“I asked him about that. He said that Lee didn’t want the tax implications of gifting it through her will, or any gift tax that would be associated with her giving them away before she died, so they didn’t do any paperwork.”
“I’ve heard that story before,” James said. “In fact, it’s the art-world equivalent of ‘the check’s in the mail.’”
“Well, that’s what Tommy said. And I believe him,” Reid said defiantly. “You going to help me on this or not? Because it’s just too big an opportunity for me to pass up. I thought, to be honest with you, that I was giving you a gift. But if you don’t want to do it, no worries. There are lots of other guys I know who would jump at the chance.”
Wayne taught biology at the Sheffield Academy, where the elites of New York City sent their offspring. For fifty thousand dollars a year, these princes and princesses could hobnob without interference from anyone whose parents couldn’t afford the tuition. Wayne had risen to become the chairperson of the science department, and from that perch he ruled over the biologists, the chemists, and the physicists, exercising all the fake authority with which high school teachers are imbued.
Wayne had attended an elite Manhattan high school too. Stuyvesant High School was the crème de la crème of the New York City public high schools. Acceptance was by test score only. Thirty thousand kids took the entrance exam, and about eight hundred made the cut, for a 2.67 percent acceptance rate. Harvard accepted 5 percent, for comparison’s sake.
Even among this group, Wayne rose to the top, almost to the very top. He graduated second in his class, a distinction that his father had mocked, of course. Salutatorian—does that mean you’re the smartest of all the idiots? Wayne had his choice of colleges, and his heart was set on MIT, but Archibald Fiske once again intervened.
“You think I got the tuition money coming out of my ass?”
“I can get loans for most of it. It probably won’t cost that much more than a SUNY in the end.”
“Did you say it was the same cost of a SUNY?”
“Not the same, but maybe close.”
“Well, I’m not bankrupting this family for you to tell me that your shit don’t stink because you went to some fancy Ivy League college.”
Wayne likened his matriculation at SUNY Buffalo as a detour, determined that after four years he’d arrive in the same place as if he’d gone to MIT. Sure enough, it played out exactly that way, and Wayne was accepted at Harvard Medical School. This time, admission came with enough financial aid that Archibald Fiske couldn’t say boo about it.
Ole Archie still ended up with the last laugh, though. He died during the second semester of Wayne’s first year, leaving Wayne’s mother without even enough resources to cover the funeral expenses, much less keep her in her apartment and fed.
So instead of his second year in medical school, Wayne took a job teaching biology at Sheffield. He told his mother that it was only another detour. He’d teach for a year, maybe two, and then go back to medical school. Deep down, however, he knew that this time was different. Archibald Fiske had finally kept Wayne down. He had given up his life to do it, but Wayne imagined his father would have considered it a fair trade-off. Winning was winning, after all.
About ten years ago, Wayne’s students had started calling him Heisenberg, a reference to Bryan Cranston’s character in Breaking Bad. Jessica had thought it was disrespectful and told Wayne that he should put a stop to it, but Wayne rather enjoyed the comparison. It told him that even his students knew that, given the opportunity, he could be a man like Walter White. A man whom other men feared.
6
Dr. Goldman had a small office. It was crammed with textbooks that Jessica assumed he had not opened in years and suspected he might have kept from his medical school days. His diplomas hung on the wall, which she always thought was tacky, suggestive of some type of intellectual insecurity. But perhaps for doctors it was different.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Owen’s cancer has returned,” Dr. Goldman said without emotion. “The blood tests we did last week came back positive. We’re doing a new set today, but we expect the same result.”
Even though Jessica had known this was coming in the waiting room, she was still floored by the news.
At the beginning of Owen’s ordeal, she had steeled herself against the possibility that the chemo wasn’t going to work. Not completely, of course, because no one could truly mentally prepare for losing their child, but she at least considered the possibility of a bad outcome. Once Dr. Goldman declared the treatment a success, however, and then when he later used the term remission and ultimately proclaimed Owen cancer-free, she had cast away all negative thoughts.
Of course, Dr. Goldman always hedged Owen’s prognosis, telling her about recurrences and five-year survival rates, the obvious implication being that there were those who survived two, or three, or even four years, but not five. But that was more information than Jessica could absorb. To her way of thinking, you either had cancer or you did not. Owen had it. He might die. Then he didn’t. Which meant he would live. For Jessica, there was no in-between. There couldn’t be.
Dr. Goldman had stopped speaking, apparently expecting Jessica to say something. Or at least to respond to what he’d said by crying.
That was how she had responded the first time he had given her this same news. Even before he told her the type of leukemia, she was sobbing. Wayne had been
