I cannot remember a time when I was not conscious of wealth. At the age of seven, attending a private Quaker school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I was embarrassed when wealthier friends from the Boston suburbs came over to my house, which was small, compared with theirs. Later, living in Arlington, Virginia, and at a public school, I felt the opposite: sheepish about a house that was grander than some of my friends’ homes. House size was one of the earliest metrics by which I clocked wealth.
Wealth was always something I quietly wrestled with. My father grew up in a poor farming family, but my mother came from money: her father was an early billionaire. Though I was raised materially as middle class, my own identity has had influxes from both extremes of the class circumstances into which my parents were born – inheriting a confidence and adventurousness, even feelings of invincibility, that come with privilege; while also tapping into the thriftiness, stoic resilience and determination that come from bootstrapping.
My grandfather, who never questioned his standing, pursued wealth with singular dedication. My early memories of him are anchored in his country estate in Millbrook, New York; I caught salamanders by the pool; visited the kennels where he kept hunting dogs; caviar was regularly served with dinner. Though he’s now in his 90s, his shadow looms large – as a patriarch who scandalised his WASPy beach club in Southampton with his European Speedos, competed in every endeavour (even beating my brother and me at backgammon as children), and whom others craned to impress, though he lived very privately.
Apostwar Greek immigrant from a prominent shipping family in Athens, my grandfather arrived in the United States aged six, and came of age during the Greek shipping boom fuelled by the maritime handover of naval ships. Decommissioned ships purchased cheaply and repurposed to service newly expanded trade routes meant that Greeks dominated postwar shipping on the back of cheap bank loans guaranteed by the Greek government. As the only son in a family of daughters, my Papou was the chosen one to carry on his father’s industrial legacy. In his early 20s, he experienced this birthright as a heavy weight, and rebelled. He dropped out of Princeton, wanting to pursue the bohemian dream and write novels, until my grandmother became pregnant with my mother and put an end to his literary aspirations. Dutifully, he stepped into the role of provider and shipping tycoon.
Upon his father’s death, my grandfather inherited a majority share of his father’s wealth and company. His sisters – veterans now of many legal appeals – maintain that rather than provide for his mother (who was still living), and for them, as detailed by his father’s will, he sidelined the women of the family, investing in his own business and art collection.
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