Free My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation Hardcover by Molly Haskell

Quicken, but used it simply to balance my bank account,
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    and, without a yearly tutorial from Chevey, could never remember at
    tax time how to categorize expenditures. He, of course, carried a
    PalmPilot at all times. We’d stop by a café for a cup of coffee and in
    would go the date, time, and amount. He was a wonderful teacher,
    endlessly patient. He occasionally taught night courses and once wrote
    a series of articles in a neighborhood service paper on investing. They were lighthearted admonitions like “Ten Investment Mistakes,” meant
    to foster the idea of financial planning— how to have reserves, keep
    credit card debt down, maintain records, and plan for the future with
    actuarial probabilities in mind. That most people (1) think they will
    live forever or die before they run out of money, and (2) would rather
    do almost anything than track their expenses (a task both tedious and
    embarrassing: our petites faiblesses for junk food or shoes or booze, suddenly revealed, in irrefutable abundance, as vices and addictions),
    this he understood. Never mind. He’d go on counseling his clients to
    keep records and plan for the future, and simply hope that somewhere
    and in someone a seed had been planted that might one day blossom
    into financial circumspection. His sense of mission gave him satisfac-
    tion enough.
    I often wondered how he could even understand the mental fragil-
    ity of the rest of us, so resistant was he to the siren call of instant gratification. Where most of us, according to Daniel Kahneman, Nobel
    scientist and author of the best seller Thinking, Fast and Slow , are mentally crippled by “cognitive biases,” decisions based on intuition and
    emotion that override reason, Chevey belonged to that rare minority
    who fall into Kahneman’s second category of those who think and be-
    have according to reason and logic. Will Ellen migrate girlishly and
    irrationally into category one?
    A demon about security on every level, he didn’t like to talk on cell
    phones for fear of being overheard (some of his precautions become
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    more significant in light of his emerging secret). For his computer, he kept four or five memory keys, one in the apartment, one in the car,
    and the others who knows where, and rotated them regularly. He was
    constantly urging me to keep a memory key off- site in case of fire. He knew a lot about a lot of things, and when he didn’t know something,
    he was quick to admit it (now that should have been a tip- off!).
    He was a true Virginian in his fiscal conservatism, but his practi-
    cality was his own, a private joke among family and friends. I gave him a toast at the rehearsal dinner before his marriage to Beth, roasting
    him on several points, and got a knowing laugh when I ended:
    “Chevey, it’s Christmas Eve, we must buy a tree.”
    “No, we’ll wait till tomorrow when we can get one for free.”
    He was the go- to man for computer questions from his tech-
    challenged harem— Eleanor, Beth, and me. He set up a DOS program
    on my PC whereby I could save each day’s work without going through
    the whole set of files and documents. When Bruce, my computer guy
    in New York, came for some emergency, he would always recognize,
    with some displeasure, any little improvement (or, as he saw it, inter-
    ference) from my brother. Like the wife who detects a smear of lipstick not her own on her husband’s collar, he saw Chevey’s fingerprint the
    minute he turned on the computer. But Bruce was too expensive to
    call for little things, so I’d telephone Chevey in Virginia, and later at Pine Mountain.
    “Hey, I was going to call you anyway,” I’d say sheepishly, if more or

less truthfully, “but I’ve got a little problem.” I’d lost the icon bar, the