The Price of Inheritance Read online

  “You don’t live off anyone, and neither did your parents. Hardworking people. You all work too hard.”

  “So do you,” I said, giving her a kiss on the cheek and holding her hand in mine. It was soft and wrinkled from years of looking after a family that liked being looked after.

  “Carolyn, poor baby,” she said smoothing my hair. “Who was stupid enough to fire a nice, smart girl like you?”

  “Well, I guess a nice, smart girl very much like me fired me.”

  Florentine took my left hand in hers, too, so that we were facing each other like we were about to start doing the minuet. It was just then that Jane showed up behind her and screamed.

  “Carolyn! What are you doing here!” she said, putting her hands on her mouth and looking at me all wrapped up for a blizzard.

  “This is the best surprise ever. You scared me!”

  Jane looked perfect, just like always. No matter what age she turned, or what she was wearing, Jane looked breezy, beautiful, and very rich. It wasn’t because she was dripping in money; it was just the light around her, her carefree attitude, like she knew that at the end of every day, everything would be all right because she had the millions from past generations shrouding her in safety. Jane had a law degree from Yale and ran the very large Dalby family foundation. She worked from whatever home she felt like, but had a huge office in Boston waiting for her when she wanted to put in the hours. For now, she was happy to dole out Dalby money from Newport while her sister, Brittan, helped make more of it in New York working on the finance side of her father’s company. She came to the door barefoot—Grace Kelly with dark hair and triceps muscles. She gave me a hug, put her head on mine, and didn’t let me go right away. When she did, she declared, “You look like hell. Really, terrible. What have you been doing?”

  “Not that much. Getting fired, crying, drinking, wallowing in self-pity, fighting with my mother.”

  Jane pouted and opened the door wider. Her hands were tan even in winter with a burgundy manicure and a diamond engagement ring that was eight carats and had belonged to her grandmother. I heard the clink of three thin gold bangles, which she always wore on her right wrist, even when she was swimming.

  “Yeah, your mother told me that. She said you’ve been abrasive and that you only drink vodka and tap water and that we should all be very concerned.”

  “Oh yeah? That’s nice. She’s so concerned she’s called me not once since she threw me out to the wolves in New York.”

  Jane didn’t say anything else about my mother. We had been having the same conversation for decades. My mother didn’t show up, or didn’t call. She forgot to do this or that. But she was always very worried, very concerned.

  “How long are you back for?” Jane asked after chiding me for not staying with her.

  “A month. Just a month.”

  “Then it will be a wonderful month,” she replied, leaning her tall body against the door frame, too.

  I turned down Jane’s multiple invitations to come inside, to stay for dinner, to stay for a month, a year, however long I wanted, and headed away from the mansions and the water to move into the apartment I had paid for, sight unseen.

  It was a second floor walk-up in a town house fifteen blocks from the ocean. It was musty. The windows were dirty, so dirty that you could barely tell it had begun to snow outside. The couch was heavy velvet and the color of split pea soup and the dining room table was oak and looked like it had doubled as a butcher block for the last five decades. None of the chairs at the table matched and the plates in the cabinets were plastic. There was nothing antique, nothing charming, but I didn’t care. I liked that it didn’t feel like me, or my life. This was a stranger’s apartment. Plus, I couldn’t afford anything else if I didn’t want to squander my savings. Who knew how long I would be unemployed. I threw my bags in the bedroom, peeked around for lung-destroying black mold or termites, and fell onto the couch, which immediately made me cough. I took a Zyrtec and listened to the booming silence around me. I was definitely no longer in New York. I was in New England, in February, and I had absolutely nothing to do.

  When I was in high school, and for the part of the summers in college, when I wasn’t interning at Christie’s I used to work for $8.25 an hour in an antique store in Newport called William Miller Antiques. It was a very small but quaint store that sold “architectural antiques, furniture, clocks, silver, nautical pieces, jewelry, militaria, textiles, lighting and general ephemera.” I had loved working there. I remember thinking that what we were selling was exquisite and that was mostly because William Miller found almost everything that had once belonged to someone dead and gone very important. Even if he would only pay me the same $8.25 that I made in high school, I was going to ask William if he would let me work with him for a month. I needed something to do and if someone was going to help me remember why I loved antiques and collecting in the first place, it was him.

