The Price of Inheritance Read online

  “Could you send me a picture of your table?” I asked. “It’s hard to take anything to the next step if we don’t have a photo,” I explained.

  “Trust me. You should take this seriously because Nina has that table.”

  “Can you please just start by sending me a photo?” I asked, giving him my email address.

  “Yes, I can send you a photo but don’t you want to come down here to Baltimore and see it? You’re about to sell a fake.”

  I was less than two weeks away from our sale. I was working fourteen hours a day and I still felt like I was three months from being ready. The last thing I was going to do was take a train down to Baltimore to see some flea market table someone was trying to pass off as a Hugh Finlay, a furniture maker that rarely fetched prices higher than the low six figures.

  “If you could just send me a photo . . . that’s how we start everything in the auction world,” I repeated. “If we can’t see it, we can’t do much with it.”

  I let Richard go and spent the rest of the day and evening refreshing my email, but nothing from Baltimore came through. I happily let the call go as some petty, highly original criminal trying to make a buck and I set my mind back on Elizabeth’s sale. When I helped consign the Nicholas Brown I had a little bit of luck thanks to the tip. Jack had changed his mind a few times as the American economy continued to rapidly tank, but I’d paced him through that. He was a seller who was ready to sell. Elizabeth was different. Elizabeth’s estate was a very tough get but presented one hundred twenty-seven chances for historic sales.

  It wasn’t until three days later that I got the picture that Richard from Baltimore had promised me. It came to my Christie’s email address from his sister Nina along with a message saying she was absolutely positive that the one in the collection of Mrs. Adam R. Tumlinson must be a replica or a fake. But she was wrong. It wasn’t a piece that we’d known Elizabeth had for years, but we had inspected it in Texas and it was no mistake.

  We were now ten days from the sale, and it had taken them seventy-two hours to send me a photo. I refused to pay attention to these people. It was without question a Hugh Finlay stenciled pier table made in Baltimore in the early nineteenth century. There was no hole in the provenance on that piece. It had been in the Tumlinson family for generations and they had two other Finlay pieces, which could be traced to the same decade. One was a Federal mahogany sofa, which had been reupholstered. It was bought at auction in 2006 from a prominent family who had been in South Carolina since the early eighteenth century. It had never been owned by anyone else besides them and the Tumlinsons and was estimated between $190,000 and $200,000. The other was a round tea table built around 1790, which had been in the Tumlinson family since it was bought by Adam’s great-grandfather, James Tumlinson, in 1817. Adam’s family came to Baltimore aboard the Dove in 1634 and just shy of 30 percent of Adam and Elizabeth’s collection had been passed down exclusively from family. They’d even had pieces sell, through Christie’s, that had the exact same provenance as the pier table. Three of those Hugh Finlay pieces all sold in the early nineties. Hugh Finlay kept meticulous records. And James Tumlinson appeared in his records. That was as good as it got.

  I shouldn’t have been anxious. I knew the Impressionist and Modern Art department received calls like this frequently. The only thing that was worrying me was that we didn’t. I had never gotten a call about a fake and it was something I thought I was immune to in my department. When I got into bed that Thursday night, I knew sleep was not in my immediate future. My nerves were shaky and I couldn’t stop thinking about Baltimore. After two hours of restlessness, I got out of bed and sat on the small Queen Anne walnut side chair that I had spent three months’ salary on during my first year at Christie’s. It was the only thing I had ever bought at auction and it only made me love the world of buying and selling and bidding and winning and losing even more.

  I pulled open the metal window next to the chair and let the freezing night air in. I didn’t have a very good view, but I liked my bad view best at night, when everything, including the insides of the buildings, was still. It was in that chair that I eventually fell asleep with my feet propped up on my bed, and when I woke up that morning at six, I was clinging to my quilt, which I had managed to rip off the bed, and my nose felt like a Popsicle screwed onto my face. I’d probably contracted seven different strands of the cold virus and even an hour-long shower couldn’t warm me up.

  It was while sitting on a bar stool, eating a green pepper and cheese omelet as the sun rose, that I first felt real anxiety about the phone call from Baltimore. The thing about the Hugh Finlay table was it had such a unique look. It was marbleized, grained, and stenciled. It had gold leaf inlay and stood out because of the level of detail. I pulled a Christie’s folder toward me and opened it, taking out a color print of the picture the woman in Baltimore had sent me. It looked a lot like Elizabeth’s. I stared at it with a brass magnifying glass. It looked exactly like Elizabeth’s.

  I turned the piece of paper upside down and looked at the legs. The photo looked old, but the table appeared to be in great condition, just like Elizabeth’s was. I pushed it across the counter and swirled my eggs around the plate. Why was I so worked up? There were dozens of ways to doctor an image. It had to be inauthentic. This was just another crazy person trying to make a buck. I tried to convince myself of that as I finished my cold, runny eggs and all I could come up with was, why this piece of furniture? It was not where the money was. Why wasn’t this woman trying to scam the Impressionist department? Or if she was furniture obsessed, why not pick something that was worth a lot more? Something with less detail yet more value? If someone were skilled enough to fake early nineteenth-century furniture, why would they waste their efforts on a small pier table? This was ridiculous. I threw my plate in the sink, not caring if the egg remained solidified there for a year. I hated myself for picking up that call.

