I stared back. “Wait a minute! You invited me out here for a drink, and you want me to make the drinks?” I exclaimed.
“Thank you, dear.”
“Christ on a crutch!” I grabbed a bottle of semi-dry Riesling off the rack. “Wine okay?”
“Thank you.”
I just rolled my eyes and pulled a corkscrew out, and opened it up. I poured two glasses and sat down at the corner of the island, facing her. “You really know how to push your luck!”
“Giving away your children’s money isn’t pushing your luck!? They’ll starve without you!” she said teasingly.
“It’s my money, not my children’s money, and if they can’t survive on twenty million, they’re too stupid to pass their genes on to the next generation!” I replied, snorting at the thought.
Marilyn wagged her finger at me. “You’d better be nice to me. What if I decide to divorce you and take my half of your money?”
“Just how nice do I have to be?” I asked lewdly, waggling my eyebrows.
Marilyn blushed. “Men!” She shook her head. “You know, this is one of the most bizarre conversations I have ever had! We are talking about just giving away billions of dollars! What in the world would you do with that kind of money?”
I smiled at her. Just her asking that question made me think she would go along with the idea. “I have no idea. We are talking about some really serious money, like curing cancer or stopping malaria or something. I have absolutely no idea. I mean, the numbers are just staggering! I’m not talking about making the kids’ school a little better. With the amount I can spend, I could buy every school in the state, and have enough left over to buy the school buses, too! What do you think we should do?”
Marilyn just stared at me, dumbfounded. I don’t think she ever really comprehended the financial resources I had at this point. Yes, I went to work and always had some money for nice Christmas presents and we had the vacation home and a nice car, but the only really extravagant thing I did was fly charter and use limos in strange places. In this I was strongly influenced by the likes of Warren Buffet. His kids all went to public schools and he ate in local restaurants and was a boringly normal guy — and one of the richest men on the planet! (He also liked flying in private jets; he said it was his one serious vice.) Last year he had announced his plan to give away almost all of his money, too. I found that quite interesting.
If you are going to be a billionaire, there are a lot worse examples to emulate than Warren Buffet. Hell, if you’re a human, there are a lot worse examples to emulate than Warren Buffet!
“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about that,” commented Marilyn. “Can you do that? Just give it all away in your will?”
“Yeah, I guess so. I think what we would do is set up a charitable trust, and then, when I die, most of my assets go into the trust. Then a trustee, maybe even you, gets to decide how to give out the money. Some of these trusts last for years and years, and give out millions every year. Howard Hughes’ trust is worth billions, and he died back in the Seventies. They give out hundreds of millions a year to medical research.”
“Huh. I just don’t know what to say.”
“Well, will you at least think about it?” I asked. “I don’t think I can legally do it without you agreeing to it. I wouldn’t want to try, in any case.” I refilled our glasses. “We need to do something in any case. As it stands, if we don’t really do some serious estate planning, when we die, the government will make out like bandits. Inheritance taxes will kill it all anyway.”
“Well, give me some time. This is just unreal!” Marilyn replied.
We finished off the wine and chatted about some outlandish charities to give the money to. I suggested a home for unwed mothers, as long as I got to be the father. That got her spluttering up her wine while I laughed at her. She wanted to donate it to a charity for out of work trailer salesmen, which made me almost cough up my wine as well. We went to bed laughing at it all.
A couple of weeks later I had her come to the office and speak to John and Jake Senior. They had been on my ass for years about this, and now they got to do some serious estate planning. Missy weighed in, too, and used her bottomless Rolodex to find an estate guy from New York to fly down and sit in.
That was how the Buckman Foundation started. We put a few million in now, the money I was giving away anyway, and got used to the idea. Marilyn was made the trustee, but she had no real authority as long as I was still around. She was happy to let me run it, anyway, since she just didn’t have the grasp of all those zeroes. There were sure a lot of them!
In mid-March, I loaded Marilyn on a plane and had her flown to Miami, and I took a couple of weeks off to play Daddy. I had a limo meet her at the airport and take her away to a clinic run by a top-notch plastic surgery operation. We had been referred there by a doctor at Johns Hopkins. It seems that the best plastic surgeons are in Hollywood or Miami. Marilyn’s abdominal scarring wasn’t severe, but it made her very self conscious, and they promised that they could reduce it substantially. I told her to ask for a discount package on a pair of DD cups and a face lift, which she refused.
Marilyn came back with just a trace of red on her abdomen, which was supposed to heal and be practically invisible. She was ecstatic about the work done, and told me about the most amazing things they were doing with hair transplants. No, I wasn’t bald, not yet; yes, I was starting to get thin in the back. I countered by asking her if she had her tits done, and then checked them out later. They were still her original equipment, but after a couple of weeks missing them, I didn’t mind.
In June we flew up to Utica and dumped the kids and Dum-Dum on Marilyn’s parents, and then we flew to Hougomont for a week, and then took a small seaplane with our luggage to Puerto Rico, and took a cruise through the southern Caribbean. We hadn’t done a cruise since our honeymoon, and Marilyn and I deserved an extended vacation. We didn’t take one of those ridiculous owner’s suites for twenty grand a week, just one of the fairly big suites one deck down. At Hougomont we worked on Marilyn’s all-over tan, but on the ship I talked her into wearing a couple of really skimpy one piece suits around the pool. The work at the clinic had been so good she didn’t feel self-conscious about it.
After the cruise, we flew back to Utica and landed in a different type of family problem. That summer her parents had bought a new home over in one of the nicer sections of Utica, just off the Parkway, and had torn down the old farmhouse out on the property and put a new modular office building up on the spot. We went over to see it (I had seen it way back when, but this was all new to Marilyn.) She was a bit sad to see her old home destroyed. I thought the thing was a firetrap and a rat motel, and wished I had pictures! Harriet sidetracked us, and said that Big Bob wanted to see me in his office. I glanced at Marilyn and shrugged, and wandered over.
I should have stayed in the Bahamas! In Big Bob’s office was a second man, tall and cadaverously thin and bald, who I also knew from the past. It was Mark Falwell, Big Bob’s accountant, and his presence could only mean one possible thing.
Big Bob wanted me to loan him some money.
Big Bob was a wonderful guy. He was an excellent father, a generous donor to church related charities, and well thought of around Utica. He was an excellent Mom-and-Pop scale businessman, selling a quality product, treating his customers honestly, always paying his debts, and servicing his products far better than the industry standard.
He was an absolute disaster at running a large scale commercial enterprise.
I had known the man for decades, and I admired Big Bob immensely. Aside from some initial pushing and testing back when we first met, the Lefleurs had welcomed me to their family, and they proved far more of a family than mine had ever been. Still, Big Bob had his issues, and they all directly related to Lefleur Homes.