New York City, 1975–1976
The recession that had been building since the oil shock finally settled over Lehman Brothers like weather nobody could pretend wasn’t there anymore, and Richard Whitfield came home in the winter of 1975 thinner around the eyes than Kit had ever seen him.
New York City itself was worse off than the bank — the whole town was sliding toward the summer when the President would tell it, in effect, to drop dead, though nobody at the Whitfield dinner table knew that particular headline was still eighteen months off.
What they knew was smaller and closer: layoffs two floors down from Richard’s office, bonuses that didn’t come, a mood in the house that Kit, at eleven, understood better than her parents likely realized.
“They let go of Danvers today,” Richard said one night, not really to anyone, more to his own scotch.
“Eleven years at the firm.”
“Richard, not at the table.”
“I’m allowed to say a man’s name, Margaux.”
Kit ate her dinner and said nothing, but she watched her father’s hands — the same hands that had once tapped a bond yield for her at breakfast, five years and a whole other lifetime ago — and thought about what Yekaterina’s father used to say, in the version of the memory that came back to her clearest: a business that survives a bad year on luck deserves what happens to it in the next one.
Lehman would survive this.
Kit knew that the way she knew very little else about the specific future — not from any oracle’s certainty, only from the dim, unreliable shape of things she’d absorbed somewhere in that fever, names and firms that seemed to still exist in some vague later memory she couldn’t quite access on command.
It was frustrating, actually, how little of it she could summon on purpose.
Mostly what she had wasn’t facts.
It was instinct, sharpened by thirty years of use, sitting inside an eleven-year-old body that couldn’t yet act on half of it.
But she could act on some of it.
And that winter, she decided to start small.
Her allowance was two dollars a week, delivered every Sunday by her father with the same small ceremony, and Kit had spent four years dutifully putting most of it into a piggy bank shaped like a Scottish terrier that Consuela had given her the Christmas she turned seven.
In January of 1976, she took the dog apart — unscrewed the little rubber stopper on its belly — and counted out forty-one dollars in ones and change onto her bedspread, and decided the dog had done its job for long enough. Visit NovelPing for the full chapter.
“I want to open a real bank account,” she told her father at breakfast.
“Not the dog. A real one, where it earns interest.”
Richard set down his coffee, delighted in the specific way he was delighted whenever Kit did something that let him feel, briefly, like he was raising a very particular kind of daughter.
“Well, look at you. All right — we can set one up at Chase, a children’s savings account, it’s not much interest but—”
“Can I put it somewhere it earns more?”
“Kitty, you’re eleven.”
“I know how old I am.” She said it without heat, the way she’d learned to say most things now, patient rather than pointed.
“But it’s my money. Isn’t the whole point of money that it’s supposed to work? You told me that yourself. Money that just sits does nothing for anybody.”
Richard looked at her for a long moment — the paragraph-reread look, the one she’d learned to recognize and, by now, half enjoyed provoking.
“I did say that.”
“So.”
He laughed, that short real laugh she still didn’t hear often enough, and told her he’d think about it, which from Richard Whitfield was as good as a yes delayed for dignity’s sake.
Two weeks later he came home with paperwork for a custodial account and a small folder of savings bonds, Series E, the kind the bank sold in stodgy denominations of twenty-five and fifty dollars, promising a fixed return over years if you were patient enough to let them mature.
“It’s not glamorous,” he told her, laying the papers on her bed like a man presenting a treaty.
“But it’s safe, and it’s yours, and you’ll actually learn something watching it grow slower than you’d like. That’s most of what investing actually is, Kitty. Not excitement. Patience.”
Kit looked at the bonds — flat, dull, government-gray paper that would sit in a drawer accruing almost nothing for years — and felt the specific, private amusement of a person who had once helped manage holdings across three continents being handed forty-one dollars of Series E bonds like a state secret. New chapters come out on novelping(.)com first.
But she took them anyway, gravely, because the lesson underneath the bonds was the right one even if the instrument was small: start where you’re allowed to start, and let it compound while nobody’s watching closely enough to stop you.
She was not, however, going to let forty-one dollars be the whole of her financial education, and so she began, quietly, doing something her father never explicitly authorized and never explicitly noticed: reading the stock tables in his discarded newspapers each morning before school, picking three or four companies whose products she recognized — Kodak, because half her mother’s friends still shot on it; Disney, because every girl in her class had seen the last re-release of Snow White; a small textile firm whose name she’d half-remembered surfacing from some Yekaterina-shaped corner of her memory as a name that mattered later, though she couldn’t say why — and tracking them in a marbled composition notebook she kept under her mattress like contraband.
It wasn’t real money.
She had no way to actually buy shares at eleven, and she knew it.
But tracking them, watching how the prices moved against the news of the week — a bad quarter here, a product launch there, the whole slow visible mechanism of how a company’s fortune showed up in a single printed number — was its own education, and Kit was, if nothing else, extremely good at educating herself when nobody was assigned to do it for her.
At school that year she’d settled into a genuine friendship for the first time since the hospital — a girl named Diane Forsythe, whose father ran a small advertising firm and whose mother, unlike most of the Chapin mothers, actually worked, which gave Diane a slightly different vantage point on the world that Kit found she liked.
Diane wasn’t sharp the way Kit was sharp; she was funny, and loud in a way Kit had never let herself be, and she liked Kit — Kit was fairly sure — precisely because Kit never made her feel slow for not keeping up.
“You think about things too much,” Diane told her once, not unkindly, sprawled on Kit’s bedroom floor flipping through a Tiger Beat while Kit’s composition notebook sat, closed and unremarked upon, six inches from Diane’s elbow.
“You get this look. Like you’re doing math in your head even when nobody asked you to.”
“Maybe I am.”
“That’s so weird, Kit.” Diane said it fondly, the way you’d tell a friend her handwriting was strange, and went back to the magazine, and Kit let the observation pass without correction, because Diane wasn’t wrong, and there was no version of the truth Kit could offer that wouldn’t require explanations she had no intention of ever giving anyone.
She was eleven years old, with forty-one dollars in savings bonds she considered beneath her and couldn’t yet do anything about, a marbled notebook of imaginary holdings under her mattress, a father quietly proud of a habit he thought he’d started, and a single real friend who liked her precisely because she never let the other thing — the older thing, the counting thing — show all the way through.
It was, Kit thought, watching Diane giggle over a photograph of some pop star neither of them would remember caring about in five years, a perfectly reasonable place to start.
A/N-
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