The Price of Inheritance Read online

  After seventy-two hours with the curtains drawn I lost track of day and night. When I wasn’t hiding from the outside world, I alternated between sleeping in my bed and sleeping in the wooden chair I had spent the night in before everything happened, before Christie’s became a place I was no longer welcome. And then, suddenly it was Monday. It was January 22, four days since the auction. I had almost no food left and I didn’t want to order any. Instead of eating, I drank tap water with the occasional shot of vodka chucked in. I just wanted to sit, and stare, get wildly drunk, and ignore my newly acquired life crisis.

  But I wasn’t that lucky. Only one person had the key to my apartment besides my landlord: my mother. On Wednesday night, she decided to use it. I was facedown on my bed, naked, covered in sheets and blankets, which were starting to get pungent from sweat, when I heard the lock snap open. I should have immediately turned around to make sure it wasn’t some zombie-eyed killer who liked to bludgeon women who’d already lost the will to live, but I didn’t. It wasn’t until I heard my mother’s monotone voice imploring me to remove the chain that I turned my head to look at her. I could just make out a thin strip of her body between the wall and the door and her left eye. She put two fingers on the chain motioning for me to come open it.

  “Carolyn. Now, please,” she said, rattling the paint-coated old chain.

  I looked up from my bed, registered that it was her, and lay back down, not planning on moving again. Maybe she would give up and go away. My parents were fond of abandoning me. They’d forgotten me in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence once for seven hours. I’d been found napping under Caravaggio’s Bacchus, which could explain my penchant for alcohol and men with questionable morals.

  “Nicole called me. She told me everything,” my mother said from the hallway. “We were worried when we didn’t hear from you after the auction, but you can be very distant. So we weren’t all that worried. Actually your father won an indoor tennis tournament last weekend, men’s senior singles. They gave him a laurel wreath, which I thought was odd . . . but I’m off topic. Nicole, she called and explained everything that happened, she sent the link to the Baltimore Sun article. And understandably, now we’re very worried.”

  So there had been an article. Was I mentioned by name? Was Louise? Or did they just use the general Christie’s American Furniture and Decorative Arts department label? I wanted to ask. But I didn’t want to know the answer. My mom was the very last person I wanted to see. She, who never failed.

  I remember when I was little and brought home report cards full of A’s, she would smile and say, “Good job, kiddo. You’re just like me. Smart as a flea.” She’d blow a kiss in the general direction of my face and go straight back to her work. But I remember living for that praise, hence my lifetime of near-perfect grades.

  I heard her fiddling with the chain again, trying to break her way inside. She raised her voice and demanded to be let in or she would “find an ax and chop, chop, chop,” so finally I got out of bed completely naked, removed the chain, and went straight back under the covers. The TV was still on and she immediately turned it off, cracked a window open muttering something about “a retirement-home-strength stench,” and sat on the edge of my bed. She smelled like wool sweaters and parental disappointment.

  “What happened?” Her hand grazed my calf and then moved on to my foot. She wrapped her hand around it, not exactly stroking it or massaging it, just holding it. My mother was only twenty years older than me and she barely looked it. When she turned forty-nine at Christmastime, she shrugged, glanced at herself in the mirror, and announced that everything was just fine. That’s the way it was in my family; everything was always supposed to be just fine.

  “I don’t know what happened,” I replied, not lifting my head from the pillow. She could probably barely hear me, but I didn’t care. I hadn’t asked her to come.

  “And is it as bad as Nicole said?” she asked, still awkwardly holding my foot, which probably smelled like a fish at this point. “Have you disgraced yourself, your family, and your future offspring?”

  Is that what Nicole said? How wonderful. I was so glad to have acquired such loyal friends during my decade at Christie’s.

  “I’m sure it’s much worse,” I replied, lifting my head slightly. “You read the Sun?” I asked, finally looking up at her.

  Her face looked smooth and distinguished, the kind of face that never wrinkles very much because it never moves very much. Her light blue eyes looked at the wall next to my bed and fell on the chair by the window.

  “Is that chair broken?” she asked, looking at it and ignoring the question.

  “The arms fell off,” I replied.

  And by fell off I meant that the night before she knocked on my door uninvited I ripped them off with the help of my foot.

  “That’s too bad; such a pretty chair.” She turned her face and looked at me. My mother’s presence was making it feel more real. She was here to bail me out and I knew that it took a lot to get her to that point. She unbuttoned her cardigan and put it on the broken chair. She looked nothing like me. She was tall, with willowy limbs, an air of ambivalence, and a perpetual tan. I, on the other hand, was regularly described as petite, pale, and intense.

  “What am I going to do?” I asked sadly.

  “You’re a very smart girl, Carolyn. You’re my girl. And you’re not going to worry about it now. In a few days, you’ll fix it.”

  I ignored the second half of her sentence and concentrated on the first. My mother wrapped her thin arms around me and mumbled something about my flair for the dramatic. It wasn’t the kind of hug that warmed your bones with love and compassion. It was the kind of hug that came from a woman who shuddered at the thought of professional ruin. But she’d called me her girl. And she was here, helping me.