  On Tuesday, after a weekend of wandering around my hometown, I gave William the same shock I’d given Jane. I knocked on the door of his little store an hour before it officially opened at 10 A.M. and William came straight to the door. He had turned sixty last year but still had a brown beard without a glint of gray, as well groomed as a topiary. He always wore suits, even when lounging on weekends, and told me that his secret wish was for blue jeans to be declared illegal and that bowler hats would come back in fashion with a vengeance. “Think of it, Carolyn, bowler hats. Would anything be more splendid than that?” he’d always say after a few glasses of wine. I had nodded enthusiastically and agreed, though I could think of a few thousand things that might be even nicer than looking like Magritte-obsessed Surrealists. William was convinced that if the world looked nice, it would help wrinkle out the peskier problems, like rape, murder, and disease.

  “Carolyn. I’m very happy to see you,” he said, shaking my hand after he had opened the door. William didn’t hug people; I had even seen him shake his own wife’s hand. He was, as always, wearing a suit that looked tailor-made for him, right down to his socks. If he could have worn a morning coat to do his books without being labeled an eccentric, he would have.

  “What brings you back to Newport in February?” he asked as he opened the door for me. He pointed to two William and Mary–style chairs in the middle of the gallery.

  “Really?” I asked before I sat down. They were definitely from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries.

  “Sure,” he replied. “We’ve got to make sure they work before we sell them. If yours breaks, let me know.”

  I laughed and sat down with a firm thud. “Feels just fine to me.” I rubbed my hands down the thick ash-wood arms and closed my eyes. “I love William and Mary furniture. It feels like the beginning of America.”

  “Yes!” said William enthusiastically. “What a great way to put it. The beginning of America. It really does. And it is. It was made by the hands of the earliest Americans. Men who weren’t even born here, but came here looking for a better life. That’s exactly what these are.” He smiled his appreciation for our shared love and he asked me again why I was in Newport in the dead of winter. “Were you hungry for frostbite?” he asked, gesturing for my coat.

  “But don’t you know why, William? You read the art press. I’m sure you know.”

  “Well, I was hoping it was for another reason,” he said, turning away from me and putting my coat on a less expensive chair.

  “Did you really lose your job over that thing? I mean, how do they know these Baltimore people are telling the truth?”

  “I don’t know,” I said fidgeting in the chair. “But everyone seems to be buying their story, and I hate to say it but after all this new information that’s come out, it sounds accurate. I just wish I’d known about it sooner. I mean the details.”

  “But you didn’t get—”

  “Fired?” I interrupted him, saving him the e
mbarrassment of having to say the word. “I definitely got fired. I tried to shop around for something new in New York. Save face and all that. But it’s not realistic right now. So I came home.”

  He eyed me and I knew he knew what I was looking for.

  “You were overwhelmed, Carolyn. That’s all. Just overwhelmed. I’ve known you for years and it takes a lot to get you overwhelmed. They shouldn’t have let you get there. Louise DeWitt could have helped you.”

  “I don’t know about that. I should have told her about Baltimore.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think I would have, either.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “What do you think I should do while I’m in Newport for a month?”

  “Well, work here, of course. That’s why you came by, isn’t it?” he said, winking at me.

  “It is. But I wouldn’t fault you for not hiring me.”

  “Nonsense. But I’m paying you what I paid you in high school, plus commission. Sound fair?”

  Eight twenty-five an hour plus commission? It sounded like I would be eating a lot of macaroni and cheese. I’d go back to New York looking like an orange, rotund noodle.

  William stood up from his chair and dabbed his brown eyes with a handkerchief. Years of being around musty furniture and memorabilia made his eyes water like a puppy with a sinus infection.

