The Brotherhood of Money

Your email has been sent.

Thanks for recommending The Daily Beast!

X Close

Steven Hunt / Getty Men like Bernie Madoff understand wealth. They understand power. And they prefer to keep women away from both.

The first I heard of Bernie Madoff or the hedge funds involved (including my brother’s) was via a voicemail I received early on the Saturday morning when the news broke. It was from someone to whom I owed an article who is particularly caught up in the web of news and gossip that consumes Manhattan’s chattering classes—factoid leading into rumor leading into informed guesswork until the original tributary is lost. He was checking in to see whether I was okay under the circumstances (meaning, I suppose, whether my own finances had taken a beating) and, more importantly, whether I would be able to deliver the piece as scheduled. I listened to his message—his voice had that mixture of solicitousness and brazen curiosity that misadventures with money always provoke, as though one were inquiring into a particularly grisly death—and imagined myself rising, phoenix-like, over a decimated landscape, continuing to tap out under-remunerated sentences as tycoons tumbled and long-standing relationships based on clubbish alliances went into free-fall.

Does anyone—men, women, gurus, tycoons, Paulson, Perelman—really understand what goes into making billions of dollars, much less losing it all in one fell swoop?

As a daughter, I was raised to know nothing about money. Whenever I tried to ask my father a question on the subject he would respond, "Nu, Daphne? Since when the interest in business?" and shoo me away. My father appeared to share financial information with my mother on a need-to-know basis, and she in turn became the keeper of the trust, someone sworn to confidentiality. The few times I tried to make inroads into this sealed-off territory I was met with resistance or accusations about my underlying motives. My closest exposure to the world of men and money was at the Jewish charity dinners I would sometimes attend as my father’s escort when my mother didn’t feel like going. At these functions, the men who mattered would often sit on a raised dais while the women sat at round tables below, wearing competitive jewelry and trading off-the-Beltway news about recent divorces and children who had grown up and moved away to far-off lands like California and Massachusetts. I felt like a permanent outsider within the community: insufficiently dazzling, overly probing, a kind of eternal Jamesian Maisie looking in on the heart of communal life and trying to determine where the light came in.

Read an excerpt from Daphne Merkin’s novel, Enchantment, on the Brotherhood of Money.

As an adult my prowess with money extends to haggling over fees for my writing and not much more. Perhaps because I don't understand any form of finance other than the hallucinatory machinery of credit cards and the hard reality of cash, I believe in the power of liquidity. Left to my own irrational devices, I would keep wads of cash under a mattress, like a wily peasant out of a Russian novel. What I see in the culture around me is that money is simultaneously idolized and demonized, in the manner of an unreliable lover who might one day deliver on his promises—or not.

Although we watch the behavior of the super-rich with goggle-eyed fascination, bad feeling toward them lurks in the wings. It is always in good form, that is, to make demeaning remarks about people who accumulate great wealth, even if one happens to move in such company oneself. The meaning of money—its importance to something as fundamental as survival and as abstract as status—makes it a superlative, a kind of metaphor of metaphors. It would be helpful to parse out its significance if only to de-Kryptonite it, but long experience has proven to me that shrinks, who you might think would provide insight into its fogged-over core, are no better than the rest of us at dealing with something so totemic and all-encompassing. It turns out that they themselves don't really know how they feel about money other than coveting elaborate vacations and weekend houses in line with their patients' lives or what they imagine to be—which requires that they charge inflationary prices for each ticking minute of listening time.

A few nights ago I had dinner with a smart, psychologically-minded friend, preceded by a flurry of emails about restaurants and prices. Although a slightly less or more costly entrée would have caused neither of us real hardship, these negotiations were something we felt obliged to have, perhaps to prove to ourselves that we were nothing like those dubious hedge-fund wives who, according to the New York Times, have started asking for their Hermès purchases to be put in unlabeled shopping bags in a show of superficial camaraderie with these stark economic times. During our conversation, my friend told me that she has never admitted, either as a child or an adult, to growing up in a gilt-edged suburb of Manhattan. Although she is the mother of children in their thirties, she also said she doesn't know how much money her mother has invested for her. I admitted to similar lacunae in my awareness, how I have enormous difficulty to this day going against my training as a female not to ask, how at some point along the way I equated ignorance with financial bliss—or something close to it. If I didn't ask, or so went my misbegotten, childlike reasoning, I would be taken care of forever by a magical bank account that flourished precisely because I didn't keep an eye on it.

View as Single Page

January 2, 2009 | 7:35am

Men And Power, Men And Wealth, Jews Without Money, Men And Money, Daphne Merkin, Bernie Madoff

(–)

Collapse Replies

Sort Up

Sort Down

sort by date:

1 2

MichaelONeill

Perhaps a nod in the direction of those millions of women who live in today's world of s'choira and are struggling every day to figure out how to make the mortgage payment or the rent?

Blogs and Stories

The Brotherhood of Money

The Brotherhood of Money