Scream

by Tama Janowitz

  I asked Mom’s accountant to send her tax returns to my brother. It took me so long just to get the info! I was trying to keep on top of my life, which just wasn’t really . . . working out for me.

  Sam got the tax returns and wrote back to the accountant, who contacted me. “Your brother says your mother’s retirement investments are terrible. Please explain to him, I am the accountant, I’m not in charge of her investments! He didn’t include a return address. Please! Your brother is very angry.”

  The accountant was alarmed and agitated. He was eighty years old and Mom had been going to him for thirty of them. Now I had to do damage control and soothe an octogenarian CPA.

  Day after day in my mom’s house I packed and tried to get rid of stuff. I also filed and put things away, like the retirement statements, which came tumbling in every day. When Sam came from Alabama—he came twice a year, for two days, to see Mom for two hours each day—I told him, “If you want the records and statements, they are in those boxes. They’re all yours!”

  But he didn’t. Sometimes he would come up with his wife. She wouldn’t come in the house, even though she had come all the way from Alabama. She waited in the car outside. I said, “Won’t Veronica come in?”

  “No.”

  They went back to Alabama and the demands and accusations started again. Finally, in May of the third year I had been looking after Mom, my brother’s letters really took a turn: he said I had been committing Social Security fraud, embezzling from her estate, and about twenty thousand other things.

  I was scared. I had no idea I was committing those crimes. Each month her Social Security check was deposited in her bank account, and I used that money to pay for her nursing home, then the bills were submitted to her insurance company, and so forth.

  Impossibly, it got worse. More missives arrived. He had gone online, somewhere, somehow, and come up with figures for Tim’s income for the past ten years, down to the last penny. He said I was very rich and that he was going to take legal action since I claimed to be broke. I had Tim’s “fortune,” plus, he added, “You make tons of money from your books.”

  Yes, I went to an office with Tim and signed a piece of paper once a year. No, I did not read the amounts we were paying in taxes. That wasn’t on the page I signed. I did not have that kind of marriage. What Tim earned, he earned in commission—sometimes people paid promptly, sometimes not for months. I didn’t know anything about it. If I asked Tim how much money there was, he said he didn’t know, and I’m sure that was the truth.

  If I earned money, I used it to pay bills; if I didn’t have money, I asked Tim for some. It’s not even that. The kid had been in private school in New York City, which cost fifty grand before taxes; there was a mortgage on the apartment, plus maintenance; Tim traveled to all the art fairs, he went out to dinner every night, he took taxis—it wasn’t my business! I always thought I would be able to earn my own way in life, then I couldn’t, and Tim’s job ended, and . . . there was no savings!

  My own brother doing this to me! And there was no assurance that those figures he found online for his brother-in-law’s income were actually true. It was an invasion of everything. And so creepy! Who would spend so much time researching their sister’s husband’s income?

  In addition to being broke and stuck, I was discouraged. Tim couldn’t keep sending money because he didn’t have it. And like in the movie Groundhog Day, I was perpetually doing one thing: cleaning out my mom’s house. There were papers—student papers, graded papers, test papers. There were photographs from her parents, box after box, there were her parents’ papers, my papers, my press clippings, my drafts of novels, her drafts of poems. There were closets full of old clothes, clothes she bought at the Salvation Army, my castoffs, things I bought for her.

  No money had ever been put into the house and the walls were covered with mold. She always said, “I’ll get it repainted when I sell the place.” Meanwhile the floors were rotting, the kitchen was circa 1949, and I was living there with a kid who was going to high school and smoking pot in the room downstairs with the foul old bathtub and sink. I picked up my kid after school and took her to glass-blowing lessons, I was trying to write, but let’s face it, I couldn’t write. I could barely take notes.

  The only thing I did that brought me any happiness was horseback riding—and yes, I wrote a check each month on my mom’s account to lease a horse. I wasn’t making a salary and this was my life’s sole pleasure, and not an expensive one. I continued to pay the bills, the TV, the phone, the heat—whatever, I was paying bills. When my brother’s letters had started, three years before, they were merely stern, with instruction such as, “No, you can’t install a walk-in bathtub for Mom. It will cost too much.”

  She couldn’t pick up her legs to get in the tub, and she hated bathing anyway, so what was I supposed to do, wrestle her down, lift her with my superhuman strength, and throw her in the tub? I should have enjoyed those days when the misery from him was only intermittent, but I couldn’t have known the accusations would escalate to big-time crimes.

  I needed a lawyer.

  The first one I went to had an office upstairs on the commons in Ithaca. The office was small, quaint, and charming, with wood paneling and a collection of boxes: old cigar boxes, inlaid wooden boxes, puzzle boxes—and old prints on the wall. “Sorry I’m late. I was in court.” He was handsome, with a long face and a soft, bemused expression; he had a soothing aura, like Atticus Finch, the lawyer father in To Kill a Mockingbird. Then he looked at the letters my brother had written and he said soothingly, “It looks like you’ll do serious time. Have the police been to you yet?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, when they come to question you, be polite and just say, contact my lawyer, then give them my card.” He handed a few to me. “Don’t tell them anything—just call me right away so I’ll know they are going to contact me.”

