Home Is the Exile by Hilary Masters

Author:Hilary Masters
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504023405
Publisher: The Permanent Press (ORD)

Hardy could remember his benefactor’s diminutive figure sitting at the art deco desk in her study, pen in hand, reviewing ledgers and check books, doling out the family treasure. Oftentimes the radio would be playing. Each of the manila envelopes he was to come across had been folded over their contents and securely taped to make packets of different thicknesses. All had been labeled. Household. Family. Staff. Surprisingly, one had Lindbergh scribbled on its face. Then, more bundles with proper names on their surface were stacked in a bottom drawer. Thurman. McCarthy. Nixon. Bush. North. What was that one? Did he see it straight? Clearly, the bold marker spelled out O. North. He had wanted to call to Celia in the next room. Hey, look! She had been paying some of that salary too. Without either of them knowing it, she had put him on her payroll!

Because each of these envelopes contained canceled checks sorted in the sequence of their printed numbers and bound together by red rubber bands. Other envelopes bore acronyms, codes of some kind, and the checks inside made out to associations, institutions, obscure societies, think tanks. Over the years, he figured, millions of dollars. Then, his name showed up on one of the fatter envelopes. Walt Hardy.

Not to be opened until after my death or after the death of Walt Hardy and the death of his children, if he should have any. Elizabeth Arnett.

The large looped handwriting filled the entire area of the envelope’s face, a suggestion of haste in its raggedness, like a scrawl against time. Hardy had hefted this bulky package several times from hand to hand and each time had been about to jam it back into one of the desk’s cubbies but then, he thought, what would one more offense matter. He ripped the tape apart.

The rubber band that held the checks together broke as he pulled at it, so the checks spilled into his hand like an unruly deck of playing cards. Most made out to stores, others to Cornell University and more—he didn’t need to count them to know their number—were dated on his birthdays. Each for twenty dollars. Even her most recent remembrance, he had cashed it with a wry amusement only just a month ago, had been put into the final place of the sequence. The first check of this series, on top of the pack, was made out to his father. Pay to the order of WILLIAM HARDY … Ten thousand dollars and no cents … Elizabeth Arnett. April 14, 1942. Maybe she’d set up a trust on his first birthday. He made a note to ask his father about it. If it was still active, the interest would have turned it into a fair sum. He’d sign it over to his father. The old guy could travel, take a Greyhound bus around the world!

The birthday checks became the tabs on a business file that marked off different payments to Horne’s or Kaufmann’s and other stores and enterprises in Pittsburgh.

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