Pineapple Street(58)
Without Brady at work, Brady on Tuesday nights, Brady on weekends, she had nothing to look forward to, and she measured her days only in miles run and hours slept. Darley noticed an article in the paper about the plane crash, but when she asked about it, Georgiana deflected. “They were project managers in Pakistan, I didn’t know them,” she lied, sure that even saying Brady’s name aloud would break the dam of her emotions. Cord continued to drag Georgiana out to play tennis on weekends, unable to ask about her clearly visible pain but convinced, as all WASPs are, that exercise would cure whatever ails you. Lena was the only one to ask directly about the anxiety pills, noticing that when they drank Georgiana slipped quickly from buzzed to blackout. “Babe, whatever you’re taking isn’t working with alcohol. You have to pick your poison,” she advised. Georgiana was still humiliated that she had kissed Curtis at the party in front of so many people, but somehow his snubbing of her on the street made it strangely better. She pictured his frozen expression, his girlfriend and his dog, and though she still felt a measure of embarrassment, she also, in some ways, felt a surge of power.
* * *
—
She was eating lunch at her parents’ apartment, picking at a plate of smoked salmon and dark pumpernickel and reading the sports section of the paper, when her mother held up The New York Times Sunday Style section. “Do you know someone named Curtis McCoy? He was your class at the Henry Street School.”
“What?” Georgiana startled. How did her mother know about Curtis?
“There’s a piece about young billionaires giving away their inheritance, and he is interviewed. His father is Jim McCoy. I remember he was quite unpleasant at the winter fundraiser.” She sniffed and handed Georgiana the section.
It is August and much of Curtis McCoy’s cohort has absconded to Martha’s Vineyard, where the McCoy clan has their notable array of properties, a private section of the island that has been known to host rock stars and presidents, where it is not uncommon to see motorcades quietly swooshing past the stone gates. The McCoy family has, for three generations, owned the second-largest defense company in America, Taconic, manufacturers of cruise-and guided-missile systems, sold to both the U.S. government and, controversially, Saudi Arabia. Curtis McCoy, at the age of 26, is ready to wash his hands of the family business—but divesting himself of his great fortune is a more complicated matter than one might guess.
“Giving away my inheritance isn’t something I can legally do in one day—nor is it something I would want to do in one day. I am still learning a lot about the best ways to shed myself of this blood money.” Curtis McCoy is part of a growing movement of millennials who have grown up as one-percenters but are unwilling to perpetuate the systems that have put them there. “People like me shouldn’t exist,” McCoy says from his Brooklyn apartment. “I’m twenty-six years old. There is no logical reason for me to have hundreds of millions of dollars.” McCoy and his contemporaries reject the very concept of inherited wealth and are working to dismantle the regulations that allowed for their situations in the first place. Despite the fact that the title suits him, McCoy doesn’t define himself as a philanthropist (“There is something gross and elitist about claiming the mantle of ‘philanthropist.’?”) but is working with family lawyers to try to gain access to more of his inheritance sooner, doing all he can to distribute his wealth among a variety of nonprofit organizations. “This money came from warmongering, and it’s my goal to use it to promote peace. I hope that by speaking out I can encourage others in my position—or people with any sort of inherited wealth—to search their souls and decide what that money means and how they might use it to undo wrongs of the past.”
Alongside the article was a photo of Curtis in his apartment, sitting in a wooden chair looking seriously at the camera, the dimple in his chin just visible.
“Uggggh.” Georgiana made a strangled noise.
“What? I thought he came off well. You should reach out to him. You would probably have a lot to talk about,” her mother said.
“Not happening,” Georgiana croaked, and picked up her phone to text the article to Lena and Kristin before angrily shoving fourteen dollars’ worth of lox in her mouth. Her father came and joined them at the table, carrying with him a pink copy of Saturday’s Financial Times. He poured himself a tomato juice and poked at Georgiana’s newspaper.
“Real men read pink papers,” he joked.
“Georgiana’s school friend is on the front page of the Style section,” her mother chimed in.
“He’s not my friend,” Georgiana said grumpily.
“What’s the story?”
“His family owns Taconic and now that he has access to his inheritance, he’s giving it away to amend for all the people his family’s company has killed.”
“That’s probably a pretty substantial fortune.” Her dad wrinkled his brow.
“He doesn’t have access to all of it.”
“I wouldn’t imagine so. It’s typically parceled out over time. Nobody would give a kid in his twenties hundreds of millions all at once.”
“Is my account parceled or could I take it all out?”
“Well, you’d never want to take it all out.” Her father looked at her, alarmed.