  On Saturday, more than a week after I had drunk in my office with Nicole on New Year’s Eve while we worked, and only eight days away from the January sale, I emailed Nina and told her I would meet her and her brother to look at the table the following day. It would take all day to go to Baltimore and back, but the certainty with which Richard Jones had spoken was haunting me. In 2000, Christie’s and Sotheby’s pleaded guilty to fixing sellers’ commissions and integrity was something we were all trying to push to the forefront. I had to make sure nothing from under the surface was going to boil up and ruin the auction.

  I hadn’t spent much time in Baltimore. I focused more on New York and New England when it came to acquisitions, but Nicole had a real interest in mid-Atlantic and southern furniture. I thought about showing her the picture. She knew Hugh Finlay better than anyone in the department. But she had been leaving the office at midnight and was more stressed than I had seen her in the past five years. I couldn’t pile on the panic, especially for something as small as this. So I headed to Penn Station alone and boarded the regional train south.

  The train flew by Newark, central New Jersey, and northern Maryland and I sat with my piles of provenance documents for all the Hugh Finlay pieces that the Tumlinsons had ever bought or sold. I read them over. When I went bleary-eyed, I turned to the latest issues of Baer Faxt and Kovels’, and then went back to the papers. There was no way, I concluded. No way that Elizabeth’s table had any provenance issues.

  I exited the train at Baltimore’s Penn Station and took a cab toward the Inner Harbor. Baltimore, it turned out, was charming in the way that things without the sheen of money can be. It had life, if not wealth. There were pockets of affluence, I imagined—all those Hopkins doctors, and people like the Tumlinsons—but they weren’t on the beaten path. One of the things I loved about American furniture was that it was beautiful without being showy and the people who collected it liked solid, traditional things, not the gild and the glitz of furnishings from France, Austria, and Italy.

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sp; A few minutes too early to meet Nina and Richard, I watched men and women in thick coats walk their children in the direction of the Science Center and looked out across the redbrick plaza. I was meeting them at a restaurant called the Rusty Scupper, which sounded like a place that served canned worms with a side of fish heads, but it was actually very nice. I wasn’t going to go to a stranger’s home, because it was already unorthodox for me to meet them in Baltimore, rather than having them come to the Christie’s office or at the very least New York. Instead, they assured me they’d bring the table in their car and I could take a look at it. I sat down at an elevated bar table by the window, which looked out toward the boats docked just a few feet in front of it and the rectangular, squat office buildings on the other side of the harbor. Two minutes later I ordered a bottle of water and the waiter barely had it poured when a stout African-American man in khakis and a black down parka and a petite woman in a red wool coat approached me.

  “Are you Carolyn?” asked the man, without even a hint of a smile.

  “I am,” I said, trying to look equally unhappy. I put out my hand and shook his and his sister’s. They sat down across from me, and without opening their menus, thanked me for coming down.

  “It’s my pleasure,” I replied, urging them to order something. “We always take any concerns of provenance or authenticity very seriously.”

  “Oh, this is not a question of authenticity,” said Nina. She had smooth skin, despite her age, and just a swipe of red matte lipstick on her downturned lips. She must have been in her late fifties or early sixties, but because of her skin, small frame, freckles, and the way she carried herself—like a teacher whose class you never dared mouth off in—she looked younger. She took off her red coat, folded it neatly behind her, and adjusted her perfectly pressed gray wool dress, which looked like something she’d been wearing to important lunches for years. “This is a question about ownership,” she said firmly. “And that table, the Hugh Finlay table on page seventy-three in this auction catalogue”—she moved down and took the Tumlinson catalogue out of her black laptop bag—“well, that’s not Mrs. Adam R. Tumlinson’s. That table belonged to my mother. Would you like to see a picture of that table?”

  Why was she showing me a picture of the table when she was about to show me the actual table?

  “Here it is,” she said, pushing a grainy photo in my direction, the same one I had in my email. “Here is the picture of that table. Not Elizabeth or Adam Tumlinson’s table, but my mother’s table. My table. I have a few other pictures, too.”

  She reached back into the bag as her brother looked on, and brought out a small manila envelope with a piece of cardboard inside to keep it from bending. She emptied the contents and showed two black-and-white photos of an attractive woman in a cotton dress with a small hat pinned to her head, sitting at a table. Though not zoomed in and slightly out of focus, the table did look a lot like the Tumlinsons’, which was printed in our catalogue right next to the photograph.

  Nina pointed to the picture again.

  “Look here, right here,” she said. “Even in black-and-white you can see it. Look at the decoration on the sides and on the legs and that thick marble top; it’s all clear in these photos: the pattern, almost like a double-sided arrow. That’s the same as the one you have here in the catalogue. It’s the same table!”

  “So are you saying that yours is the real table and Elizabeth Tumlinson’s is not what it purports to be? Because I can assure you that we have done our research on her table and we have no reason to question its provenance. James Tumlinson, Adam Tumlinson’s great-grandfather, his name appears in Hugh Finlay’s sales records.”

