Текст книги "The Goldfinch "

Автор книги: Donna Tartt

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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 55 страниц)

What had started as a reassuring thought was once again morphing into thoughts of strangers and break-ins. The air conditioner was so cold I was shaking; and when I closed my eyes I felt myself lifting up out of my body—floating up fast like an escaped balloon—only to startle with a sharp full-body jerk when I opened my eyes. So I kept my eyes shut and tried to remember what I could of the Hart Crane poem, which wasn’t much, although even isolated words like seagull and traffic and tumult and dawn carried something of its airborne distances, its sweeps from high to low; and just as I was nodding off, I fell into sort of an overpowering sense-memory of the narrow, windy, exhaust-smelling park near our old apartment, by the East River, roar of traffic washing abstractly above as the river swirled with fast, confusing currents and sometimes appeared to flow in two different directions.

xi.

I DIDN’T SLEEP MUCH that night and was so exhausted by the time I got to school and stowed the painting in my locker that I didn’t even notice that Kotku (hanging all over Boris, like nothing had happened) was sporting a fat lip. Only when I heard this tough senior guy Eddie Riso say, “Mack truck?” did I see that somebody had smacked her pretty good in the face. She was going around laughing a bit nervously and telling people that she got hit in the mouth by a car door, but in a sort of embarrassed way that (to me, at least) didn’t ring true.

“Did you do that?” I said to Boris, when next I saw him alone (or relatively alone) in English class.

Boris shrugged. “I didn’t want to.”

“What do you mean, you ‘didn’t want to’?”

Boris looked shocked. “She made me!”

“She made you,” I repeated.

“Look, just because you’re jealous of her—”

“Fuck you,” I said. “I don’t give a shit about you and Kotku—I have things of my own to worry about. You can beat her head in for all I care.”

“Oh, God, Potter,” said Boris, suddenly sobered. “Did he come back? That guy?”

“No,” I said, after a brief pause. “Not yet. Well, I mean, fuck it,” I said, when Boris kept on staring at me. “It’s his problem, not mine. He’ll just have to figure something out.”

“How much is he in for?”

“No clue.”

“Can’t you get the money for him?”

“Me?”

Boris looked away. I poked him in the arm. “No, what do you mean, Boris? Can’t I get it for him? What are you talking about?” I said, when he didn’t answer.

“Never mind,” he said quickly, settling back in his chair, and I didn’t have a chance to pursue the conversation because then Spirsetskaya walked into the room, all primed to talk about boring Silas Marner, and that was it.

xii.

THAT NIGHT, MY DAD came home early with bags of carry-out from his favorite Chinese, including an extra order of the spicy dumplings I liked—and he was in such a good mood that it was as if I’d dreamed Mr. Silver and the stuff from the night before.

“So—” I said, and stopped. Xandra, having finished her spring rolls, was rinsing glasses at the sink but there was only so much I felt comfortable saying in front of her.

He smiled his big Dad smile at me, the smile that sometimes made stewardesses bump him up to first class.

“So what?” he said, pushing aside his carton of Szechuan shrimp to reach for a fortune cookie.

“Uh—” Xandra had the water up loud—“Did you get everything straightened out?”

“What,” he said lightly, “you mean with Bobo Silver?”

“Bobo?”

“Listen, I hope you weren’t worried about that. You weren’t, were you?”

“Well—”

“Bobo—” he laughed—“they call him ‘The Mensch.’ He’s actually a nice guy—well, you talked to him yourself—we just had some crossed wires, is all.”

“What does five points mean?”

“Look, it was just a mix-up. I mean,” he said, “these people are characters. They have their own language, their own ways of doing things. But, hey—” he laughed—“this is great—when I met with him over at Caesars, that’s what Bobo calls his ‘office,’ you know, the pool at Caesars—anyway, when I met with him, you know what he kept saying? ‘That’s a good kid you’ve got there, Larry.’ ‘Real little gentleman.’ I mean, I don’t know what you said to him, but I do actually owe you one.”

“Huh,” I said in a neutral voice, helping myself to more rice. But inwardly I was almost drunk at the lift in his mood—the same flood of elation I’d felt as a small child when the silences broke, when his footsteps grew light again and you heard him laughing at something, humming at the shaving mirror.

My dad cracked open his fortune cookie, and laughed. “See here,” he said, balling it up and tossing it over to me. “I wonder who sits around in Chinatown and thinks up these things?”

