“Who?” Harrison demanded. “Not Lewyn.”
I shrugged.
“So. Sally. And how does Sally know? I highly doubt Mom shared any of this with Sally.”
He said our sister’s name with such profound disapproval. Of the three of them, he was the most intractable. He was unbearable, too.
“Sally has known since she was thirteen. Since all of you were thirteen. She saw them together, Harrison, if you must know. And she didn’t tell anyone else—not Mom and certainly not you. Did you know that our father had a habit of staying out all night and coming home at dawn?”
After a moment, he said: “No. Actually.”
“She could see him from her window. My window.”
Harrison didn’t answer.
“So would you please tell me about the legal troubles, Harrison?”
He sighed. “Stella Western wanted things from us. She wanted things she had no right to ask for, let alone assume she’d receive.”
“What kind of things?”
“Property,” he said shortly. “It was craven and it was disgusting.”
I just gaped at him.
“Oh, don’t look at me like that. Privileged white family oppresses poor artiste. Of color! Call the Walden morality force!” Harrison leaned back and crossed his legs. “It was a negotiation. It’s how grown-ups settle their differences in a civilized world. And we settled them. In any case, I don’t understand why this is something you need to burden yourself with. As you pointed out in your email, you are a high school student. Your concerns are—or should be—Latin and track. And yes, applying to college.”
“Fuck applying to college!” I shouted. “Fuck this ridiculous, pathetic, thoroughly manufactured ‘rite of passage’ that’s supposed to tell you if you’re qualified to make money in America, and reassure your parents they did a good job raising you. It’s the most asinine thing! I don’t care about any of it. I don’t want to rank my extracurriculars or freak out about ten points on the SAT I didn’t get. I don’t want to apply to Cornell because I have a thirty-five percent higher chance of getting in there, just because my father, whom I don’t even remember, went there. And I don’t want to end up crying because some school I can see myself at decides it’s unable to offer me admission at this time. All I want is to go somewhere interesting and read some good books, and learn from people who know more than I do, and maybe talk about the world with people my own age.”
“There’s nothing wrong with making money, Phoebe. And I’m happy to say, in this country at least, you don’t need formal qualifications to do it, just an idea and a work ethic.”
“Says the man with degrees from Harvard and Oxford, and an almost two-hundred-year-old company that was handed to him to run.”
“It was handed to me,” he said, placidly, “first and foremost because I was the only one of us who had the first idea of how to run it, but also because I was the only one of us who seemed to care about acquiring wealth.”
I glared at him. This was not untrue, at least, for Lewyn and Sally. For myself, I wasn’t sure.
“I told the board, and Mom, when I came home from England, that I would take over, and I like running the company, but I also made it clear that I’d be structuring things so I’d have time to do my other work. Because while I am extremely serious about financial security for myself, and for Mom and incidentally for you, Phoebe, I do have additional interests and projects, unrelated to the company.”
“Your additional interests and projects,” I said, “have been noted. And for the record I have no personal objection to making money. I might not go in for the baubles, but I’d probably miss the infrastructure if it suddenly disappeared. I’m especially fond of our house, for example. And I appreciate the education.”