The Price of Inheritance Read online

  “Are you thinking about rehab?” Kira asked. “I know a few places that will let you in to rest even if you don’t have a valid addiction. But if you play your hand right, you could just convince everyone that your mistake was due to an innocent little meth problem.”

  Wait, a meth addiction was better than making a mistake? The girls waited for me to reply and all I could say was, “I hate my mother.”

  They shook their heads in agreement and started swapping stories of their crazy childhoods. Who needed a family? I could be like Mowgli the jungle boy and live in the forest and befriend ants. I did not need to be exposed to this slow, female torture.

  “You really picked the party to come to,” said Kira. “Everyone’s here. Lots of nonfurniture people. Do you know Michael Ando from Christie’s Tokyo? He’s upstairs. And Max Sebastian from Sotheby’s London. Do you know him? He’s very good-looking, for someone so terribly old. He’s right over there with that thief of an art dealer Greta Merch.” She waved her wrist toward the windows.

  “How old is he?” I asked, looking at the man regularly called the silver fox of the art world.

  “Fifty. Halfway dead.”

  Max Sebastian looked very much alive. He was a pleasant-looking fifty, wearing age in a way that caused people to say, “If that’s what fifty looks like . . .” But despite the comfort of his looks, he had a standoffish quality that made him just right to be a department head.

  “Miller McCarthy is here, too. Sotheby’s. Impressionism,” said Kira, pointing at a wisp of a woman in a cape and riding boots.

  “Why is she here?”

  “She’s here because Max is here. Oxbridge connection. Max is here because Francie Aldridge is here. Francie is here because Louise was supposed to be here and you’re here to show all these people that you’re a real tough cookie, right?”

  I wanted to punch her.

  The girls finally left me to fight back my rage, which I had to do with twice as much strength when I spied David Marcham walk through the door. Instead of ignoring me, as he should have done, he walked right over with a big, expensive smile.

  “Hi, Carolyn. How are you?”

  “I’ve been better,” I said, deadpan.

  My mother might not understand my level of mortification, but David did.

  “Pretty brave of you to come out here. Especially to this,” he said, motioning to all the women in the room. “It’s full of hawks.”

  What was I going to say to that? My mother made me? I was planning on throwing myself off a building but this seemed like a more uncomfortable way to die?

  “Well, I guess I used to be one of them.”

  “A hawk,” he said, smiling. “Yes, you were. Ruthless even. And very good at your job. One of the best I’ve seen in that department at Christie’s, maybe ever.”

  “Thanks,” I said, genuinely appreciative of his compliment. The only nice thing I had heard lately was when I walked out of the shower and my mother said, “You stink less than you did fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Why are you here?” he asked.

  That was a very good question.

  “I don’t know,” I said, biting my bottom lip. Why was I there. “I guess I’m hoping that eventually I can do something else. Find another job.”

  “Ah, I see,” he said, cutting me off before I could embarrass myself even more. “I doubt you want my advice but I’ll give it to you anyway.”

  I looked at him expectantly. Hopefully his advice was “Run, don’t walk to Sotheby’s; there’s a desk waiting for you.”

  He smiled at me and put his hand on my shoulder, not condescendingly but more as a person who didn’t want me to end my life on a cold gray night in January in New York.

  “Go do something else for a while. Take a break. The art world can be very unforgiving.”

  Yes, it could be. It was being unforgiving right now in the form of a slightly balding man in a very expensive suit. But what else could I do?

  I let my evening finish on that note and left the gallery without another word. By the time I reached my apartment I was crying again. My mother walked up to me and apologized.

  “I was only trying to help, Carolyn. I call it modern parenting for the unconventional child. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, running my hand across my tears and smearing them across my face. “I wish you hadn’t left me there.”

  “I know. But no one was going to talk to you if I was standing there.”

  “That would have been nice.”

  “Did you speak to anyone interesting?”

  “David Marcham.” I put my hand up to caution her from doing leaps in celebration. “It went terribly. He suggested I leave the auction world altogether.”

  “He’s an imbecile.”

  “Not exactly. Though I’ve never liked him very much. All that showboating on Antiques Roadshow. It’s weird.”

  The next morning, my mom packed her things, made sure my cabinets were well stocked with food, poured the rest of my vodka down the sink, and gave me a hug.

  “You don’t need me anymore, do you?”

  “It’s not that I don’t need you, it’s just that I don’t need this right now. My old life is not mine anymore.”

  “Don’t you want it back?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I mean yes, but not today. Not right now. I tried to get back on the same track and I just can’t. No one wants me right now.”

  “Well then, they’re idiots! Pea-brained fools,” said my mom, giving me a stiff hug before she reached for her bag.

  “Don’t be a stranger,” she said, doing her walk-away-and-wave move. I heard her soft steps down the carpeted stairs. Soon she would be at Penn Station on a train back to Boston and she’d think about how different the two of us were after all.