Aloud, I read it: “ ‘You have an unusual equipment for fate, exercise with care!’ ”

“Unusual equipment?” said Xandra, coming up behind to put her arms around his neck. “That sounds kind of dirty.”

“Ah—” my dad turned to kiss her. “A dirty mind. The fountain of youth.”

“Apparently.”

xiii.

“I GAVE you a fat lip that time,” said Boris, who clearly felt guilty about the Kotku business since he’d brought it up out of nowhere in our companionable morning silence on the school bus.

“Yeah, and I knocked your head against the fucking wall.”

“I didn’t mean to!”

“Didn’t mean what?”

“To hit you in the mouth!”

“You meant it with her?”

“In a way, yeah,” he said evasively.

“In a way.”

Boris made an exasperated sound. “I told her I was sorry! Everything is fine with us now, no problem! And besides, what business is it of yours?”

“You brought it up, not me.”

He looked at me for an odd, off-centered moment, then laughed. “Can I tell you something?”

“What?”

He put his head close to mine. “Kotku and me tripped last night,” he said quietly. “Dropped acid together. It was great.”

“Really? Where did you get it?” E was easy enough to find at our school—Boris and I had taken it at least a dozen times, magical speechless nights where we had walked into the desert half-delirious at the stars—but nobody ever had acid.

Boris rubbed his nose. “Ah. Well. Her mom knows this scary old guy named Jimmy that works at a gun shop. He hooked us up with five hits—I don’t know why I bought five, I wish I’d bought six. Anyway I still have some. God it was fantastic.”

“Oh, yeah?” Now that I looked at him more closely, I realized that his pupils were dilated and strange. “Are you still on it?”

“Maybe a little. I only slept like two hours. Anyway we totally made up. It was like—even the flowers on her mom’s bedspread were friendly. And we were made out of the same stuff as the flowers, and we realized how much we loved each other, and needed each other no matter what, and how everything hateful that had happened between us was only out of love.”

“Wow,” I said, in a voice that I guess must have sounded sadder than I’d intended, from the way that Boris brought his eyebrows together and looked at me.

“Well?” I said, when he kept on staring at me. “What is it?”

He blinked and shook his head. “No, I can just see it. This mist of sadness, sort of, around your head. It’s like you’re a soldier or something, a person from history, walking on a battlefield maybe with all these deep feelings…”

“Boris, you’re still completely fried.”

“Not really,” he said dreamily. “I sort of snap in and out of it. But I still see colored sparks coming off things if I look from the corner of my eye just right.”

xiv.

A WEEK OR SO passed, without incident, either with my dad or on the Boris-Kotku front—enough time that I felt safe bringing the pillowcase home. I had noticed, when taking it out of my locker, how unusually bulky (and heavy) it seemed, and when I got it upstairs and out of the pillowcase, I saw why. Clearly I’d been blasted out of my mind when I wrapped and taped it: all those layers of newspaper, wound with a whole extra-large roll of heavy-duty, fiber-reinforced packing tape, had seemed like a prudent caution when I was freaked out and high, but back in my room, in the sober light of afternoon, it looked like it had been bound and wrapped by an insane and/or homeless person—mummified, practically: so much tape on it that it wasn’t even quite square any more; even the corners were round. I got the sharpest kitchen knife I could find and sawed at a corner—cautiously at first, worried that the knife would slip in and damage the painting—and then more energetically. But I’d gotten only partway through a three-inch section and my hands were starting to get tired when I heard Xandra coming in downstairs, and I put it back in the pillowcase and taped it to the back of my headboard again until I knew they were going to be gone for a while.

Boris had promised me that we would do two of the leftover hits of acid as soon as his mind got back to usual, which was how he put it; he still felt a bit spaced-out, he confided, saw moving patterns in the fake wood-grain of his desk at school, and the first few times he’d smoked weed he’d started out-and-out tripping again.

“That sounds kind of intense,” I said.

“No, it’s cool. I can make it stop when I want to. I think we should take it at the playground,” he added. “On Thanksgiving holiday maybe.” The abandoned playground was where we’d gone to take E every time but the first, when Xandra came beating on my bedroom door asking us to help her fix the washing machine, which of course we weren’t able to do, but forty-five minutes of standing around with her in the laundry room during the best part of the roll had been a tremendous bringdown.

“Is it going to be a lot stronger than E?”

“No—well, yes, but is wonderful, trust me. I kept wanting Kotku and me to be outside in the air except was too much that close to the highway, lights, cars—maybe this weekend?”

