Great Big Beautiful Life(21)
“Clickbait,” I say, “before the advent of clicking.”
“More or less,” she agrees. “That’s what my family used to make themselves very rich—and like Dove Franklin says, powerful too. But in the end, it doesn’t matter. Even if you’re the one to build the monster, you’re never going to be able to control it. It’ll gladly eat you alive and floss with your bones, once it’s finished with everyone else.”
My chest squeezes as some of the crueler headlines I’ve read about Margaret and her family cycle through my mind. Her younger sister, Laura, had especially suffered at the hands of the press, during her preteen years when she’d put on some weight and gotten an unfortunate haircut—normal kid stuff that seemed so much worse when you juxtaposed her with her glamorous and austere family on red carpets and at ribbon cuttings and attending every other manner of highly publicized event.
Margaret, on the other hand, had been the media’s darling. Until she wasn’t.
“It must’ve been strange,” I say, “growing up with all that attention on you.”
She almost smiles. It just barely reaches the corners of her lips but goes not a millimeter further. “No one knows how ‘normal’ or ‘strange’ their own life is until they see the alternative. Life in the House of Ives was all I knew.”
I must be making some kind of face, because one of her brows hooks sharply upward. “Whatever you’re thinking,” she says, “you don’t have to worry about breaking me, Alice. I’m hard to shake.”
My chest pinches. Of course she is. No one person survives everything she did plus years’ worth of public rehashing of those sad and bizarre events without getting some grit, I’m sure.
“Noted,” I say, but I don’t push her to begin, even so. These interviews need to be a safe place for her. The only way to get a person’s full, unfiltered story is to let them tell it to you when and how they want. The best stories are born when the words slip effortlessly from a subject’s lips, rather than being painfully cranked out of them bit by bit.
She sets the book on the table, her shoulders squaring as she meets my eyes. “Okay, Alice. Let’s start at the beginning.”
And then she does.
The Story
Their version: Lawrence Richard Ives made the family filthy rich. He was also a cold-blooded sociopath who may have murdered his business partner.
* * *
? ? ?
Her version: It’s not that they were wrong exactly. It’s just that they’re answering the wrong question.
Lawrence Richard Ives made the family rich. Who cares? That’s not a story. It’s an event.
Even the how isn’t all that interesting. And yet countless writers over the last century have cataloged that information, again and again, like somehow it could add up to a full picture.
The what: The eighth-born son of two destitute farmers in Dillon Springs, Pennsylvania, makes a fortune prospecting out west.
The how: He spends every penny he makes on more land, more equipment, more smelting, more miners, more hotels in every soon-to-be-booming town along the trail of the so-called gold rush.
The interesting question, the interesting answer, is almost always the why.
That’s why we read these celebrity tell-alls, isn’t it? That’s why we pore over cold cases. We want to understand why things happen. We want it all to make sense.
The reason Lawrence Richard Ives got rich wasn’t because of a knack for business. It was because he was hungry. Because he was born in the harsh winter of 1830 on a failing farm, the eighth of ten children.
By adulthood, there would be only six.
The world is cruel and dangerous, and Lawrence learned this, death by death.
The worst was his younger brother, Dicky, lost in the woods one winter, taken by frostbite. Lawrence was only nine when it happened, but he felt responsible. That was how it worked in large families like his. Each sibling looked after the one who came along next.
He expected his mother and father to blame him, the way he blamed himself.
They didn’t.
This was when Lawrence realized the awful truth. His parents hardly felt Dicky’s loss, because they hardly knew him. Just as they hardly knew Lawrence. They were spread too thin, worked too hard. They were too tired to love.
The only people on this earth to whom Lawrence truly mattered—the only people who loved him as he loved them—were his younger brother and sister. And now one of them was gone, the other growing hungrier and gaunter by the day, the light seeping out of her large brown eyes, bit by precious bit.
He worried endlessly. If he let her down…if he lost her too, then what was the point of it all? All the hurt and pain that came with surviving would be for nothing if he couldn’t keep her safe.
Lawrence was nineteen the first time he heard about the gold, from a young local miner named Thomas Dougherty. About places out west where you couldn’t dig three feet without striking metal. About cities that were always warm, and men who’d never be hungry or cold again.
He tried to brush the stories off.
Fantasy, he told himself. A word that had no purpose in his world.
During the day, he was a pragmatist. At night, though, he dreamed.
Of gold. Of finding it in the fallow fields and the collapsing barn, and then, finally, in the sunlit creek he and Dicky used to wade through in the summers when they were small. Dicky was there too sometimes, still and forever the little boy Lawrence had failed to protect, and when he plucked a stone that glistened like honey from beneath the water, he held it out to Lawrence with an awed expression. Look, Lawrie, he said, a magic rock.