  The second lawyer I went to was in a big fancy corporate place, upstairs from the bank, with generic hotel/office furniture and a fluorescent-lit conference room. He had written my mother’s will, and he had written the paperwork for her trust, whatever that was. When I showed him the letters my brother had written, he dropped them like they were covered in ricin. “You have committed a number of serious crimes! I can’t represent you—I represent your mother. You have to find someone else.”

  The third lawyer was a personal friend. His offices were also on the commons—again, upstairs from a shop—but not as nice as the first lawyer’s. There was gray carpeting and a vinyl couch and it wasn’t charming. His company dealt with very poor criminals. When I explained the situation and gave him my brother’s letters he looked into space for a long time and said, “It’s going to depend whether you’re going to be prosecuted for a Class C felony, or Class D. Class C you will be doing three to seven. Class D is five to fifteen.”

  “But . . . I had no idea what I was doing was wrong! I was living there looking after my mom every day and I had no money to live on. I was spending money the same as I would be paying someone else to look after her.”

  “If you had paid someone else to look after her, that would have been okay. But you can’t take money to live on.”

  “I didn’t know!”

  “That doesn’t matter. Also, you had no legal right to sell your mom’s house.”

  “She left it to me in her will. It was falling down! It was going to cost more and more money to keep it up. I couldn’t live there anymore.”

  “You could have lived there,” he said bitterly. “I have to live with my mother.”

  All the lawyers made it pretty clear: I was going to do time. And all three had said I’d better find a bookkeeper and get all the accounts put together. And my brother’s letters continued in an endless stream. Finally I told him, “Okay, I’ll divorce Tim and sell the apartment, and that way I’ll have half the money from the sale.”

  This news seemed to placate him but he wanted me to divorce right away and he
wanted a strict accounting immediately.

  i get an accountant

  I found a pair of women named Wanda and Dawn who had a bookkeeping firm. They took the papers and put them online in some kind of accounting program. The letters from my brother didn’t stop, but at least his focus had turned on the bookkeeping company for doing a bad job. When Dawn (who owned the company) heard all the stuff from my brother and saw how he was operating, she told me to get a lawyer. I told her how my recent experiences with lawyers had gone, and she referred me to a different one.

  The lawyer she knew was very nice, even though he was an hour farther away and I had to drive. I had to use the device that gives directions, and that thing makes me very nervous. That woman’s voice got all agitated like she was going to have a nervous breakdown if I didn’t turn right in three hundred yards, and I was going to have a nervous breakdown because it’s hard enough to drive without this crazed woman getting frantic. I switched it to a man’s voice, but forget it, he was bossy and superior and patronizing and I hated him even more. The device was technically some form of GPS, but my car was so old I had to attach the thing to the windshield and it would fly off and go dead and I was alone on the road so what was the point?

  At least this lawyer didn’t think I was going to do hard time. “Look,” he said, “you didn’t know it was wrong. It’s not like this client I had, he had POA on his mom’s estate and he took a million from it and he gambled the money and lost it. How much did you spend from your mom’s estate?”

  “I don’t know,” I say miserably. “It was over a three-and-a-half-year period.”

  “Your situation is different,” he says. “It’s much more like this daughter of a friend of mine: she was playing in Little League and she was a great pitcher and the night before the big game the authorities came to her and they said, ‘Listen, that pitch is illegal. You can’t use that pitch.’ She didn’t know it was an illegal pitch. That’s much more your situation.”

  He was the fourth lawyer I had been to, and not just the only one so far who wasn’t certain I was going to jail, but the only one to compare my situation to Little League, so I gave him a retainer. He urged me to get all the paperwork my brother was asking about to the bookkeepers.

  I wrote check after check from my mother’s accounts (on which I was a joint account holder, or the account had been left in trust for me) and called place after place on an endless search for whatever paperwork they needed. Miraculously, my brother became even more vicious. He couldn’t believe the records for 2011 were not yet online! He couldn’t believe I didn’t have my mom’s statements from John Hancock, where she had a seventeen-thousand-dollar life insurance policy! If he got any more agitated he was going to spontaneously combust, so I lived in hope.

  The strange thing is that, just like with his insane knowledge of Tim’s finances, it became clear that he knew where every single account of hers was, with figures down to the last penny. So why, year after year, had he kept screaming at me that he needed to know everything? “As beneficiary I am entitled to a strict accounting!”

  Dude, as a human being you are entitled to shut the hell up. But what’s the use? Now I’m under his thumb.

  And months go by.

  bookkeeping

  I was scheduled to meet with the bookkeepers again so I could tell them what every single check and penny was spent on, whether it was for something personal or my mom. I was sure I didn’t remember every expense from three years ago, but whatever, I’d show up and try. Then Mom died. And my brother wrote to the bookkeeper, “Where is the update! There have been no updates since June.”

  The bookkeeper wrote back, “We had a meeting scheduled for August. But as you may remember, your mother died. The meeting was postponed.”

  My brother really didn’t care. I was still looking for papers. He sent me more angry e-mails. “I might have given you some extra money from Mom’s estate because you looked after her. But because you were so duplicitous you will pay me back any money you took.”