So that was something to look forward to. But just as I was starting to feel good and even hopeful about things again—ESPN hadn’t been on for a week, which was definitely some kind of record—I found my father waiting for me when I got home from school.

“I need to talk to you, Theo,” he said, the moment I walked in. “Do you have a minute?”

I paused. “Well, okay, sure.” The living room looked almost as if it had been burgled—papers scattered everywhere, even the cushions on the sofa slightly out of place.

He stopped pacing—he was moving a bit stiffly, as if his knee hurt him. “Come over here,” he said, in a friendly voice. “Sit down.”

I sat. My dad exhaled; he sat down across from me and ran a hand through his hair.

“The lawyer,” he said, leaning forward with his clasped hands between his knees and meeting my eye frankly.

I waited.

“Your mom’s lawyer. I mean—I know this is short notice, but I really need you to get on the phone with him for me.”

It was windy; outside, blown sand rattled against the glass doors and the patio awning flapped with a sound like a flag snapping. “What?” I said, after a cautious pause. She’d spoken of seeing a lawyer after he left—about a divorce, I figured—but what had come of it, I didn’t know.

“Well—” My dad took a deep breath; he looked at the ceiling. “Here’s the thing. I guess you’ve noticed I haven’t been betting my sports anymore, right? Well,” he said, “I want to quit. While I’m ahead, so to speak. It’s not—” he paused, and seemed to think—“I mean, quite honestly, I’ve gotten pretty good at this stuff by doing my homework and being disciplined about it. I crunch my numbers. I don’t bet impulsively. And, I mean, like I say, I’ve been doing pretty good. I’ve socked away a lot of money these past months. It’s just—”

“Right,” I said uncertainly, in the silence that followed, wondering what he was getting at.

“I mean, why tempt fate? Because—” hand on heart—“I am an alcoholic. I’m the first to admit that. I can’t drink at all. One drink is too many and a thousand’s not enough. Giving up booze was the best thing I ever did. And I mean, with gambling, even with my addictive tendencies and all, it’s always been kind of different, sure I’ve had some scrapes but I’ve never been like some of these guys that, I don’t know, that get so far in that they embezzle money and wreck the family business or whatever. But—” he laughed—“if you don’t want a haircut sooner or later, better stop hanging out at the barber shop right?”

“So?” I said cautiously, after waiting for him to continue.

“So—whew.” My dad ran both hands through his hair; he looked boyish, dazed, incredulous. “Here’s the thing. I’m really wanting to make some big changes right now. Because I have the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of this great business. Buddy of mine has a restaurant. And, I mean, I think it’s going to be a really great thing for all of us—once in a lifetime thing, actually. You know? Xandra’s having such a hard time at work right now with her boss being such a shit and, I don’t know, I just think this is going to be a lot more sane.”

My dad? A restaurant? “Wow—that’s great,” I said. “Wow.”

“Yeah.” My dad nodded. “It’s really great. The thing is, though, to open a place like this—”

“What kind of restaurant?”

My dad yawned, wiped red eyes. “Oh, you know—just simple American food. Steaks and hamburgers and stuff. Just really simple and well prepared. The thing is, though, for my buddy to get the place open and pay his restaurant taxes—”

“Restaurant taxes?”

“Oh God, yes, you wouldn’t believe the kind of fees they’ve got out here. You’ve got to pay your restaurant taxes, your liquor-license taxes, liability insurance—it’s a huge cash outlay to get a place like this up and running.”

“Well.” I could see where he was going with this. “If you need the money in my savings account—”

My dad looked startled. “What?”

“You know. That account you started for me. If you need the money, that’s fine.”

“Oh yeah.” My dad was silent for a moment. “Thanks. I really appreciate that, pal. But actually—” he had stood up, and was walking around—“the thing is, I actually see a really smart way we can do this. Just a short term solution, in order to get the place up and running, you know. We’ll make it back in a few weeks—I mean, a place like this, the location and all, it’s like having a license to print money. It’s just the initial expense. This town is crazy with the taxes and the fees and so forth. I mean—” he laughed, half-apologetically, “you know I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t an emergency—”

“Sorry?” I said, after a confused pause.

“I mean, like I was saying, I really need you to make this call for me. Here’s the number.” He had it all written out for me on a sheet of paper—a 212 number, I noticed. “You need to telephone this guy and speak to him yourself. His name is Bracegirdle.”

I looked at the paper, and then at my dad. “I don’t understand.”

“You don’t have to understand. All you have to do is say what I tell you.”

“What does it have to do with me?”

