Diamond Girl (5 page)

I knew then I wanted to scream and call for Elizando until I was hoarse, but I couldn’t make a sound. My legs gave out and I fell over onto the thick white carpet, choking out her name. Above me, Sylvia said, the triumph in her voice barely concealed, “That’s right, Carey, Elizando is gone. You are too old for a nanny and your father is more comfortable with me being near at hand to make sure that you stay healthy. Now hurry up if you want to change. We need to leave for Dr. Heming’s in the next half hour. All your clothes have been moved into the new closets in here. You don’t need my help
changing, do you, a big girl like you?”

I shook my head and she left me alone. She was gone, my Elizando, with her big brown face and warm eyes. She had been with me since I was six weeks old, and all the physical love and security I had ever known had been from her. The one person in all of that vast space who had been all mine had disappeared, like my old room.
Elizando. I wanted to cry and I wanted to run and look for Daddy, but I didn’t do either of those things. I understood that Elizando was gone because I had been bad at breakfast and upset Daddy. He had made her go away because of me, and had given me the new white room in exchange for her. If I acted badly again, he might think mother was right after all about sending me to Canada.

I walked into my new ballroom-sized bathroom and held my hands under the cold water until they stopped shaking. I didn’t want to see my own small white face in all those mirrors. When my body became still, I pulled in my breath, walked downstairs and waited by the door for Sylvia.

I didn’t cry in the car and I didn’t flinch when Dr. Heming’s clumsy nurse hurt me putting the needle and tube into my stomach for the new pump. I didn’t cry when I ate dinner alone in the upstairs library with my night nurse Bettina, or when two of the girls at school the next day made fun of me for my new 'blood beeper'.

I kept everything inside, and when I was alone at night in my big white bed where I would have to pull my knees up against me because my stomach hurt so badly and I wanted to scream, I kept that inside too.

I told myself that the hurt was better than the empty dead feelings I walked around with during the day. If I had pain, then I must be real.  Remembering what that first year alone was like makes me feel a little less scared now. If I’m dying, it won’t be any different than going into another empty white room. If I’m dying alone, that is nothing new either because I have always been alone.

Chapter 6

My Aunt Georgia came and rescued me one day the year I tuned ten. She must have heard from Daddy that I was having a rough time with all the new changes to my life since the onset of my disease. Until she showed up in her white Mercedes to help me, I didn’t think anyone had noticed that I had started to drift away and live in my head more and more.

Buckley wasn’t the kind of school that notified the kind of parents I had about inattention in class, or a lack of friends. Start telling families that their little darlings were not all that brilliant or socially on the ball, and said families might start wondering why the hell they were paying fifty thousand a year, plus endowments, to send their kid there. The parents might start thinking of other toney Manhattan private schools who would promise to make sure their child got accepted to their alma mater and landed on the cover of Vogue, or GQ, at the same time, because that is what it’s all about in the golden ghetto.

I didn’t tell Daddy that I hated Sylvia, or that I sometimes wondered what my new all-white 'sleeping environment', as mother’s decorator called it, would look like with a little red splashed around. I didn’t tell him that I didn’t have any friends at school, or at dance class, because I knew he loved me and, since that made him a minority, I didn’t want him to start wondering why he loved me.

He must have noticed something, though, because the morning before my tenth birthday we were having our usual silent but chummy breakfast together when he announced that my Aunt Georgia was going to pick me up after school that day and take me shopping for a birthday gift. I was pretty excited about it. Aunt Georgia was a legend in a legendary family. She was the only daughter of the last Kells in charge and the first female Kelleher to have complete control of her own money. 

My grandfather, Kells IV, must have been really crazy about his beautiful blond daughter because he had settled the exact amount on her that he had on his two younger sons, Daddy’s dead younger brothers. When they died so tragically of heroin and motorcycles, their money, per Grandpa IV’s dictates, had reverted back to the remaining siblings and, at the end of the wills, my Aunt Georgia, age nineteen at the time, controlled, with no strings attached, a flat eight billion dollars of her own money.

That made her, after Daddy, the richest Kelleher - way after Daddy, but it was still enough to let Forbes list her as the second richest woman in the world after Melinda Gates.

Aunt Georgia always got a kick out of that mention because she said everyone knew that Melinda Gates had married her money while Aunt Georgia’s money was 'her birthright'. Somehow, in her mind - and I guess in all of our minds - birthright money was more important, more deserved, than marrying it.

Aunt Georgia explained it to my mother once while I was eavesdropping. “You see, Ellen, while marrying into the Windsor family gives you the name, it doesn’t give you the blood. For example, who is more of a member of the royal family, Princess Margaret or that so called Princess Michael?”

My mother had responded in the usual half-annoyed, half-pleading-for-approval way that she always did when talking to Aunt Georgia.         “Well, Georgia, I can’t disagree with you about Princess Michael, but surely you aren’t suggesting that Princess Diana isn’t a real Windsor.”

I heard Aunt Georgia laugh lightly before answering. “No, of course not. Diana is an Earl’s daughter with blood as blue as theirs and, after all, Ellen, she has produced those two lovely boys, so it is very different than say if Charles had married some nobody from nowhere who went and gave him daughters. Surely even you can see the distinction.”

I guess mother could see the distinction because she quickly changed the subject.

While Aunt Georgia, and Daddy too, I think, got a kick out of the Melinda Gates’ mention, neither of them were ever amused by the other female Kelleher named each year in Forbes.

