The Age of Dreaming by Nina Revoyr

Author:Nina Revoyr
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Historical
ISBN: 9781933354460
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2007-12-31T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

October 23, 1964

It is late in the evening, and I am thoroughly exhausted, having spent the last few hours attempting to forget week’s events by doing bookkeeping for my various properties. Work has always been my way to put unpleasant things out of mind, and these last few days have seen more than their usual share. By this afternoon, I was so troubled by my recent encounters that I was grasping for something—truly, anything—to distract me. Then I remembered the paperwork that awaited me at my desk, and as I have so many times when I’ve needed to calm myself over the years, I settled into it as one might into a soothing bath.

Back in the late 1910s and early ’20s, when my income seemed limitless, I invested in a number of apartment buildings, as well as three houses, two commercial properties, and several empty parcels of land. My family’s farm had impressed upon me the importance of property ownership, and I’m sure this knowledge was significant in my decision, all those years ago, to buy as much real estate as I possibly could. I’d had to make my acquisitions through a friendly real estate management firm introduced to me by David Rosenberg, since Japanese were barred from owning property. But it wasn’t very difficult getting around this limitation, and I’d enjoyed the process of buying; I liked acquiring tangible things like land and clothes and automobiles, things that were purchased as a matter of course by white gentlemen of means. Of course, I only had the slightest inkling, when I bought those properties, of how dramatically their value would increase. But time has proven that my investments were wise. The combined income from my commercial and residential rentals has been more than enough to live on, and when I recently sold two large parcels of land in Malibu to an aggressive investor, I made a profit of nearly a million dollars. I was lucky—my investments meant that when my career came to its rather abrupt end, I had a source of income to fall back on. So many of my contemporaries, who frittered away the cash that fiowed like water in those pre-tax days, watched their incomes decrease and then dry up completely as their film careers drew to a close. In the ’30s, some of them, desperate for money, held large auctions of old movie memorabilia. Two or three of them even auctioned off their houses.

I have a property management company take care of most of the day-to-day items of business—showing apartments, collecting rents, arranging for repairs—and they only contact me when some particularly large expenditure is required. This was an especially convenient arrangement during the Second World War, which I waited out in England while so many others were herded away to the camps. My management people have been very dependable over the years. That said, to keep myself occupied, I still manage one of the buildings myself. It is the Chestnut Arms—you may have heard of it.

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