“Look, just do it. Tell him who you are, need to have a word, business matter, blah blah blah—”

“But—” Who was this person? “What do you want me to say?”

My father took a long breath; he was taking care to control his expression, something he was fairly good at.

“He’s a lawyer,” he said, on an out breath. “Your mother’s lawyer. He needs to make arrangements to wire this amount of money—” my eyes popped at the sum he was pointing to, $65,000—“into this account” (dragging his finger to the string of numbers beneath it). “Tell him I’ve decided to send you to a private school. He’ll need your name and Social Security number. That’s it.”

“Private school?” I said, after a disoriented pause.

“Well, you see, it’s for tax reasons.”

“I don’t want to go to private school.”

“Wait—wait—just hear me out. As long as these funds are used for your benefit, in the official sense, we’ve got no problem. And the restaurant is for all our benefit, see. Maybe, in the end, yours most of all. And I mean, I could make the call myself, it’s just that if we angle this the right way we’d be saving like thirty thousand dollars that would go to the government otherwise. Hell, I will send you to a private school if you want. Boarding school. I could send you to Andover with all that extra money. I just don’t want half of it to end up with the IRS, know what I’m saying? Also—I mean, the way this thing is set up, by the time you end up going to college, it’s going to end up costing you money, because with that amount of money in there it means you won’t be eligible for a scholarship. The college financial aid people are going to look right at that account and put you in a different income bracket and take 75 percent of it the first year, poof. This way, at least, you’ll get the full use of it, you see? Right now. When it could actually do some good.”

“But—”

“But—” falsetto voice, lolled tongue, goofy stare. “Oh, come on, Theo,” he said, in his normal voice, when I kept on looking at him. “Swear to God, I don’t have time for this. I need you to make this call ASAP, before the offices close back East. If you need to sign something, tell him to FedEx the papers. Or fax them. We just need to get this done as soon as possible, okay?”

“But why do I need to do it?”

My dad sighed; he rolled his eyes. “Look, don’t give me that, Theo,” he said. “I know you know the score because I’ve seen you checking the mail—yes,” he said over my objections, “yes you do, every day you’re out at that mailbox like a fucking shot.”

I was so baffled by this that I didn’t even know how to reply. “But—” I glanced down at the paper and the figure leaped out again: $65,000.

Without warning, my dad snapped out and whacked me across the face, so hard and fast that for a second I didn’t know what had happened. Then almost before I could blink he hit me again with his fist, cartoon wham, bright crack like a camera flash, this time with his fist. As I wobbled—my knees had gone loose, everything white—he caught me by the throat with a sharp upward thrust and forced me up on tiptoe so I was gasping for breath.

“Look here.” He was shouting in my face—his nose two inches from mine—but Popper was jumping and barking like crazy and the ringing in my ears had climbed to such a pitch it was like he was screaming at me though radio fuzz. “You’re going to call this guy—” rattling the paper in my face—“and say what I fucking tell you. Don’t make this any harder than it has to be because I will make you do this, Theo, no lie, I will break your arm, I will beat the everloving shit out of you if you don’t get on the phone right now. Okay? Okay?” he repeated in the dizzy, ear-buzzing silence. His cigarette breath was sour in my face. He let go my throat; he stepped back. “Do you hear me? Say something.”

I swiped an arm over my face. Tears were streaming down my cheeks but they were automatic, like tap water, no emotion attached to them.

My dad squeezed his eyes shut, then re-opened them; he shook his head. “Look,” he said, in a crisp voice, still breathing hard. “I’m sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry, I noted, in a clear hard remove of my mind; he sounded like he still wanted to beat the shit out of me. “But, I swear, Theo. Just trust me on this. You have to do this for me.”

Everything was blurred, and I reached up with both hands to straighten my glasses. My breaths were so loud that they were the noisiest things in the room.

My dad, hand on hips, turned his eyes to the ceiling. “Oh, come on,” he said. “Just stop it.”

I said nothing. We stood there for another long moment or two. Popper had stopped barking and was looking between us apprehensively like he was trying to figure out what was going on.

“It’s just… well you know?” Now he was all reasonable again. “I’m sorry, Theo, I swear I am, but I’m really in a bind here, we need this money right now, this minute, we really do.”

He was trying to meet my eyes: his gaze was frank, sensible. “Who is this guy?” I said, looking not at him but at the wall behind his head, my voice for whatever reason coming out scorched-sounding and strange.