  Further: “You were there to look after Mom in her house. BUT YOU PUT HER IN A NURSING HOME.”

  Didn’t he understand? She was dangerous to herself and to others. The home aides had quit. The first nursing home called me at 7 A.M. the day after I took her there: “You come get your mother NOW! We can’t handle her.” The second nursing home asked me to remove her by the end of the first month. She had maybe seven months at the next place, then they told me to find a higher level of care. If the nursing homes—fully staffed, fully equipped—couldn’t handle her, how could I have done so? But my brother made me feel terrible that I had not taken care of Mom at home.

  That person in the home, though, that was not my mom. My mom was dead, but she had left a long time ago. It was October and I was alone on this planet. I went to Dawn the bookkeeper. “As soon as we get these papers from your mom’s retirement plan”—printouts of three and a half years of every buy, sell, and trade she made—“we can get this into the system and almost everything will be done. Look how close we are to finishing this job! It looks like based on this information, we are getting close to what you spent over the three and a half years.”

  Dawn was so nice and sympathetic to my plight. That’s what it was, a plight. I just couldn’t believe I had made this great and supportive new friend; I wanted to hang out with her. “And soon your bro will leave you alone . . . although surely you are entitled to some compensation for spending all your time looking after your mother.”

  “I wasn’t doing it for compensation. If I had the income I wouldn’t have spent her money—but I had to live. And . . .” I showed her the e-mail from my brother where he said he would not let me take reimbursement for my time or work. She shook her head.

  “I will be away for ten days, but Wanda will work on it, and when I get back, we’ll have one more meeting and I think it will be all done! So, keep the faith! By the way, while I’m away—don’t tell Wanda anything. She is just my intern. I’m trying her out.” She handed me an invoice. I wrote her a check in her office.

  “Thank you, Dawn. Thank you for your kindness and sympathy and help. I would be so lost without you and your kind words.”

  A week later, I was on my way out of town; a friend had invited me to Florida. I hadn’t been anywhere in almost two years, and then it was only for two days. I had to have a vacation. I was totally alone.

  I had a layover in Philadelphia, where I discovered the following e-mail:

  Tama,

  Your check bounced. I am out of the country on vacation and I need for you to get Wanda $661.55 in cash as soon as possible. The fact that this has happened is not sitting well with me. You have to give the cash to Wanda TODAY.

  Kindly text me to let me know that you have received this email.

  You have placed me in a very difficult position financially and I do not appreciate it at all. When I return we can talk about the future of our working relationship.

  Thank you for your prompt response to this email.

  What? I was so embarrassed and upset! “I am in the airport,” I e-mailed her immediately, apologizing. “I truly don’t know how this happened—there is plenty of money in that account.” I called the bank and they said, “Your name is not on the accounts. You only had POA, which stopped as soon as your mother died.”

  This was a different story than what I’d been told. I apologized to Dawn, over and over, but her angry e-mails continued—just like my brother’s!

  It turned out that the account on which I had written the check not only had the money in it (visible to Dawn) but also had—as I had thought—been left in trust for me. Only the bank had lost the card stating this.

  Now I had to start from scratch. It was mid-November, pitch dark at 5 P.M. It was cold and already there were snow flurries. Hunting season would start soon.

  When I took a look at the work Dawn had done, what had been recorded on the QuickBooks accounting program—all of it was incorrect! She’d written d
own vast amounts of money that weren’t there, that had never been there. She’d simply made up numbers; it was completely wrong.

  At night the coyotes howled and screamed all night, right outside my door. And in the day my brother emitted via e-mail his punitive cries—only his were filled with hate and vitriol. He decided to take me to court. I’m still waiting for the trial. It’s coming up soon. My brother’s retired now. He has five million in the bank, plus property. I’ve got a lawsuit in a month—he’s trying to sue me because my mother left me two small accounts he wants half of. Me, the life of a writer? I’m broke.

  no conclusion

  What happens? What happened.

  Here I am, eight years old, they hauled me out of second or third grade at Smith Day School to model for the alumni magazine.

  Arlene Studio for the Smith Alumnae Quarterly. Used by permission.

  No kidding. And life, too. That happens.

  Just before Christmas of 1986, Andy said he had a Christmas present for me that he would give me when he got back from Milan. But then he died. Twenty-nine years later, in 2015, the portrait of me appeared in the New York Times. It was found in his house, following his death, but had not yet been stitched together. I never did receive it.

  I wanted to include it because (a) I appear deranged and have only one eye, (b) it represents a major change and breakthrough in Andy’s art, and (c) I am and will be the only person to have a portrait done by Andy and also appear in a Spider-Man comic. This, to me, is proof of my existence. But I couldn’t. Reprint rights were expensive. Here is my attempt at a similar portrait.

  I’m still with the contractor and am waiting for my trial. I am writing. I am riding my horse. Most of the past is a blur because only the present exists. But there are still a few things that make me smile when I reflect back. Like, one time I got a call, back in New York City. A man said, “Hi, Tama. I am calling to ask if you would appear on a talk show with Peter Parker—he’s just published a new book of photographs.”