  She changed my sheets and blankets, pointed to the center of the bed, and told me to wait there while she went out to get us food. And I did. I sat still until I started to slink down, deeper and deeper until I was lying flat again, drifting off to sleep. I faintly heard her come back in, but I barely stirred. Then I could sense her getting into bed next to me. I had never been a kid who curled up in her parents’ bed. There were very firm lines drawn in my house of where I could and could not be. But here was my mother sharing my bed. Watching me. Taking care of me. And for a second, between all the self-pitying I was doing, I felt lucky. I felt loved.

  “I have a plan,” my mother said as soon as my eyelids fluttered the next morning. She smiled at me as if she were about to announce that I was going to have all my teeth removed with rusty pliers by children playing doctor.

  “Nothing in life is worth mourning like this, Carolyn. You need to make a few of the right moves now, and then you’ll see, everything will turn out just fine. You are allowed to mourn your loss for twenty-four hours and then you have to let it go and get your life back. Like I said yesterday, you’re my girl, and this”—she pointed at me slumped over in bed, a jar of peanut butter and a baking spatula on the floor next to me—“is not my girl.” I looked at her with my recently perfected sad face. With her shiny brown hair and flawless makeup, we didn’t even look related. She even smelled like success.

  “I think I’m the horse who jumped off the track and now the owner has to shoot it.”

  “Oh Carolyn, stop it. Where did I find you? Universal Studios? You’re being ridiculous. You’re going to go out and get a haircut. Getting haircuts always makes a person feel better.”

  “I just got a haircut.”

  “Well, then get it cut again!” my mother screamed without really looking at me.

  “After you have a day of relaxation, we are going to go to the Vollinger Gallery at seven P.M. sharp for the opening of the Pennsylvania Furniture Show. I know you already RSVP’d to it. I asked Nicole this morning. She plans on being there, too. She was instructed not to speak to you by Louise but she’s going to
blink at you across the room three times to show she cares.” My mother paused and listened to me say the word no about fifteen times.

  “The thing you do not understand, Carolyn, is how important it is to get back out there immediately. You put on a brave face and show the world that none of this affected you. You’re above this and too smart for their petty gossip. Tell the art world that this was just an inconsequential misunderstanding. If you act that way, they’ll see it your way. Trust me. I know about these things.” She sighed and stared at me like I was some rent-a-kid she still couldn’t believe she got stuck with.

  “No,” I said again. “No way, not happening, not even entertaining the idea.”

  “You will go, or I will not leave your apartment. Ever,” my mother said firmly. “If you go with me tonight, I will leave tomorrow morning and let you make your own decisions. Now, doesn’t that sound appealing. How to get rid of your mother.” I knew I should have emancipated myself at sixteen like Macaulay Culkin.

  I left the apartment, but only because my mom was in it and I wanted to be far away from her. But I was not getting a haircut. What I needed to do was read. I had to suck it up and open the Sun article. I had to check my email, listen to my voicemail, and tell Nicole, Alex, and Jane that I wasn’t dead. I turned on my now-charged phone and sent three texts, all of which said, “I am not dead. Just trying to figure things out. I’m sorry I’ve been out of touch. I appreciate your concern and I’ll call you soon.” My hand was shaking so I stood up and bought two Rice Krispies treats, sat at a table in the back, and tried not to hyperventilate. It didn’t work. I was hyperventilating. Next I’d be sweating, and based on the last few days, tears would follow. But what choice did I have. I couldn’t exactly go to some party at the Vollinger Gallery and not know what shape my career was in.

  The Baltimore Sun. I had to start with the Sun. Or maybe I should just google myself. No. The Baltimore Sun. It was a warm and friendly paper. Meg Ryan’s character worked there in Sleepless in Seattle. There was no way they were going to trash an innocent person like me. I loaded the home page on my phone. “Triple homicide, all children, bludgeoned by masked man.” Great. That was a swell headline. Was this paper printed at the penitentiary? I searched for my name in the paper’s archives and exactly one article came up. “Christie’s big Baltimore boo-boo.” I dropped my phone on the table and stuffed one of the cellulite bars in my mouth.

  The article followed just what Louise had said. This enterprising reporter, whom I now wished great harm upon, had managed to find the family that Nina’s grandmother worked for and that family had produced photos of the table in their house. They’d also found some bankbook or record where their great-grandfather had noted that the table had been given to “the negro maid” when she retired as a thank-you gift. There was no concrete theory on how it had gotten from the Joneses’ shop into the Tumlinsons’ house, first in Baltimore and then in Texas, but some unnamed source said Adam Tumlinson had dealt with art dealers who had been in trouble before and another said that Adam Tumlinson himself employed several personal aides who were less than ethical in helping him build the perfect collection. Where exactly was this information when we were working with the Tumlinson estate? Had I not checked enough? Could I have found all this? Christie’s had been helping Adam buy and sell for decades and nothing like this had ever come up. I felt sick. The provenance of all of the Tumlinsons’ Baltimore furniture was now in question, and the whole estate felt shaky. The paper called it “a grave embarrassment for the small, yet respected, American Furniture and Decorative Arts Department, led by Louise DeWitt.” Some art expert who they probably found selling chalk art to tourists on the Inner Harbor said it would take the department “years to recover. Maybe a decade.” But I knew that. I knew that as soon as I had heard Louise utter the word stolen.