“Your mother’s lawyer. How many times do I have to tell you?” He was massaging his knuckles like he’d hurt his hand hitting me. “See, the thing is, Theo—” another sigh—“I mean, I’m sorry, but, I swear, I wouldn’t be so upset if this wasn’t so important. Because I am really, really behind the eight ball here. This is just a temporary thing, you understand—just until the business gets off the ground. Because the whole thing could collapse, just like that—” snapped fingers—“unless I start getting some of these creditors paid off. And the rest of it—I will use to send you to a better school. Private school maybe. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Already, carried away by his own rap, he was dialing the number. He handed me the telephone and—before anyone answered—dashed over and picked up the extension across the room.

“Hello,” I said, to the woman who answered the phone, “um, excuse me,” my voice scratchy and uneven, I still couldn’t quite believe what was happening. “May I speak to Mr., uh…”

My dad stabbed his finger at the paper: Bracegirdle.

“Mr., uh, Bracegirdle,” I said, aloud.

“And who may I say is calling?” Both my voice, and hers, were way too loud due to the fact that my dad was listening on the extension.

“Theodore Decker.”

“Oh, yes,” said the man’s voice when he came on the other end. “Hello! Theodore! How are you?”

“Fine.”

“You sound like you have a cold. Tell me. Do you have a bit of a cold?”

“Er, yes,” I said uncertainly. My dad, across the room, was mouthing the word Laryngitis.

“That’s a shame,” said the echoing voice—so loud that I had to hold the phone slightly away from my ear. “I never think of people catching colds in the sunshine, where you are. At any rate, I’m glad you phoned me—I didn’t have a good way to get in touch with you directly. I know things are probably still very hard. But I hope things are better than they were the last time I saw you.”

I was silent. I’d met this person?

“It was a bad time,” said Mr. Bracegirdle, correctly interpreting my silence.

The velvety, fluent voice struck a chord. “Okay, wow,” I said.

“Snowstorm, remember?”

“Right.” He’d appeared maybe a week after my mother died: oldish man with a full head of white hair—snappily dressed, striped shirt, bow tie. He and Mrs. Barbour had seemed to know each other, or at any rate he had seemed to know her. He’d sat across from me in the armchair nearest the sofa and talked a lot, confusing stuff, although all that really stuck in my mind was the story he’d told of how he met my mother: massive snowstorm, no taxis in sight—when—preceded by a fan of wet snow—an occupied cab had plowed to the corner of Eighty-Fourth and Park. Window rolled down—my mother (“a vision of loveliness!”) going as far as East Fifty-Seventh, was he headed that way?

“She always talked about that storm,” I said. My father—phone to his ear—glanced at me sharply. “When the city was shut down that time.”

He laughed. “What a lovely young lady! I’d come out of a late meeting—elderly trustee up on Park and Ninety-Second, shipping heiress, now dead alas. Anyway, down I came, from the penthouse to the street—lugging my litigation bag, of course—and a foot had fallen. Perfect silence. Kids were pulling sleds down Park Avenue. Anyway, the trains weren’t running above Seventy-Second and there I was, knee deep and trudging, when, whoops! here came a yellow cab with your mother in it! Crunching to a stop. As if she’d been sent by a search party. ‘Hop in, I’ll give you a ride.’ Midtown absolutely deserted… snowflakes whirling down and every light in the city on. And there we were, rolling along at about two miles per hour—we might as well have been in a sleigh—sailing right through the red lights, no point stopping. I remember we talked about Fairfield Porter—there’d just been a show in New York—and then on to Frank O’Hara and Lana Turner and what year they’d finally closed the old Horn and Hardart, the Automat. And then, we discovered that we worked across the street from each other! It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, as they say.”

I glanced over at my dad. He had a funny look on his face, lips pressed tight as if he was about to be sick on the carpet.

“We talked a bit about your mother’s estate, if you remember,” said the voice on the other end of the phone. “Not much. It wasn’t the time. But I had hoped you would come to see me when you were ready to talk. I would have telephoned before you left town if I’d known you were going.”

I looked at my dad; I looked at the paper in my hand. “I want to go to private school,” I blurted.

“Really?” said Mr. Bracegirdle. “I think that may be an excellent idea. Where were you thinking about going? Back east? Or somewhere out there?”

We hadn’t thought this out. I looked at my dad.

“Uh,” I said, “uh,” while my father grimaced at me and waved his hand frantically.

“There may be good boarding schools out west, though I don’t know about them,” Mr. Bracegirdle was saying. “I went to Milton, which was a wonderful experience for me. And my oldest son went there too, for a year anyway, though it wasn’t at all the right place for him—”

As he talked on—from Milton, to Kent, to various boarding schools attended by children of friends and acquaintances—my dad scribbled a note; he threw it at me. Wire me the money, it said. Down payment.