  “Well, then it had to be for something else,” said Nina, clearly winning our staring contest. “Because this table here, this is the table that was in my mother’s shop until April seventh, 1968. She didn’t know it was worth a thing, which is why she had it in the store all covered in hats, but just before April of ’68 a woman, and I was there so I remember this very well, a woman who taught at Johns Hopkins came in because she was lost and she asked for directions. My mother gave them to her but the woman didn’t leave. She picked up several hats off the table, looked at the top of it and underneath, and asked my mother if she knew that she had a very expensive table in her store. My mom said she didn’t know too much about it, and the woman showed her the signature and explained that it was made by Hugh Finlay and the reason she knew this was because she had worked for the Baltimore Historical Society and studied that kind of thing. She offered to buy it, but I think my mother was pretty proud of herself for having something someone of that stature would recognize so she kept it. Turns out that was the wrong decision because just about two weeks later, on April seventh, it was gone.”

  “What do you mean by April seventh?” I asked. “April seventh, 1968? You wrote and said you would be bringing the table in the back of your brother’s car.” I looked at Richard, who looked at his sister.

  “Well, we don’t have the table anymore,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “You don’t have the table? But you told me you did. The only reason I am here is because you said you had the table!” My knee hit the underside of the much less expensive table we were sitting at and rattled my water glass.

  “Well, my guess was that if I told you I only had a picture of it, you would not have come down,” replied Nina.

  All of a sudden, I got it. I understood why I was in a restaurant and not in a parking lot looking at the table. Their mother could have been to the Tumlinsons’ at one point or another when they were in Baltimore and posed for a picture with their table. It was possible. I had come all the way down here, ignoring the million things I had to do before the January sale, just to look at a picture that I had already looked at sitting at my desk in New York.

  “Listen. Lying to someone is probably not the best way to conduct business, or whatever this is,” I said, starting to lose my patience.

  “Just hear me out, though,” said Nina. “I don’t have the table, but I do have a few things to show you. Will you give us five more minutes?”

  I had left New York four hours ago. What was five more minutes.

  “This table,” said Nina, holding her picture next to the catalogue, “was in my mother’s store for years, right at the front entrance. She and my father owned a women’s clothing shop on the fourteen hundred block of North Milton Street, though she really ran the place. And when he died in 1965, she did run the place. North Milton, now, I don’t know how much you know about that time, but that’s the street where the fires started during the Baltimore riots of 1968.”

  Looking me over and deciding I was too young to know the details of what she was talking about, she said, “Those were the riots that took place all over the country after Martin Luther King was shot.”

  I nodded, listening, aware of the riots, but not much about them.

  “My parents, they kept that table near the entrance of the store, close to the cash register, because it had such a nice look about it. Like I said, there were usually a few of the most expensive hats we sold and other small items on it. And even after they knew the table was worth something, they kept it there. In fact, they cleared it off, cleaned it better than ever, and inched it a little toward the front. They hoped it would attract people to the store and they planned to eventually sell it to that woman to put us through college. But neither of us ended up going to college because on that day in April, part of the store burned. Not the whole place, like some of the other businesses on North Milton. Well, all over town really. But part of it did. And the store and our business never recovered. That riot, it was devastation.”

  “And the table,” I said, interrupting her.

  “Well, it didn’t burn, because we never found any trace of it. It must have been looted. So much of the area was and people took everything during those riots. They stole clothes from the dry cl
eaners next door. Just filled up bags and took them. And they did the same thing at our place. They took everything that wasn’t charred by the fire.”

  “If you don’t mind me asking, how old were you during the riots?”

  “I was fourteen years old, but trust me, I remember that table. And I’m sure, and I mean sure, that it is the exact table that you have up for auction.”

  There were tables out there, which were “most likely” Hugh Finlay but were not certainly Finlay. The more I looked at Nina’s table, and heard her story, I started to think it could be real. But if it was, that certainly did not mean Elizabeth’s was inauthentic; it just meant this was a companion piece to the Finlay we had. Or maybe it was just a copy of a Finlay. The thing about Finlay, which I explained to Nina and Richard, was that he not only built furniture from mahogany; he also sold mahogany. He was also not the only person making Federal-style furniture in Baltimore in the early 1800s.

  “I take it your mother is no longer alive?” I asked them.

  “I’m afraid not,” replied Richard.

  “Are there any identifying marks on the table? Any chips or defects?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “Do you know how she got the table?”

  “I don’t,” said Nina. “I remember her always having it in the store. It could have come with the store.”

  “I think your table was possibly a companion piece, which would mean that it looked exactly like this one in the catalogue. That’s the most probable explanation, and I’d like to help if I can. It’s just that we’re a little busy in New York right now, as you might assume, but maybe I can after the sale.”

  “What do you mean about companion piece?” said Richard.

  “Companion piece, it just means that the maker made two of the exact same table, to go on either end of a sofa or chaise. This, on page seventy-three is a pier table, it’s possible that he made two, but no one knew about it because the table was never bought or sold publicly and it wasn’t in his records.”