Other People’s Money Can Drive You Mad

Brooke has enjoyed what a friend from Vassar regards as an enviable upbringing enriched by “the secret weapon of a chic mother with a Manhattan apartment.” The Black adopted daughter of an unmarried white lawyer running an organization dedicated to reproductive justice, Brooke has grown up under the hovering benevolence of a trio of glamorous “aunties,” friends with whom her mother formed “what they would have called a family.” Her younger brother, who is white but also adopted, has flourished under these conditions. Brooke, however, can’t figure out what to do with herself. Having spent nine years teaching at a charter school in the Bronx, she takes a job at the Asher and Carol Jaffee Foundation. The decision disappoints her mother, who now considers Brooke a glorified secretary. Asher, eighty-three and semi-retired, is himself at loose ends. He sees Brooke (“Black, gorgeous, serious, passionate”) as “the sort of woman he wanted at the foundation, the sort of woman he wanted working in his name,” and decides to make her his protégée.