“Um,” I said, not knowing how else to introduce the subject, “did my mother leave me some money?”

“Well, not exactly,” said Mr. Bracegirdle, seeming to cool slightly at the question, or maybe it was just the awkwardness of the interruption. “She was having some financial troubles toward the end, as I’m sure you’re well aware. But you do have a 529. And she also set up a little UTMA for you right before she died.”

“What is that?” My dad—his eyes on me—was listening very closely.

“Uniform Transfer to Minors. It’s to be used for your education. But it can’t be used for anything else—not while you’re still a minor, anyway.”

“Why can’t it?” I said, after a brief pause, as he had seemed to stress the final point so much.

“Because it’s the law,” he said curtly. “But certainly something can be worked out if you want to go away to school. I know of a client who used part of her eldest son’s 529 for a fancy kindergarten for her youngest. Not that I think twenty thousand dollars a year is a prudent expenditure at that level—the most expensive crayons in Manhattan, surely—! But yes, so you understand, that’s how it works.”

I looked at my dad. “So there’s no way you could, say, wire me sixty-five thousand dollars,” I said. “If I needed it right this minute.”

“No! Absolutely not! So just put that out of your mind.” His manner had changed—clearly he’d revised his opinion of me, no longer my mother’s son and A Good Kid but a grasping little creep. “By the way, may I ask how you happened to arrive at that particular figure?”

“Er—” I glanced at my dad, who had a hand over his eyes. Shit, I thought, and then realized I’d said it out loud.

“Well, no matter,” said Mr. Bracegirdle silkily. “It’s simply not possible.”

“No way?”

“No way, no how.”

“Okay, fine—” I tried hard to think, but my mind was running in two directions at once. “Could you send me part of it, then? Like half?”

“No. It would all have to be arranged directly with the college or school of your choice. In other words, I’m going to need to see bills, and pay bills. There’s a lot of paperwork, as well. And in the unlikely event you decide not to attend college…”

As he talked on, confusingly, about various ins and outs of the funds my mother had set up for me (all of which were fairly restrictive, as far as either my father or me getting our hands immediately on actual, spendable cash) my dad, holding the phone out from his ear, had something very like an expression of horror on his face.

“Well, uh, that’s good to know, thank you sir,” I said, trying hard to wrap up the conversation.

“There are tax advantages of course. Setting it up like this. But what she really wanted was to make sure your father would never be able to touch it.”

“Oh?” I said, uncertainly, in the overly long silence that followed. Something in his tone had made me suspect that he knew my father might be the Lord Vader-ish presence breathing audibly (audibly to me—whether audibly to him I don’t know) on the other line.

“There are other considerations, as well. I mean—” decorous silence—“I don’t know if I ought to tell you this, but an unauthorized party has twice tried to make a large withdrawal on the account.”

“What?” I said, after a sick pause.

“You see,” said Mr. Bracegirdle, his voice as distant as if it were coming from the bottom of the sea, “I’m the custodian on the account. And about two months after your mother died, someone walked in the bank in Manhattan during business hours and tried to forge my signature on the papers. Well, they know me at the main branch, and they called me right away, but while they were still on the phone with me the man slipped out the door, before the security guard was able to approach and ask for ID. That was, my goodness, nearly two years ago. But then—only last week—did you get the letter I wrote you about this?”

“No,” I said, when at last I realized I needed to say something.

“Well, without going into it too much, there was a peculiar phone call. From someone purporting to be your attorney out there, requesting a transfer of funds. And then—checking into it—we found out that some party with access to your Social Security number had applied for, and received, a rather large line of credit in your name. Do you happen to know anything about that?

“Well, not to worry,” he continued, when I didn’t say anything. “I have a copy of your birth certificate here, and I faxed it to the issuing bank and had the line shut down immediately. And I’ve alerted Equifax and all the credit agencies. Even though you’re a minor, and legally unable to enter into such a contract, you could be responsible for any such debts incurred in your name once you come of age. At any rate, I urge you to be very careful with your Social Security number in future. It’s possible to have a new Social issued, in theory, although the red tape is such a headache that I don’t suggest it…”

I was in a cold sweat when I hung up the telephone—and completely unprepared for the howl that my father let out. I thought he was angry—angry at me—but when he just stood there with the phone still in his hand, I looked at him a little closer and realized he was crying.