  My stomach was churning. It was all here, in front of me, the demise of my career. Louise was mentioned by name and so was I, along with Nicole and Erik. It made us out to all be at fault, not just me, which meant that they wrote the article before they knew I had been exiled from Christie’s. Had there been a follow-up? Not in the Baltimore Sun. The story hadn’t been picked up by the Times but the Washington Post gave it a few inches and every inside art publication had run it or linked to it, which meant everyone in my industry knew about it. And unfortunately, those were the only people I cared about and the only ones who could give me a job.

  There was no way my department, my former department, was going to recover from this quickly. It wasn’t just the one piece; the Hugh Finlay table was poison to the whole estate. And still my mother was convinced that someone from Sotheby’s or Bonhams was going to sprint to me at the Vollinger Gallery, hand me a big fat contract to sign on the line, and say, “Welcome to the family, little one.”

  I slowly wove through the city blocks home and my mother opened my door before I reached it. She had on her navy blue shift dress, a Chanel copy she’d had custom made in the Garment District, which she’d been wearing with sensible kitten heels and a double strand of pearls for the last decade. Her dark hair was arranged in her perfect helmet of success. She looked at me and said, “Vollinger Gallery. You have no choice. Please get ready.” So I would die in public. I’d probably be stoned. Louise surely had Nicole pushing around a wheelbarrow full of boulders just in case she ran into me and had to kill me like in “The Lottery.” I put on a black sleeveless dress, which I’d found in a ball on the floor, no makeup, and motorcycle boots. I looked unpolished, unkempt, un-Christie’s, which is what I was. I was accepting my fate.

  The Vollinger Gallery was the best American furniture gallery in New York City. If you weren’t buying American furniture at auction or from a private dealer, you were buying it from Vollinger. I sat against the leather seat of the cab and mentally went through a checklist of who could be there. Louise could definitely be there, if she wasn’t too busy wading through the mess I’d left her. David Marcham could be there, too. He might slap me on the back and thank me in front of everyone for taking out his competition so publicly and swiftly.

  We arrived on the early side, which was good and terrible. It was good because there were fewer people milling through the five floors of the nineteenth-century town house on East Eighty-Fourth Street, and bad because the few people who were there were all looking at the door anticipating who might arrive next.

  None of them was expecting me.

  Rebecca Wall was the manager of the gallery and was so tall you almost wanted to ask her what the air was like up there. She also had one of those pan-British accents that made you think she was raised between London and some former British African colony like Malawi. She had a perpetual tan and always wore her hair in a topknot like she wanted to conduct electricity. She saw me when I walked in and actually put her hand on her heart.

  Marisa Irving, another gallerina and the manager of the well-known Steiner Gallery, moved briskly toward Rebecca in her over-the-knee Louis Vuitton boots to talk about one thing: the ignoramus that was I.

  “This is really fun, Mom. What’s next, lethal injection?” She shut me up with a flick of her wrist and gave the room her best academic smile, a little sincere, a lot more menacing.

  I stood in the corner with her and watched everyone who dealt with American furniture walk in except Louise, Nicole, and Erik.

  I knew that normally one of them would have made it. Probably Louise. But they were surely still at work dealing with the aftermath of the auction. Within the next five minutes, they would know that I was there. Someone would text them and preface it with “Guess the buffoon who just walked in??!!”

  I leaned over to my mother and whispered, “I need to leave. Where is the door? I can’t be here.”

  “You are a very smart woman. Just persevere. Smile. Let them see that what happened is no big deal. Nothing to gawk at. People will take cues from the way you present yourself.”

  It was at t
hat moment that my own mother abandoned me. Without warning, she beelined out the door and left me standing there, exposed. Within seconds, a group of five women, the dreaded gallerinas, rushed over to me.

  The gallery girls of New York are like starving attack dogs in really nice clothes. All have legs for days and glasses so edgy you wondered why they didn’t just strap two paperweights to their faces with some hooks. I knew most of them, I was friends with a few of them, and I didn’t want to see any of them. But as these girls appeared next to me with dinner-plate eyes and their fingers poised to text everyone my reaction, it was clear that I had no choice. They were going to stone me.

  “Carolyn Everett! I can’t believe you’re here! I’m going to blog about this immediately,” said one named Jacqueline, grabbing me by the elbow and pouting like a model who eats only baby carrots and laxatives.

  “Bold. Extremely bold move, Carolyn,” said her friend Kira.

  I hated my mother. Hated. How could she leave me like this? She knew this was going to happen. She was probably standing outside watching me from a window in some form of sadistic parenting.

  “How much Xanax are you on? Can you see me? Do I look like a cartoon character?” said Kira.

  “I wouldn’t be able to walk,” said Jacqueline. “I’d be too distraught. Someone would have to push me in a delicate chair. Not like a wheelchair but maybe a Chippendale fauteuil with small sliding disks on the bottom.”