Too Much and Never Enough, стр. 55
When she said she was ready for bed, I asked her if she wanted me to stay or if there was anything I could get for her before I left.
“No, dear, I’m fine.”
I bent over to kiss her cheek. She smelled like vanilla. “You are my favorite person,” I told her. It wasn’t true, but I said it because I loved her. I said it, too, because nobody else had bothered to stay with her after her husband of sixty-three years had been put in the ground.
“Good,” she replied. “I should be.”
And then I left her alone in that large, quiet, empty house.
Two weeks after my grandfather’s funeral, I was home when a DHL truck pulled up and delivered a yellow envelope containing a copy of my grandfather’s will. I read through it twice to be sure I hadn’t misunderstood anything. I had promised my brother I’d call him as soon as I knew anything, but I was reluctant to do so. Fritz and Lisa’s third child, William, had been born hours after my grandfather’s funeral. Twenty-four hours after that, he’d begun having seizures. He had been in the neonatal intensive care unit ever since. They had two young children at home, and Fritz had to work. I had no idea how they were managing all of it.
I hated to be the bearer of more bad news, but he needed to know.
I called him.
“So what’s the deal?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I told him. “We got nothing,”
A few days later, I got a call from Rob. As far as I could remember, he had only ever called me before to let me know when Gam was in the hospital. He acted as if everything were fine. If I signed off on the will, he implied, everything would be great. And he did need my signature in order for the will to be released for probate. Though it’s true that my grandfather disinherited me and my brother—that is, instead of splitting what would have been my father’s 20 percent share of his estate between me and my brother, he had divided it evenly among his four other children—we were included in a bequest made separately to all of the grandchildren, an amount that proved to be less than a tenth of 1 percent of what my aunts and uncles had inherited. In the context of the entire estate it was a very small amount of money, and it must have infuriated Robert that it gave me and Fritz the power to hold up the distribution of the assets.
Days passed, and I couldn’t bring myself to sign. In the breadth and concision of its cruelty, the will was a stunning document that very much resembled my parents’ divorce agreement.
For a while, Robert called me every day. Maryanne and Donald had assigned him to be the point person; Donald didn’t want to be bothered, and Maryanne’s husband, John, had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer, and his prognosis was not good.
“Cash in your chips, Honeybunch,” Rob said repeatedly, as if that would make me forget what was in the will. No matter how many times he said it, though, my brother and I had agreed not to sign anything until we had some idea of what our options were.
Eventually Rob began to lose patience. Fritz and I were holding everything up; the will couldn’t go to probate until all of the beneficiaries had signed off. When I told Rob that Fritz and I weren’t yet willing to take that step, he suggested we get together to discuss it.
At our first meeting, when we asked Rob to explain why my grandfather had done what he had, Rob said, “Listen, your grandfather didn’t give a shit about you. And not just you, he didn’t give a shit about any of his grandchildren.”
“We’re being treated worse because our father died,” I said.
“No, not at all.”
When we pointed out that our cousins would still benefit from what their parents were getting from my grandfather, Rob said, “Any of them could be disowned at any time. Donny was going to join the army or some bullshit like that, and Donald and Ivana told him if he did, they’d disown him in a second.”
“Our father didn’t have that luxury,” I said.
Rob sat back. I could see him trying to recalibrate. “It’s pretty simple,” he said. “As far as your grandfather was concerned, dead is dead. He only cared about his living children.”
I wanted to point out that my grandfather hadn’t cared about Rob, either, but Fritz intervened. “Rob,” he said, “this just isn’t fair.”
I lost track of how many meetings the three of us had between July and October 1999. There was a brief respite in September while I was in Hawaii for my postponed wedding and honeymoon.
At the very beginning of our discussions, Fritz, Robert, and I agreed that we would leave Gam out of it. I assumed she had no idea how we’d been treated in my grandfather’s will and saw no reason to upset her. Hopefully we would be able to resolve everything, and she’d never have to know there had been a problem at all. I spoke to her every day while I was away and, once back in New York, resumed my visits to her. The negotiations, if they could even be called that, also resumed. There was a numbing sameness to our conversations. No matter what Fritz and I said, Rob came back with his clichés and canned responses. We remained at a standstill.
I asked him about Midland Associates, the management company my grandfather had set up decades earlier in order to avoid paying certain taxes and benefit his children. Midland owned a group of seven buildings (including Sunnyside Towers and the Highlander) that were