Time after time, year after year, the people at the magazine listed my great uncle’s widow, the former Dominican maid, Chica Kelleher, as the wealthiest American woman not residing in America. Aunt Georgia always pointed out, truthfully enough, that my family would not have to endure this embarrassing reminder of Great-uncle David’s marital misadventures if Chica had remained in America as her fortune, being only a little over two billion, would not have been sufficient to place her on the list if she had stayed put. But, no, she had taken the money and run off to live in splendor in Monaco and therefore became, it seemed permanently, the 'wealthiest American woman not residing in America'.

I know that there would not have been a single member of the Kelleher family who would have been sorry to hear that Chica’s three hundred foot yacht, the hilariously named 'Kelleher’s Loot', had sunk to the bottom of the Mediterranean, forever ending her 'reign of terror', as Aunt Georgia called it. That is the thing about our family, we can do anything, we can have anything, but we can never talk about it to strangers, and no one is stranger to Daddy, or to Aunt Georgia, than the press. 

I don’t remember which of them first explained it to me, but the upshot was that while people would always want to know about us, and there would always be 'trashy publications' that might write about us, that was okay. As long as we never responded voluntarily, people would never know our private family business.

I was a little lost on that business part because no Kelleher has had an actual job since grandfather.

Later, after I had crossed the Rubicon, I did understand, far too late, what family business meant. It meant money, an ocean of money, money beyond the imagination of ordinary people, and that is exactly how it has to stay forever, because if ordinary people do start to imagine it, then anger, jealousy and greed quickly follow. From there, the next thing you know, public pressure is brought to bear and we might have to pay real income taxes and our helicopters and jets and staffs of thirty, as well as our investments in jewelry and football teams which almost always depreciate, are looked at far too closely for comfort. Daddy always said that ’loose lips sink ships’, but I think what he really meant was that they sink yachts. 

Daddy, as the main Kelleher, and Aunt Georgia, as the richest female Kelleher, planned to make sure that an incident like great uncle David’s never happened again.

Obviously Daddy did get married or I wouldn’t be here in my rat-infested room able to recall all the family high points. Aunt Georgia got married and had children
too, five of them, from seven different husbands, if you don’t count James, aka Hamir, but that came later. They made sure, though, that no non-blood Kelleher would ever walk away with enough to end up in Fortune magazine again.

Daddy did it by settling twenty-five million on each of his three daughters and making himself the sole trust officer, and Aunt Georgia, being poorer, set up twenty million on each of my cousins and asked Daddy to oversee that as well.

To uphold the Kelleher name, Daddy and Aunt Georgia each patterned themselves on famous rich people from the past, and I don’t mean screw-ups like Barbara Hutton. Daddy admired the early Astors and Vanderbilts, and he has always lived exactly as an old school gentleman of means should. 

He is also a great philanthropist. Every year, when his accountants sit him down and discuss taxes with him, the level of taxation due is exactly how much is plowed back into the Kelleher Foundation that supports the arts. Daddy does not believe in his hard-inherited money going to the Government and he likes to be in charge of how it can best help the things that matter to him. His football team, which practically bleeds money, creates all these jobs for people, not just the players, but ordinary people who work at football stadiums and stuff. I have always understood that, without families like ours who watch out for
ordinary people on the street, the whole American service industry might dry up, and that is why we don’t like to just turn it over to the Government. They don’t think about individual lives like we do.

Aunt Georgia is like an old-style heiress too. People say she is the Gertrude Whitney of her generation. I’m sure they don’t mean because she is a self-obsessed bitch who marries and dumps men like used condoms and thinks she is a great artist but actually sucks so bad that she has to open her own museum so that people will be forced to look at her work; no, I’m sure that they mean that she is like Gertrude Whitney because she is such the Bohemian. She always says that she 'lives life off the grid'. It’s not all that hard to do really when all 'living off the grid' means is that you do whatever the hell you feel like twenty-four seven, not to take away from Aunt Georgia’s very real talent. She is a great artist and, unlike poor Gertrude, she has not had to open a museum so that people would look at her work.

Aunt Georgia’s paintings have all sold. Anyone who is ever in the boardroom of Kelleher Pharmaceuticals can see them. Aunt Georgia calls herself an 'impressionistic realist', which means that while her stuff  kind of looks like Jackson Pollock’s blobs on canvas, the colors are more muted. It’s the sort of thing Monet might have produced at Giverney if he had filled his mouth with paint and spit at the canvas instead of using brushes.

So she has that whole Fifth Avenue,
Trump Towers artist vibe going on, which justifies any of her really, really off-the-grid activities, like the seven husbands for example. This stuff I’m thinking about now is pretty much all echoes of stuff my mother used to tell me … things she would say back in the day when I was closer to Aunt Georgia than anybody, except Daddy, because I was.

For a long, long time she was the person I most admired in the world.

I guess it made my mother envious, so she would try and rip her down in front of me. Years later, when Aunt Georgia and I fell out, I started believing her and, for a little while, it made my mother and me close. That’s the way it goes in our family. We aren’t very affectionate but we can always bond over hating one another. Back then, though, when I was ten, Aunt Georgia was my aunt, my buddy and my fairy godmother all rolled into one. I think she even loved me for a while. We looked alike, and I certainly loved her, and a full-on lonely kid’s devotion can be pretty heady.

I hate her now and she hates me, and if I don’t make it onto my feet, then I’ll bet if she does cry at my funeral, they will be crocodile tears of joy. But once upon a time she taught me how to become my own kind of Kelleher and reinvented the alphabet for me. Like Annie Sullivan, Helen Keller’s beloved teacher, Aunt Georgia taught me how to master the weird Braille of being a Kelleher.

Chapter 7

When I walked outside of Buckley the day before my birthday, there was a crowd of my classmates standing clustered around, pointing at someone. I looked over at the curb and wanted to die right that second. Third in the usual line-up of stretch limos and Range Rovers was a bright red antique truck with my beautiful aunt in the driver’s seat.