The Boy Who Didn't Like Money

I’m opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.

Mark Twain

Awakening

On a sweltering August afternoon, the clatter of jackhammers blasted through the open dinette window. I sat in the hallway next to the only phone in my parents’ Brooklyn tenement. Their apartment had no air conditioning—never did, never would—and my backside stuck to the vinyl seat cover of the telephone chair. The black rotary phone rang. I looked down at the dusty piece of history and imagined Alexander Graham Bell calling from the great beyond.

I picked up the receiver. “Hello.”

“Hi, Mr. Zachter, it’s Bruce Geary.”

I had no idea who he was.

“Yes.” I was Mr. Zachter, just not the Mr. Zachter he thought he was talking to.

“There is a million dollars in the money market account. I suggest you buy a million dollars worth of Treasuries to maximize the return.”

I was hearing things. No one in my family had that kind of dough. The heat had gotten to me. It must be a misunderstanding. A practical joke. I stared at the river of stains running down the walls from the ceiling. When I had lived here as a child, sleeping in the dinette with my head next to the Frigidaire, the upstairs apartment bathroom had leaked. Some things never change.

But some do.

“Hello, Mr. Zachter, are you there?”

“Yes. This is Mort Zachter. My father is in the hospital. He had colon cancer surgery and won’t be home for a while. Who are you?”

“I’m your uncle’s stockbroker, known him 40 years. I’ve been working with your father recently.”

At that moment, my uncle, Harry Wolk, who had moved in with my parents two years before due to his dementia, sat in the living room slowly sinking into an upholstered chair with broken springs, his feet resting on a well-worn patch of carpet. His uncombed hair was more yellow than gray, his face paper white, eyeglasses resting on the tip of his nose, his eyes vacant. He needed a shave.

“Mr. Geary, did I understand you correctly? Did you say my uncle has a brokerage account with a million dollars in the money market fund?”

“Yes.”

I let that settle in for a minute. I didn’t know how to respond. Growing up I felt poor: not a homeless, hungry, dressed-in-rags poor, but a never discussed sense we simply couldn’t afford better. Not better than our one-bedroom apartment, not better than vacations in Art Deco dives on Miami Beach only in the summer, and not better than view-obstructed seats behind one of those damn poles at the old Yankee Stadium. At 36, I knew lives of not better than plus a million dollars didn’t add up.

Mr. Geary broke the silence. “Would you like me to send you papers to get signed allowing you power of attorney over the account?”

That was a loaded question if ever I heard one. Would I like financial control over an account with a million dollars?

“Yes, you could mail us those papers.”

Mr. Geary assured me he would mail the papers out that day. I hung up and staggered to the dinette. Uncle Harry slept there now. The ancient Frigidaire that mom had defrosted by hand every few weeks when I was a child had finally been replaced by a self-defrosting GE. I sat at the edge of the bed, my old wood-laminate desk across from me. A deep, jagged crack in the side of the tabletop ran above one of the legs. One false move and the leg would break off. When I was a kid the table was whole.

Back then, the first thing I would do when I woke up was look out the dinette window. The early morning sunlight would filter through the coarse burlap Mom had sewn for a curtain. Below our second-floor window was the cement courtyard where I played stick-ball, baseball box-ball, and the other street games of Brooklyn. In...