off a Band-Aid. She would change. She would change all at once and leave no room to ever go back.
She made an appointment with Bill Wallis, the investment manager. She knew Bill, he’d been a friend of the family since she was a small child. She’d seen him at Darley’s and Cord’s weddings, she remembered once joining him and his wife for lunch at a seaside restaurant in Ogunquit, Maine, when they were all there on vacation. He was soft-spoken and wore small round glasses; he gave the impression of someone who played bridge or studied architecture in his free time.
The morning of her appointment she dressed carefully, tucking a silk blouse into trousers as though she were a professional adult and not someone who routinely ate peanut butter out of the jar for dinner. She took the subway to Grand Central Station and walked up Park Avenue to the offices of Brotherton Asset Management, nestled in a tower so reflective it was nearly invisible against the sky. A secretary welcomed her and offered her a bottled water, which Georgiana politely refused—single-use plastic—and led her to Bill’s office, leaving her in a leather guest chair facing the window.
The office was massive, the size of the Pineapple Street dining room. Bill had a large mahogany desk, a tawny leather sofa, a tall orchid on a pedestal, and a coffee table showcasing a series of white ceramic vases. The walls were glass, and from where she sat Georgiana could see the arches of Grand Central and the stone pillars of the Park Avenue Viaduct. Georgiana’s underarms prickled with sweat, and then Bill came in and she stood, letting him kiss her hello on both cheeks. He smiled warmly. “Georgiana! I haven’t had the pleasure of seeing you in the office in several years now.”
It was true, Georgiana hadn’t come in since her grandfather passed and the family gathered to sign paperwork for his trust. “Thanks for making time today, Bill,” Georgiana said stiffly. “I’d like to close the account.”
“What do you mean?” Bill smiled uncertainly.
Georgiana hadn’t rehearsed this part, but she pressed on. “I understand that much of my trust is currently tied up in investments. I’d like to sell off my stakes in everything, as soon as it’s feasible, and then I want to take all the money and give it away to a charity.”
“Have you spoken to your family about this?” Bill asked, concern creasing his brow.
“No, I don’t want to. This is entirely my decision.”
“Well, it’s not your decision, and it’s quite a bit more complicated than that, I am afraid. While you’re the beneficiary of the trust, you are not the trustee. There are two trustees, and you would need to compel both of them to make any significant moves with your investments.”
“My father told me that the fund was mine,” Georgiana stammered. “He told me he didn’t oversee it.”
“He doesn’t. He’s not a trustee.”
“Well, who is?” Georgiana felt blood rushing to her neck and cheeks.
“I am one, and your mother is the other.”
“My mother?”
“Yes, when your grandparents set up your account it was with the provision that both your mother and an investment manager from Brotherton would help manage the trust for you.”
“To stop me from doing something like this?”
“Well, there are lots of reasons that people assign trustees. It’s really there to protect the beneficiary.”
“Like if I were to develop a massive drug addiction or gambling problem.”
“Well, sure.” Bill nodded his head sympathetically.
“I don’t have a drug addiction or a gambling problem. I just need access to the money my grandparents left me.” Georgiana was horrified to realize she was starting to cry. She wiped her eyes and yet more tears spilled down her cheeks. She was so frustrated.
“I think you need to talk to your mother.”
“But I can’t!” Georgiana said, and her voice cracked.
“Georgiana,” Bill said softly. “Tell me what’s going on. I can help you.”
Georgiana told him she had fallen in love with a man who was married, that he died in Pakistan, that he had been trying to help people, and now the only way she knew how to make it better was to get rid of the money. Georgiana spoke in a rush, and when she finished she took a tissue from Bill and wiped her face, which was covered in tears, and her nose, which was running.
“I’m sorry,” Georgiana whispered, exhausted.
“Don’t be,” the kind man replied. “I think what you want to do is incredible and I have some ideas.”
