Mom became even more concerned about my values when my editor offered me a job writing a weekly column about what he called the behind-the-scenes doings of the movers and shakers. Mom thought I should be writing exposes about oppressive landlords, social injustice, and the class struggle on the Lower East Side. But I leaped at the job, because it meant I would become one of those people who knew what was really going on. Also, most people in Welch had a pretty good idea how bad off the Walls family was, but the truth was, they all had their problems, toothey were just better than we were at covering them up. I wanted to let the world know that no one had a perfect life, that even the people who seemed to have it all had their secrets.
Dad thought it was great that I was writing a weekly column about, as he put it, the skinny dames and the fat cats. He became one of my most faithful readers, and would go to the library to research the people in the column, then call me with tips. "This Astor broad has one helluva past," he told me one time. "Maybe we should do a little digging in that direction." Eventually, even Mom acknowledged that I'd done all right. "No one expected you to amount to much," she told me. "Lori was the smart one, Maureen the pretty one, and Brian the brave one. You never had much going for you except that you always worked hard."
I loved my new job even more than I loved my Park Avenue address. I was invited to dozens of parties a week: art-gallery openings, benefit balls, movie premieres, book parties, and private dinners in marble-floored dining rooms. I met real estate developers, agents, heiresses, fund managers, lawyers, clothing designers, professional basketball players, photographers, movie producers, and television correspondents. I met people who owned entire collections of houses and spent more on one restaurant meal than my family had paid for 93 Little Hobart Street.
True or not, I was convinced that if all these people found out about Mom and Dad and who I really was, it would be impossible for me to keep my job. So I avoided discussing my parents. When that was impossible, I lied.
A year after I started the column, I was in a small, overstuffed restaurant across the table from an aging, elegant woman in a silk turban who oversaw the International Best Dressed List.
"So, where are you from, Jeannette?"
"West Virginia."
"Where?"
"Welch."
"How lovely. What's the main industry in Welch?"
"Coal mining."
As she questioned me, she studied what I wore, assessing the fabric and appraising the cost of each item and making a judgment about my taste in general.
"And does your family own coal mines?"
"No."
"What do your parents do?"
"Mom's an artist."
"And your father?"
"He's an entrepreneur."
"Doing what?"
I took a breath. "He's developing a technology to burn low-grade bituminous coal more efficiently."
"And they're still in West Virginia?" she asked.
I decided I might as well go all out. "They love it there," I said. "They have a great old house on a hill overlooking a beautiful river. They spent years restoring it."
MY LIFE WITH ERIC was calm and predictable. I liked it that way, and four years after I moved into his apartment, we got married. Shortly after the wedding, Mom's brother, my uncle Jim, died in Arizona. Mom came to the apartment to give me the news and to ask a favor. "We need to buy Jim's land," she said.
Mom and her brother had each inherited half of the West Texas land that had been owned by their father. The whole time we kids were growing up, Mom had been mysteriously vague about how big and how valuable this land was, but I had the impression that it was a few hundred acres of more or less uninhabitable desert, miles from any road.
"We need to keep that land in the family," Mom told me. "It's important for sentimental reasons."
"Let's see if we can buy it, then," I said. "How much will it cost?"
"You can borrow the money from Eric now that he's your husband," Mom said.
"I've got a little money," I said. "How much will it cost?" I'd read somewhere that off-road land in parched West Texas sold for as little as a hundred dollars an acre.
"You can borrow from Eric," Mom said again.
"Well, how much?"
"A million dollars."
"What?"
"A million dollars."
"But Uncle Jim's land is the same size as your land," I said. I was speaking slowly, because I wanted to make sure I understood the implications of what Mom had just told me. "You each inherited half of Grandpa Smith's land."
"More or less," Mom said.
"So if Uncle Jim's land is worth a million dollars, that means your land is worth a million dollars."
"I don't know."
"What do you mean, you don't know? It's the same size as his."
"I don't know how much it's worth, because I never had it appraised. I was never going to sell it. My father taught me you never sell land. That's why we have to buy Uncle Jim's land. We have to keep it in the family."
"You mean you own land worth a million dollars?" I was thunderstruck. All those years in Welch with no food, no coal, no plumbing, and Mom had been sitting on land worth a million dollars? Had all those years, as well as Mom and Dad's time on the streetnot to mention their current life in an abandoned tenementbeen a caprice inflicted on us by Mom? Could she have solved our financial problems by selling this land she never even saw? But she avoided my questions, and it became clear that to Mom, holding on to land was not so much an investment strategy as it was an article of faith, a revealed truth as deeply felt and incontestable to her as Catholicism. And for the life of me, I could not get her to tell me how much the land was worth.
"I told you I don't know," she said.
"Then tell me how many acres it is, and where exactly it is, and I'll find out how much an acre of land is going for in that area." I wasn't interested in her money; I just wanted to knowneeded to knowthe answer to my question: How much was that freaking land worth? Maybe she truly didn't know. Maybe she was afraid to find out. Maybe she was afraid of what we'd all think if we knew. But instead of answering me, she kept repeating that it was important to keep Uncle Jim's landland that had belonged to her father and his father and his father before thatin the family.
"Mom, I can't ask Eric for a million dollars."
"Jeannette, I haven't asked you for a lot of favors, but I'm asking you for one now. I wouldn't if it wasn't important. But this is important."
I told Mom I didn't think Eric would lend me a million dollars to buy some land in Texas, and even if he would, I wouldn't borrow it from him. "It's too much money," I said. "What would I do with the land?"
"Keep it in the family."
"I can't believe you're asking me this," I said. "I've never even seen that land."
"Jeannette," Mom said when she had accepted the fact that she would not get her way. "I'm deeply disappointed in you."