  “You know what I want you to do?” he said, heading to his computer to print something. “I want you to buy for me. Scout and buy. I trust you to do that. You know more than I do at this point so you don’t even have to check in with me first. I’ll give you a budget for the month and you spend it. I’ll split commission with you any time it’s over two hundred dollars. How’s that sound?”

  “That sounds pretty fair,” I said, taking an address from him.

  “There have been some very good local auctions down in an old converted fire station in Narragansett put on by a retired fisherman named Hook Durant.” He pointed to the address he had just given me. “You know him?”

  William looked at my face and laughed. “Not the crowd you’ve been hanging out with at Christie’s, I guess.”

  “Let’s just say they have a particular clientele.”

  “I bet they do,” he replied. “But that’s too bad. I think everyone deserves to own a bit of history and that history can cost five dollars or fifty million.”

  “Right. That’s why I always liked working here.”

  “Oh yeah?” he asked, looking over his reading glasses. “Go after many five-dollar lots over there at Christie’s?”

  He laughed at himself and kept talking. Before I left the store that day, he wrote down my new working hours on a scrap of paper and handed me a check for ten thousand dollars. I looked up at him, said, “Seriously?” and he gave me a little slap on the back.

  “Find me things! Wonderful things. Go, go!”

  “Your happiness scares me, William.”

  “Carolyn,” he said sternly. “You are a very happy person underneath all this. I’m glad you left New York with all those . . . people.”

  Narragansett was a coastal town about a thirty-minute drive southwest from Newport. It was wealthy, but not like Newport, and it was one of those places I was always driving through rather than stopping in. Their old firehouse had been bought and sold a half dozen times since it was built. It was part of a hotel, and then used as a gym, was donated to a church group, bought back by the hotel, used as a lawyer’s office, and now, I guessed, was empty and being used as a type of auction house, though it was styled more like a high school gymnasium than any auction house I had ever set foot in.

  The first thing that surprised me about Hook Durant’s was how casual it was. And then really, how strange it was. To kick things off, they were serving alcohol. Tons of it. I could see what looked like a barrel of oddly colored red wine near the door. Second, the auction was at ten o’clock in the morning and it was full of women. I was expecting around ten people to be in attendance, but at 9:45 in mid-February, there were already thirty people in the room. Some women looked affluent, some looked much less so, and some just looked a little eccentric and curious. There were a few men, too, mostly older, but they seemed to be accompanying the women, not leading the show. At Christie’s, it was almost always the opposite.

  I spotted Hook right away. He looked like a weight lifter wearing a navy blue sweater. He was chewing on a pipe instead of smoking it and his roving eyes seemed to take in everything in the room, even what was going on behind him. Everything about Hook was big. He was broadly built and had large features and wild, unkempt black hair. He must have electrocuted himself every morning to get it to stand up the way it did. And though he seemed the kind of man who would be far more comfortable in a pair of carpenter pants and a flannel shirt, he was wearing plaid dress pants.

  I sat on the back row of the metal bleachers holding my paddle. I was the only person on the row when the auction started, so I quickly slid down to the next row and placed my paddle square on my lap. I was wearing jeans, because the only piece of advice William had given me for the auction was “Wear an old pair of jeans. Hook loves to swindle the rich.” I flipped the paddle over between my fingers, fanning myself even though it was about fifty degrees inside the building. The paddle was nothing more than a thick tongue depressor with a printed cardboard square on it. Inside that square was my red number, drawn in marker, number 37.

  At exactly 10 A.M., with the room filled with forty-five women who clearly didn’t care a thing about indoor voices, Hook started things off with the first lot. I didn’t know if the former fisherman knew anything about antiques, though I liked many of his first lots. And the man could definitely call an auction. He sounded like a gypsy who had gotten hold of fifty years of Christie’s auction recordings and learned to emulate them adding a thick dose of homespun rhetoric. His voice rose, he scanned the room expertly, never missed a hand, and moved lots for much more than I thought they were worth. I did not plan to pay that kind of money, so I waited. The first thing I bid on was a wooden carved American eagle for $160. Then I bid on a side table of questionable provenance, a nineteenth-century copper weather vane, and an old Amoco gas station sign, but was outbid by a woman in my row who was clearly on the road to getting completely wasted.

