One of the weapons that the Malkinites have deployed against the Frost family is that they must have been really rich, but slumming and choosing to be poor, because their wedding announcement ran in the New York Times.
O RLY?
Funny thing about the Times wedding announcements: they’re often given out not because you’re wealthy*, but because you or someone in your family is notable in some way, that some way often having to do with New York City.
Here’s their wedding announcement.
Let’s take a look:
Mrs. Frost, 26 years old, is a receptionist at the Cat Hospital at Towson, in Baltimore. She graduated from Towson State University. Her father is an electrical engineer at Tracor Inc., a defense electronics manufacturer in Crystal City, Va.
Mr. Frost, also 26, is known as Halsey. He owns Frostworks, a woodworking and furniture-design studio in Baltimore. His mother, Randy Frost, is a quilt artist. His father is the deputy director of design and construction for the City University of New York in Manhattan. The bridegroom’s late grandfather Frederick G. Frost Jr. was an architect responsible for several public buildings in New York, including Martin Luther King High School in Manhattan.
So, Mom’s a quilt artist, Dad’s a civil servant, and Grandpa was an architect who designed some notable public buildings, probably during the Robert Moses era. Woohoo! Oh, he must be rich!
Except, not so much. Architects who design public buildings rarely make all that much, and in any event, even if Halsey Frost took possession of some vast fortune upon his grandfather’s death (unlikely, since it would normally go to his parents’ generation), it would probably have been wiped out paying for the five months that his kids spent in the hospital after the accident, not to mention the ongoing care.
I know someone who had a severely premature baby, whose care in the first few months of her life exceeded the million-dollar lifetime limit on the family’s insurance policy. They laugh at bill collectors and tell them to get in line. Because what else can they do?
In any event, what your parent or grandparent did to get your wedding announcement in the Times often has little bearing on your current financial status. From time to time, I see people I know on the wedding page, and often, their parents were mayors of whatever town they lived in, or state legislators, or in some high level of city or state government, or some kind of nonprofit with outsize contribution relative to the amount of remuneration. Which, again, doesn’t necessarily translate to dollars, and certainly not the kind of money that could pay cash for the kind of catastrophic care that Graeme and Gemma Frost needed.
Mind you, the “He’s got three names, so he MUST be rich” argument really is a keeper.
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* They don’t always run your wedding announcement if you’re wealthy, either. My cousin Kevin, much to the shock of the rest of the family, married into one of the wealthiest/most prestigious families in the country (we only found out the bride’s identity long after the wedding, since the wedding invitation had contained no last names. Since Kevin’s branch of the family had been estranged for a while and the wedding was in Florida and the rest of the family in the Northeast or scattered elsewhere, nobody went. It was only after our grandmother died and Kevin’s mom, who’d been divorced from Uncle Jackie, my mother’s brother, called up Uncle Brendan’s ex-wife Aunt Susie, to say that Kevin and his sister Kimmie felt that their last link to the rest of the family was severed with Grandma’s death, oh and by the way, here’s who Kevin married, that we found out. Which, hello, we were stunned, but it kind of meant that re-establishing links with Kimmie and Kevin (which were only severed because Jackie was kind of a controlling asshole) became problematic. Because there’d always be the question of whether we were trying to reconnect with the cousins we really hadn’t seen in 20 years or trying to get at the Xs’ money. Though it might have been useful to have that contact when a friend of mine was caught near their house during a hurricane and could have used a better shelter). Anyway, even though the name of the family would be instantly recognizable to just about anyone in the country, the Times never ran his wedding announcement, despite the fact that he was marrying a big-name heiress.