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She thought back to who she was when she first drove onto this estate. She hadn’t been able to believe her luck. She was so happy she wouldn’t have to struggle. Her struggle to survive was so gigantic that she refused to pass it on to her unborn children. And yet, sitting in this limousine, there was something in Ruth that couldn’t bear that her children, now fully born, hadn’t suffered at all. How she couldn’t forgive them for this.
That night, after all the well-wishers left the house, Ruth told the children about the diamonds that had been buried beneath the greenhouse. She told them she was going to sell half of them and keep half of them. A quarter of the cash would be for her future and for Marjorie’s future, and a quarter to invest in several irrevocable trusts that would be controlled by Arthur. The other half would be distributed among her children, who now had more money than they ever had before. See? A terrible ending. There would be no growth, no revelation, no coming of age, no plastic hour brought to
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And even as we know that there is no such thing as a mechanism that can guarantee your safety, and even as we know that there’s no such thing as a dybbuk, not really, except for the way the prior generation haunts you forever—the rest of us arrive at the next class reunion and what we talk about is the way things have changed:
Maybe that was the real Long Island Compromise, that you can be successful on your own steam or you can be a basket case, and whichever you are is determined by the circumstances into which you were born. Your poverty will create a great drive in your children. Or your wealth will doom them into the veal that Jenny described at her science fair, people who are raised to never be able to support a life so that when they’re finally allowed to wander outside their cages for the first time on their way to their slaughter, they can’t even stand up on their own legs. But the people who rise to
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We tell ourselves it is better to be able, better to have the ability to survive and to be competent—to be any other animal but a veal calf—but, man, as I grow older, it’s getting harder and harder to believe it.