Inheritance

My mother was the caretaker of the Moybridge family’s idiot son, George, for most of my life. I believe she would have gladly died in service to this cause—the constant looking after, the chauffeuring of his bent body around town, the perpetual soothing of him—if she hadn’t shattered her pelvis tumbling down the front steps of her own home one sunny afternoon.

I’m aware, of course, that using the word idiot to describe someone with a neurological condition comes across as mean-spirited. His exact issue was kept a secret from the public by his family and my mother. To her, it was a mystery she lorded over, this denial of information giving her role a certain added weight in the eyes of the people who might otherwise, she feared, see her as nothing more than a “babysitter.”

There were many theories about what had gone wrong within the oddly shaped confines of George’s skull. Some were sophisticated, some were juvenile. The perpetual joke, anyway, was that George suffered from “affluenza.” It was reasoned that because he grew up surrounded by such immense wealth, he simply couldn’t understand reality in the way others did. Of course, his little sister, Clara, grew up in the same environment, and she, as anyone could tell, was perfectly normal.

Aging has made me more aware of what my mother went through in her job, but it’s still hard to imagine the exhaustion she faced—as a widow who had to look after two of us boys. There were a handful of other clients before George came along, but once the Moybridges recognized that their troubled son was magically subdued by my mother’s presence, her services were retained indefinitely by a salary well beyond what anyone else could hope to pay. The tacit understanding of this arrangement meant that George was to be her sole obsession. I grew up coming home to an empty house, dawning quickly to the realization that my mother was now raising someone else’s child.

I wasn’t completely separate from this arrangement either.

My own interactions with George were limited, but each possessed an intense air of yearning. The Moybridge family held out hope that we might become friends, perhaps secretly viewing me like George’s half-brother, since we both depended on the same overworked and overwhelmed woman. There were several attempts during my adolescence to kick-start this relationship: poorly attended birthday parties at their sprawling home, a ski trip to Colorado via their private jet, and, perhaps the most vivid of my childhood memories, an emotionally devastating afternoon at the Barnum & Bailey circus when the star tiger (a much-publicized white Siberian snowcat) failed to appear before the coliseum crowd. On the ride home, George sat between Clara and me, wailing inconsolably. On impulse, I handed him the stuffed animal replica of the Siberian tiger that I had purchased during intermission, and his hysterics eased as he ran his fingers across the faux fur. “What do we say, George? Isn’t that kind of him to share?” Mr. Moybridge said from the driver’s seat. His eyes quivered in the rearview mirror like two gelatinous things cut out and set down on a silver platter. “Can you say, ‘Thank you?’ ” he asked, before giving me a wink.

Watching George up close through the years made me realize that despite the Moybridge family’s best efforts, he would never be able to make a friend in the true sense of the word. The main problem was that if you showed him any kindness at all, he would latch onto you like a tick. You’d be stuck with him for hours if you simply said, “Hi, George. How are you?” Immediately, you grew to resent him for the feelings of guilt he inspired coupled with the twisting sense of unease he sent creeping up your back—the deeply rooted evolutionary knowledge that something about him was “off.” His curdled posture and limp arms spoke to something fundamentally wrong within his body and blood. Most noticeably, though, the muscles in George’s face only seemed strong enough to emote a singular expression of imbecilic befuddlement. Whenever he was about to lock you into a conversation about his few odd interests, his expression was like a wax mask in the process of melting. On some level, George must have understood the reaction he induced in others, because every day he made my mother take him to places across the city where the employees couldn’t otherwise flee from him: the diner, the public library, even the local YMCA, where the Moybridges had funneled millions of dollars into various construction projects.

Despite his many needs, George was mostly benign. It was only some time following my mother’s accident, in the early days of her physical therapy process when she couldn’t do a thing for herself and I temporarily moved back into the single-story home I thought I’d escaped, that I was given a glimpse of what she had dealt with all those years. This happened after the Moybridges invited us over for dinner.

Our invitation came in the mail with the details neatly and compactly written. The evening was to be a kind of retirement party for my mother—it was understood that with the long recovery ahead of her, my mother wouldn’t be able to continue in her role. The Moybridges no doubt wanted to express their gratitude for her decades of service. But I think the family also wanted to issue a soft declaration of sorts, a capstone to help ease George’s transition into a new era while they searched for my mother’s replacement. The word change was poisonous to him and was avoided at all costs.

When we arrived that Friday evening, Mrs. Moybridge, thin and as tightly drawn as I had ever seen, told us that George was “in a mood” as I pushed my mother’s new wheelchair haltingly across the fine gravel drive and up the makeshift ramp that had been set out in anticipation. Mrs. Moybridge watched sorrowfully while clenching her hands against the front door’s frame as if a gale-force wind was imminent. “He’s in the house somewhere,” she sighed, “but he doesn’t really feel like showing himself right now.”

“Well, I just know he’ll pop out when he hears how much fun we’re having,” my mother purred, rubbing Mrs. Moybridge’s back as she leaned down for a hug. “You know how he is.”

Forty minutes were spent making small talk that revolved around the proposed infrastructural needs of their niece’s upcoming debutante party, the varicose veins expert that Mrs. Moybridge was seeing to eradicate the bluish tendrils spreading like ivy across the back of her legs, and finally the ups and downs of my mother’s physical therapy sessions. A flushed Mr. Moybridge peeled me away from the women and eagerly plied me with samples of the bourbon he had acquired in various distilleries in Kentucky, where he went annually to view the Keeneland yearlings with a group of old friends and their bloodstock agent.

“We passed on the first three they brought out,” he told me. “That’s not to say they weren’t impressive, but if you’ve got the eye for it like Terrence does, you can spot the little things that absolutely muck it up.”

“Muck it up?” I took a small sip of my drink. “How so?”

“Oh, you name it,” he said. “The lifespan of their sires, issues they had. Terrence says it’s like dropping a marble into the engine of an Aston Martin. It might not be a problem now, but someday it’ll break down, and I certainly don’t go to Kentucky just to invest in vet bills.”

Mr. Moybridge laughed at his own little joke, and the conversation shifted to dinner. He began to go into detail about the evening’s menu, being prepared by an unseen chef and staff. I excused myself, however, before he could pour me another tumbler.

As I wandered the hallways trying to remember where the bathrooms were on the first floor, I passed by an amber-hued study and was startled to see George standing near an unlit fireplace. He was running one hand with tactile pleasure across a globe while he whispered to himself. When I tentatively called his name, George turned his head and stared at me, blinking like an owl. He looked sunburned and dirty, and I remembered the horrific little “therapy garden,” tucked far away on the estate, where he was sometimes sent to spend afternoons piddling around in the flowers and among the spindly plants—a subtle means of tiring him out when he became agitated by life.

Later, after he made the effort to come and sit with us at the dining table, George got into an argument with his mother during the soup course. “Not so loud, please,” she begged as George slurped, while Mr. Moybridge and my mother smiled weakly in support. George stopped, glaring icily at us in betrayal, and then abruptly smashed his fist through a salad plate. Mrs. Moybridge screamed in horror from the table’s head while fragments of heirloom china rattled across the floor.

George only sobbed and cradled his bleeding hand against his chest as if he were holding a wounded dove.