Bank of America

Bank of America is the financial institution through which Dan Davis tries to protect, trace, and ultimately transfer Hired Girl, Inc. stock. Its role is significant because the bank becomes both the intended safeguard for Ricky’s inheritance and the source of a painful confirmation that Dan’s first plan never took effect; years later, he turns again to a bank branch to complete a more direct transfer to her.

The First Stock Arrangement

Dan’s first attempt to secure Ricky’s future begins with a letter and a stock assignment. In December 1970, he writes that if she does not see him for a year, she should take an inner envelope to a Bank of America branch and ask a trust officer to open it. The envelope contains a separate assignment of his shares to the bank in trust for Frederica Virginia Gentry, with reassignment to her on her twenty-first birthday.

The arrangement is designed to protect Ricky if something happens to Dan while preventing Miles and Belle from taking the shares. Dan believes the bank will hold the stock for her, yet he also intends the provision to be reversible: if all goes well, he can ask Ricky to return the envelope and tear up the separate assignment. He seals the stock certificate and assignment inside a smaller envelope, places that and his letter in a larger one addressed to Ricky at the Girl Scout camp, and mails it.

A Disputed Gift and a Failed Safeguard

The bank’s proposed role becomes entangled with Dan’s conflict with Belle. Dan had previously transferred stock to her as a betrothal present, while continuing to vote it; after their engagement breaks down, he argues that the shares were given in expectation of marriage and should be returned. A lawyer points to McNulty v. Rhodes and explains that Dan would need to prove both the condition attached to the gift and Belle’s understanding of it. The dispute makes the meaning of the earlier transfer—gift or conditional exchange—central to control of the company.

When Miles and Belle discover Dan’s later stock assignment, they learn that it has been mailed and ask whom he assigned the shares to. Dan answers that they went to Bank of America. Belle recognizes that a bank will be harder to manipulate than an individual: if the assignment has already gone through, she says, they can forget about the stock. She immediately considers the alternative of finding Dan’s car and altering the assignment if he has not yet mailed it. The bank’s role here is therefore not abstract custody; its anticipated control blocks the couple’s immediate effort to reclaim the shares.

The Search and the Record

After waking decades later, Dan investigates what became of Ricky and the stock. He writes to Bank of America to ask whether it holds, or ever held, a trust for her. The first response is a form letter invoking confidentiality. Dan writes again, explaining that he is a Sleeper and that Ricky is his only surviving relative. A trust officer then gives him a limited but decisive answer: the bank has never held a trust in favor of anyone named Frederica Virginia Gentry.

That negative finding tells Dan that his intended arrangement did not reach the bank. He concludes that the stock assignment would have had to pass through Bank of America as written, but the bank’s records show no trust; he believes that he and Ricky have both been robbed. A school record from Mojave confirms that a pupil named Frederica Virginia Gentry withdrew in 1971, but it offers no way to trace where she went. The bank inquiry thus resolves one part of the mystery while leaving Ricky’s whereabouts unknown.

A later inquiry supplies a more detailed account of the shares. Bank records show that dividends on a larger block were paid from the first quarter of 1971 through the second quarter of 1980 on the original shares to a trust for a party named Heinicke. After a 1980 reorganization, the equivalent shares were sold to Cosmopolitan Insurance Group, which still holds them. A smaller block, by contrast, was held by Belle D. Gentry until 1972, when she assigned it to Sierra Acceptances Corporation; that company broke it up and sold it piecemeal over the counter.

The record does not establish that Dan’s intended trust for Ricky was ever effective. After speaking with the trust officer, Dan says he has learned that the assignment to Ricky never took effect. He suspects that the transfer recorded in the bank’s account of the shares was fraudulent and associates it with Belle, though he cannot establish the identity or role of the party named Heinicke. He also realizes that tracing the later history of the shares might offer a lead to Ricky, but the financial history cannot itself restore the relationship he meant the trust to protect.

A More Direct Transfer

When Dan eventually meets Ricky again, he returns to the stock certificate as a means of providing for her. He tells her he is giving her all he owns in Hired Girl, Inc., explaining that he expects to be gone for a long time and wants her to have it. Rather than rely again on an assignment written on a separate sheet, he tears up that paper and uses the standard assignment form on the back of the certificate.

Dan arranges for the transfer to be made in Ricky’s full name, Frederica Virginia Gentry. The formalities require an acknowledgment; after Ricky assures the notary that she knows him, and Pete’s presence helps establish his respectability to her as a fellow cat person, Dan signs before her. The notary embosses her seal through both signatures. Dan then gives the certificate to Ricky and tells her to give it to her grandmother, who should take it to a Bank of America branch in Brawley so the bank can handle the remaining process. The transfer is framed as help for the child’s education, but it also replaces the failed, concealed trust scheme with a concrete instruction that Ricky and her family can act on.

Institutional Role

Across the episodes, Bank of America represents the difference between intending to secure property and successfully placing it under institutional control. Dan’s first plan depends on a mailed envelope, a separate assignment, and the bank’s later administration of a trust; the bank’s records eventually show that this arrangement did not take effect. Its confidentiality policy also limits how much Dan can learn, though the trust officer eventually provides a narrow negative answer and later records clarify the history of the stock.

The final direction to use a branch in Brawley reverses the earlier pattern. Instead of asking the bank to safeguard shares through an arrangement Dan hopes to retrieve, he gives Ricky the endorsed certificate and sends her family to the bank to complete the transfer. The institution remains a procedural intermediary, but the narrative weight falls on the change in Dan’s method: a private promise and an ineffective trust give way to a signed document placed directly in Ricky’s hands.