“You may be wondering how I know all this. If you’re a Bentwick child, you get it drilled into you before you learn how to read. On Christmas Eve each of us was given a quiz on family history; if you failed, no presents.
“Paul Bentwick kept up his New Zealand connections. He was a friend of Samuel Butler’s, who made his fortune the way Paul had, and he was one of the consortium that bought up the land we’re living on. Also the tracts of hinterland beyond. And that superintended the creation of our nifty little town.” (Andreas: “New Bentwick! At last I know why.”)
“In 1859 Paul married Mary Gifford, the daughter of an old whaling family he’d frequented with his family on a summer vacation in Fairhaven, Massachussetts. The following year they had a son, the first John Bentwick, my great-grandfather. In 1862 Mary’s sister, Abbie, married Henry H. Rogers. Henry was on his way to becoming a key man in John D. Rockefeller’s fabulous development of Standard Oil. The two families had remained close. In early 1881, John Bentwick was about to turn twenty-one. In homage to his majority, Henry Rogers told him in strictest confidence that Rockefeller was about to launch a new corporate entity: the Standard Oil Trust. John’s parents had for the same occasion allotted him a decent sum; on the day that Standard Oil Trust made its public offering on the New York Stock Exchange, John bought five thousand shares. It proved to be the inside tip of all times. For once the expression ‘an embarrassment of riches’ rang true; John was soon spreading his bonanza to others, publicly and privately.
“So his son, my grandfather, the second John Bentwick, born in 1903, had a substantial stake with which to play financial games. They were something he enjoyed and was fairly adept at. He inherited his father’s seat on the Stock Exchange — a position that gave him privileged access to information, incoming and outgoing. During the fall of 1929 he got wind of a spate of urgent messages from the Parisian headquarters of the Banque Saint-Phalle to its American branch. These messages contained increasingly emphatic instructions to sell all of its holdings on the New York Exchange without delay. The last of these messages was delivered on the Thursday preceding Black Tuesday; like the previous ones, it was ignored by the American Saint-Phalle directors.
“It was not ignored by John Bentwick. He had independently researched the few leads provided by the French bank and come to the conclusion that their decision was justified. In the few days between making his own heretical choice and the disaster of October 29, he liquidated the totality of the Bentwick family investments, buying government bonds in their place. The operation could not be effected without informing all the Bentwicks concerned. At a family conclave in his New York house on a Saturday evening, an animated discussion climaxed in a proposal to have my grandfather confined to a lunatic asylum. But by the following Wednesday his vindication had already begun.
“My father, Duff Bentwick, born in 1942, took little interest in business matters. But even he managed to make his contribution to the Bentwicks’ wealth. When André Malraux was indicted for stealing Khmer art at Angkor Wat in the 1930s, Malraux managed to sequester a considerable part of his sculptures with a partner. This partner later died without indicating their whereabouts. Traveling in Europe after World War II, Duff Bentwick came across this trove in the storeroom of an Italian dealer who had no idea of their nature. Duff managed to buy them for a minute fraction of their value. He then set them aside for several years to ‘decant,’ as he put it, meaning to lose all trace of their provenance. He finally sold them in the early fifties and made his own small fortune. But his story doesn’t end there.
“Duff’s older brother, the third John Bentwick and present heir, was born in 1940. This John is alive and flourishing. He claims, with some justice, to be first and foremost a philanthropist. ‘Someone,’ he says, ‘has to repay society for my forbears’ ill-gotten gains.’ He can’t resist adding, ‘To which I contribute my share. Whenever I give a million dollars to a noble cause, its sponsors shower me with invaluable tips. My insider trading hasn’t just paid for your schools and doctors. It’s paid for every damn pair of those crazy shoes you love to buy.’
“You see, John has been my guardian since I turned fifteen.
“My mother died of leukemia when I was nine. Duff and I were bereft. Each of us in a way that was of no help to the other. When he looked at me, he saw her. When I looked at him, I saw not-her. Was there no love between us? Maybe, but we didn’t have the right vocabularies for it. I screamed at him. The screams meant, why are you alive and not her? His response was pale silent faces, which could have meant, I agree with you. She’d been beautiful and tender. He was beautiful, too; he got colder by the day. He’d long before been made a major in the US Army reserve. When we invaded Iraq, he’d finagled and operated and maybe even bribed some fellow officer to be recalled to active duty, in
