“I had never known this kind of wealth, and who *was* I if I lived like this?” An essay by the novelist Andre Dubus III.
It’s the summer of 2001, and I’m trying to check into the Royalton on Forty-fourth Street, but my credit card has been declined. The receptionist is in a silk blouse, and she glances behind me at my road-tired, happily expectant family: at my wife and three young kids, at my mother and older sister, her toddler daughter in her arms.On her face is an expression I know well, for I grew up with it.
Like nearly all my relatives, Jeannie was from Louisiana. In her late forties she became a widow, and in her fifties she lost her eyesight, but she was still active in her progressive church. She cooked her own meals and listened to biographies and the New York. To everyone she met, she was warm and friendly, her blindness somehow not robbing her of her gratitude to simply be alive, which is on full display as our family cruises away from the airport.
“Twelve thousand dollars?” my uncle said. “With four kids? Nobody can live on twelve thousand dollars. Hell, I make sixty and that ain’t enough.”I lean toward the limo’s glass divider and ask the driver to take the long way to midtown. My aunt can still see what’s in the periphery of her vision, and I want her to take in the lighted buildings as we head down F.D.R. Drive, the East River glistening to our left.
At the Royalton, I hand my mother and aunt four hundred dollars each, for pocket money. My aunt kisses and thanks me, then folds the bills and pushes them down her bra. She will eventually lose the cash, and I will hand her four more hundred-dollar bills. “Good Lord, Andre,” she’ll say. “I’m going to leave this trip with more money than I brought with me.”
But, one July night, all five of us in the van, the engine took a long time to start, and when it did my mother couldn’t go faster than ten miles an hour. Finally, she had to leave it in the street, and we climbed out and trudged back to our hot, airless house. A piano concerto is playing inside, and there are strips of purple light in the padded ceiling. The bar’s stocked with ice and glasses and bottles of water. I pour some for my aunt and my mother, and they smile at me with such pride that I have to look away.“Of course. It’s crazy, but yes, we can.”
The receptionist needs even more of a deposit than the Royalton did, so after handing him my four thousand, still in its envelope, I call my bank and tell the woman who answers that I’m treating my aunt to a few days in New York City. Could I get my hands on another ten thousand dollars?“So then I can just use my debit card?” I ask.Any door I want to open, opening.
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