  “I don’t recognize you, do I,” she asked me after she slapped me five across the laps of two other women when she won.

  “I don’t think so,” I said, introducing myself.

  She eyed me and lifted her glass. “Merlot makes everything better, don’t you think?”

  “Well, maybe not auctions,” I replied. “Level head and all that. I’ve actually never seen it served at an auction. I think it’s illegal.”

  “Illegal? I love it. You’re a crackerjack! Come on, keep bidding. It’s Valentine’s Day and I want to beat you again.” She wrapped her plump hand around her paddle and practiced shooting it up skyward.

  “Hey, time me! How long does it take me to get my paddle up?”

  She waited for me to look at my watch before doing it again.

  “Less than a second,” I replied.

  “I knew it, I knew it. I’m like a human rocket ship. Kaboom! Bid again, Everett.”

  So I kept bidding. And I let her beat me again.

  The following Tuesday, I was back at Hook Durant’s auction. William had sold the copper weather vane for six times what I paid, the side table was Thomas Molesworth and would certainly make back more than double, and the eagle had previously sold at Christie’s for a hair above thirty thousand dollars.

  “Did you recognize this eagle, Carolyn?” William said, stroking the head of the painted, gilded object. He gave it a hug and ran his hand down the wing. It was gripping a wooden American flag and a red, white, and blue shield with its claws.

  “I thought I recognized it from a 1992 Christie’
s catalogue. The position of the feet looked familiar.”

  “Thought you recognized it. And from 1992! Let’s not belittle this accomplishment. You’re an absolute genius. You were when you were young and you’re even smarter today. Christie’s is going to seriously regret letting you go.” We stood together and admired the expensive piece of Americana. “I’m going to try to sell it for thirty-one thousand. That should net you enough of a commission to stay in Newport for another couple of months. You have to stay. I knew you would do well at Hook’s. Everyone else there is drunk. Don’t drink. Don’t even look at that poison Merlot he serves. He makes it in the backyard,” William advised me. “And don’t let those old heiresses bid you up too much. They’re just there for the game. It’s like gambling to them, without the blue-collar reputation or the hookers. I don’t know how Hook got such a great eye, but he has one. Luckily yours is better. He can tell if something is beautiful, but you can tell what it’s worth. I want you to spend every Tuesday at Hook Durant’s. How many Tuesdays do you have left?”

  “Four, counting today,” I answered, surprised that I’d already been in Newport more than a week.

  On that next Tuesday, feeling very optimistic and hungry after last week’s buys, I sat on the top bleacher in Narragansett again. Unlike houses that had auctions by department, Hook Durant ran his little auction like he was putting his hand in a magic suitcase and selling whatever he found. He would sell a gun, followed by an oil painting, and then some antique children’s toys, collectible wine, a Chinese vase, whatever he had in his arsenal. And the best part about it was that in Rhode Island, in the winter, when the population around Newport was reduced by half, there was still a buyer for almost everything.

  I had passed on the first twenty-three lots that Tuesday, but Lot 24 piqued my interest as soon as Hook set it on the card table next to him.

  “Next up we’ve got this little bowl! Who doesn’t love a bowl. This bowl is about a foot across and definitely from the Middle East. Arabic origins. Yemen or Egypt perhaps. There’s Arabic writing inside. And look at that detail. This looks like it took fifty years to paint.” He flipped it on its side so we could see the beautiful, intricately detailed vegetal motif. “It’s small, but it packs some historic punch! Of course, I have no idea what that is, but I’ll leave it to the lucky buyer to find out. Could be very old, could have been made yesterday. Let’s all have a big swig of Merlot and then we’ll get the bidding started at five dollars.”