My Father's Wives by Mike Greenberg

and settled in Rochester, where they made an even greater fortune in agriculture. Percival Sweetwater I, the grandson of Jacques and Edith, moved his family to Manhattan during the Second Industrial Revolution and founded a financial firm that grew into one of the most successful in early Wall Street history. By the time of his grandson’s birth, the Sweetwater fortune was valued at over forty million dollars. The Great Depression staggered the Sweetwater family, but still, Percy inherited a sizable fortune and never wanted for money .
    He began his career in politics while still in his twenties and was fond of saying: “It’s a good thing I was born rich, because I’ve never worked a day in my life.” Upon his death, Percy’s estate was valued at fifty million dollars, of which he left most to his favorite charities. The remainder was distributed among his six wives, though details were never made public. He also left an unknown sum to his only son, Jonathan, who refused to attend the reading of the will and asked that his inheritance be donated to various charities of his mother’s choosing .
    That was, in brief, the story of my father’s life and, in some ways, of mine as well. Now I was thinking perhaps I needed to know more. About both of us.
    Back to Google, I again typed in two words. Sweetwater decisions . I knew what would come up. Everyone knows the quote. But I wanted to make sure I had it exactly right.
    “A nation,” said the majority leader, “is not a living being, nor is it a collection of beings. Rather, it is a collection of the billions of decisions that have been made in our history and all thosedecisions that are to come. We, as a people, will leave only one mark on this planet long after our time, and that mark will be the sum total of all the decisions we make.”
    My father spoke those words while touting his voting record as a member of Congress, and that phrase The sum total of the decisions we make became his political calling card; his autobiography was titled Percival Sweetwater III: The Decisions We Make .
    I opened the speaker on my phone and punched in my mother’s number.
    “Hello?”
    “Mother, it’s me.”
    “Good grief, Johnny, what is it now? Yvette vacuumed up all my incense again and I’m late for my shrink.”
    “Of all the books written about Percy,” I asked, twirling a pencil between my forefinger and thumb, “which is the best?”
    There was a long pause; if not for the vacuum I would have thought we’d been disconnected. Then she sighed. “Sweetheart, you aren’t going to find your father in any of those books.” There was melancholy in her tone. “They write about his career, the brilliant politician he was, his ability to make people comfortable in his presence. All of that is accurate but he was a good deal more complicated than he wanted the world to know. I’m afraid the time to know Percy has come and gone. You need to accept that and worry about the people who are still here.”
    “Did they interview you for the books?”
    “One of them did, but I didn’t tell him anything. Like I said, your father was too complicated for that. You can learn what the man did from books, but you can’t learn who he was.”
    The next question was one we had assiduously avoided my entire life. “How about the others?”
    “No,” she said, “as far as I know they didn’t interview any of them either. Most of those books are old; I think he was still only on the doctor at that point. Long before the model for sure.”
    My father’s wives. Much like the man himself, I knew what they did but I didn’t know who they were.
    “Maybe I should talk to them,” I said.
    “Good luck with that, sweetheart. I don’t even know where they are.”
    I let the pencil fall to the desk. “I think I know someone who can help with that.”
    I hung up the phone and took a long look at the photos of my family on the desk. When you spend your entire life running away from