said Joe.
‘Let’s hope it behaves incorrigibly from now on,’ said Patrick.
‘The latest valuation we have,’ said Peter, glancing down at his notes, ‘is two point three million dollars, with an estimated income of eighty thousand.’
‘Oh, well, still a useful sum,’ said Patrick, trying to sound slightly disappointed.
‘Enough to buy a country cottage!’ said Peter in an absurd impersonation of an English accent. ‘I gather house prices are pretty crazy over there.’
‘Enough to buy a second room,’ said Patrick, eliciting a polite guffaw from Peter, although Patrick could in fact think of nothing he wanted more than to separate the bed from the sit.
Walking down Lexington Avenue towards his hotel in Gramercy Park, Patrick began adjusting to his strange good fortune. The long arm of his great-grandfather, who had died more than half a century before Patrick was born, was going to pluck him out of his cramped living quarters and get him into a place where there might be room for his children to stay and his friends to visit. In the meantime it would pay for his mother’s nursing home. It was puzzling to think that this complete stranger was going to have such a powerful influence on his life. Even his benefactor had inherited his money. It had been his father who had founded the Jonson Candle Company in Cleveland, in 1832. By 1845 it was one of the most profitable candle companies in the country. Patrick could remember reading the founder’s uninspiring explanation for his success: ‘We had a new process of distilling cheap greases. Our competitors were using costly tallow and lard. Candles were high and our profits were large for a number of years.’ Later, the candle factory diversified into paraffin, oil treatment and hardening processes, and developed a patented compound that became an indispensable ingredient in dry cleaning around the world. The Jonsons also bought buildings and building sites in San Francisco, Denver, Kansas City, Toledo, Indianapolis, Chicago, New York, Trinidad and Puerto Rico, but the original fortune rested on the hard-headedness of the founder who had ‘died on the job’, falling through a hatchway in one of his own factories, and also on those ‘cheap greases’ which were still lubricating the life of one of his descendants a hundred and seventy years after their discovery.
John J. Jonson, Jr., Eleanor’s grandfather, was already sixty by the time he finally married. He had been travelling the world in the service of his family’s burgeoning business, and was only recalled from China by the death of his nephew Sheldon in a sledging accident at St Paul’s School. His eldest nephew, Albert, had already died from pneumonia at Harvard the year before. There were no heirs to the Jonson fortune and Sheldon’s grieving father, Thomas, told his brother it was his duty to marry. John accepted his fate and, after a brief courtship of a general’s daughter, got married and moved to New York. He fathered three daughters in rapid succession, and then dropped dead, but not before creating a multitude of trusts, one of which was meandering its way down to Patrick, as he had discovered that afternoon.
What did this long-range goodwill mean, and what did it say about the social contract that allowed a rich man to free all of his descendents from the need to work over the course of almost two centuries? There was something disreputable about being saved by increasingly remote ancestors. When he had exhausted the money given to him by a grandmother he scarcely knew, money arrived from a great-grandfather he could never have known. He could only feel an abstract gratitude towards a man whose face he would not have been able to pick out from a heap of sepia daguerreotypes. The ironies of the dynastic drive were just as great as the philanthropic ironies generated by Eleanor, or her Great-Aunt Virginia. No doubt his grandmother and his great-grandfather had hoped to empower a
‘Let’s hope it behaves incorrigibly from now on,’ said Patrick.
‘The latest valuation we have,’ said Peter, glancing down at his notes, ‘is two point three million dollars, with an estimated income of eighty thousand.’
‘Oh, well, still a useful sum,’ said Patrick, trying to sound slightly disappointed.
‘Enough to buy a country cottage!’ said Peter in an absurd impersonation of an English accent. ‘I gather house prices are pretty crazy over there.’
‘Enough to buy a second room,’ said Patrick, eliciting a polite guffaw from Peter, although Patrick could in fact think of nothing he wanted more than to separate the bed from the sit.
Walking down Lexington Avenue towards his hotel in Gramercy Park, Patrick began adjusting to his strange good fortune. The long arm of his great-grandfather, who had died more than half a century before Patrick was born, was going to pluck him out of his cramped living quarters and get him into a place where there might be room for his children to stay and his friends to visit. In the meantime it would pay for his mother’s nursing home. It was puzzling to think that this complete stranger was going to have such a powerful influence on his life. Even his benefactor had inherited his money. It had been his father who had founded the Jonson Candle Company in Cleveland, in 1832. By 1845 it was one of the most profitable candle companies in the country. Patrick could remember reading the founder’s uninspiring explanation for his success: ‘We had a new process of distilling cheap greases. Our competitors were using costly tallow and lard. Candles were high and our profits were large for a number of years.’ Later, the candle factory diversified into paraffin, oil treatment and hardening processes, and developed a patented compound that became an indispensable ingredient in dry cleaning around the world. The Jonsons also bought buildings and building sites in San Francisco, Denver, Kansas City, Toledo, Indianapolis, Chicago, New York, Trinidad and Puerto Rico, but the original fortune rested on the hard-headedness of the founder who had ‘died on the job’, falling through a hatchway in one of his own factories, and also on those ‘cheap greases’ which were still lubricating the life of one of his descendants a hundred and seventy years after their discovery.
John J. Jonson, Jr., Eleanor’s grandfather, was already sixty by the time he finally married. He had been travelling the world in the service of his family’s burgeoning business, and was only recalled from China by the death of his nephew Sheldon in a sledging accident at St Paul’s School. His eldest nephew, Albert, had already died from pneumonia at Harvard the year before. There were no heirs to the Jonson fortune and Sheldon’s grieving father, Thomas, told his brother it was his duty to marry. John accepted his fate and, after a brief courtship of a general’s daughter, got married and moved to New York. He fathered three daughters in rapid succession, and then dropped dead, but not before creating a multitude of trusts, one of which was meandering its way down to Patrick, as he had discovered that afternoon.
What did this long-range goodwill mean, and what did it say about the social contract that allowed a rich man to free all of his descendents from the need to work over the course of almost two centuries? There was something disreputable about being saved by increasingly remote ancestors. When he had exhausted the money given to him by a grandmother he scarcely knew, money arrived from a great-grandfather he could never have known. He could only feel an abstract gratitude towards a man whose face he would not have been able to pick out from a heap of sepia daguerreotypes. The ironies of the dynastic drive were just as great as the philanthropic ironies generated by Eleanor, or her Great-Aunt Virginia. No doubt his grandmother and his great-grandfather had hoped to empower a
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