Georgiana’s senior year of high school, her mother had surgery for her tennis elbow and couldn’t play for eight months. That marked the lowest point in their mother-daughter relationship, including the time Georgiana got bangs at fifteen and her mother made her wear a hat in her presence until they grew out. Without tennis they were like two strangers who both happened to have the exact same ears.
Georgiana accepted Tilda’s invitation to play at the Casino and decided ahead of time that she would let her mother win, partially to make up for the Mad Hatter’s party and partially in preparation for the trustee conversation, but once they got on the court Georgiana couldn’t help herself and beat her with a nasty drop shot that would have made Andy Roddick break a racket. Tilda took it entirely graciously and even applauded before changing her shoes and leading Georgiana back to Orange Street.
Happily, Chip was out at a business dinner so Georgiana could talk to her mother alone. They ordered supper over the phone—Tilda didn’t trust online ordering and insisted on talking to her favorite bartender, Michael, to place the order. It made Georgiana cringe to watch her mother demand a different level of service from everyone else, but at least she was a good tipper. They had agreed that they were having hamburgers, but they bastardized them in two wildly different directions, Tilda ordering a burger, rare, with no bun, and substituting a salad, Georgiana ordering a meatless burger with avocado and cheese and a side of ranch for the fries. Tilda poured them each a glass of white wine and they curled up in the living room to wait for the food.
“So, Mom,” Georgiana started.
“Yes, dear,” Tilda replied a bit too eagerly.
“Have you ever done something you were really ashamed of?” Tilda nodded in concentration, so Georgiana continued. “Have you ever paused and wondered ‘Am I actually a good person? Or am I moving through this world making things a little worse instead of better?’ ” Tilda continued to bob her head. “Have you ever felt like you just couldn’t keep going down the same path, and that you needed to stop and really evaluate what it meant to be a part of this planet? What it meant to be a good human?”
“Of course, my dear,” Tilda agreed.
“So, what did you do when you felt that way?”
“Well, lots of things, dear,” Tilda reflected. “When I’m really blue, I like to buy myself a bouquet of flowers. Not the ones at the deli on Clark Street, though those are certainly better than you’d expect, but I go down to that florist on Montague, the one that sometimes has the table of succulents out front, and I have the little woman who works there put together something fresh from the refrigerated case—not the ones they already have premade, they always put too much green in there—but I have her put together something really bright and fresh, and just smelling that bouquet and looking at the flowers can work wonders for the soul.”
“That’s not at all what I am talking about, Mom.”
“Oh, well, some people like to look at the ocean,” Tilda considered, nodding her head wisely.
“Mom, let me try something else. Were you ever in love before Daddy? Did you have anyone you really fell for before him?”
“Well, I was engaged, you know.”
“Um, no, Mom, I did not know that,” said Georgiana, shocked.
“Oh, well, yes, I was. His name was Trip.”
“How did you never tell me this?”
“Well, you never asked!” Tilda replied indignantly.
“What? I never said, ‘Hey Mom, were you previously engaged to a man named Trip?’ ”
“Right! You never asked that.”
“Well, I didn’t realize how specific I had to be in my inquiries about your past, Mom!” said Georgiana sarcastically.
“You know I am an open book to you children,” Tilda said magnanimously. “You all just never think to ask about me!”
“Oh, okay. Got it. I need to ask better questions.”
“Maybe you do,” Tilda sniffed.
“Okay, so do I have any secret siblings or half siblings I don’t know about?”
“No! Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Um, have you ever been arrested for possession of illegal drugs?”
“No! God, no!”
“Was it you who secretly farted that time we were in the elevator at the Carlisle with Martha Stewart?”
“GEORGIANA!”
Georgiana started laughing in spite of herself. Their food arrived, and they set it up in the dining room and as they ate Georgiana started over and, in the way she had opened up to Bill Wallis, a man she barely knew, in his office in a glass tower, she tried again, this time to the woman she’d known her whole life, the woman who made her the angriest, the woman she couldn’t always understand, who had nursed her and grown her in her belly and yet often felt so very far away. Tilda listened.