  I’d only been rid of my mother for ten minutes when Alex called. She’d probably called him on her way out and told him to contact me immediately so I didn’t run out to buy more vodka to mix with my tap water.

  “I’m worried about you,” said Alex. “I’m very, very worried about you. But I figured you needed your space. So I gave it to you. And then your mother called and said you have had all the space you can handle, so I called. Are you feeling better now?”

  “A little,” I said, lying.

  “Would you like to see me?”

  Did I want to see Alex? That was a very good question.

  “I’ll take your silence as a ‘not right now,’ ” said Alex diplomatically.

  “Carolyn?”

  “Yes,” I said, apologizing for the long, awkward pause.

  “I’m sorry that happened to you.”

  “Do you know everything?”

  “Well, not everything, but I read the papers and Nicole called me and your mother called me, so I guess I have a pretty good picture of it all.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, trying to fight back the distinct sound of shame in my voice. “I know how much you care about our shining careers. How much we both do. We always planned to be such big New York success stories and now I’ve written that other kind of story. The kind where the heroine dies penniless and forgotten.” I was crying again.

  “Carolyn, stop. You made a mistake. Big deal. It was about time you made a mistake.”

  “Time I made a mistake? Do you take some perverse enjoyment in watching me fail?”

  “No, but you never fail. You didn’t fail now. I think it’s good for people sometimes, for things to go wrong. It builds character. And you, you’ve just never really done anything wrong. You graduated summa cum laude from Princeton. You were in Ivy Club, you got a job at Christie’s before you even graduated, and you were the youngest person to ever hold your job there. You’re a wunderkind. It was time for you to mess up.”

  “What should
I do, Alex?” I said, my voice tired and gravelly.

  “Why don’t you try something else? You’ve only done one thing your entire professional life. Even when we were in high school you wanted to work for an auction house. There are millions of other jobs in the world. Try one.”

  “ ‘Try one.’ You make it sound awfully easy. Which one should I try?”

  “I don’t know. Stockbroker, tightrope walker, teacher, parachutist, lawyer, cosmonaut. You’re a smart girl, Carolyn, and you need a break right now. From me, from New York, from art and auctions, and frankly, from yourself.”

  “I hate how well you know me.”

  “No, you don’t. That’s part of the reason you love me.”

  I let the word love sit there between us and didn’t reply.

  “You need a break, Carolyn. That’s obvious, maybe not to your mother or the Dalbys, but to me.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “So take one.”

  When I hung up the phone with Alex, I regretted not asking him to come over. I wanted two big, strong arms around my waist. I wanted him in bed with me. I knew that seeing him naked and moving on top of me was not the way to solve all my problems. It might cause me to scream the words Jesus and Christ while digging my nails into his back, but that wasn’t a long-term solution. So instead of calling him back I turned on my computer and logged on to the real estate section on Craigslist. I listed my apartment as a monthlong sublet. I wrote what I paid a month and then subtracted seven hundred dollars from it. I wanted to leave quickly. Alex was right, and even David was right in a way. I needed a change.

  There was just one person I wanted to call before I started figuring out exactly what that change was.

  Nicole was already crying when she picked up the phone. I apologized over and over again as she cried, and she told me to stop apologizing while I cried.

  “I need to get out of this city, Nicole,” I said after she told me about how Christie’s was handling the Tumlinson estate. She’d been completely taken off it and Louise and Erik were dealing with everything. She wasn’t allowed to contact Elizabeth or Nina at all. Or me. Especially not me.

  “Leave New York? I think that’s a good idea.”

  “Do you?”

  “I actually do. Sometimes this city can suffocate you. Go to the Hamptons. Go to Block Island.”

  “It’s January.”

  “Right. Go skiing. Go meditate in an igloo. Find yourself at Canyon Ranch. Just do something to begin anew.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you think, in a few . . . years. Do you think I could work at another auction house again? Not Christie’s but maybe Sotheby’s or Phillips?”

  She hesitated before saying, “I do. But I think, like you said, it could take years rather than months.”

  “So if you were me . . .”

  “I think if I were you, I’d become a dealer. Work for yourself. Do what you love. Make some money. Christie’s and Sotheby’s may be off the table for . . . well . . . a decade, but you’re not dead in the art world. You have clients who trust you. You’re very smart. Branch out on your own.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe? What else are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to go to Newport,” I said suddenly. “I’m going home.”

  CHAPTER 6

  It was exactly three days before Valentine’s Day when I drove a rented car from the Providence train station to Newport. The man at Hertz asked if I wanted to upgrade my vehicle from tin can to slightly larger tin can; I said I was tempted to downgrade it to the bus. I’d subletted a small apartment in Newport close to the tennis club but not close to the water for twelve hundred dollars a month—a third of what I paid in New York—and packed two suitcases full of winter clothes and my laptop. Despite two phone calls to Houston, I still hadn’t spoken to Elizabeth about what had happened and Nina hadn’t called me. I promised myself not to harass anyone having to do with the Tumlinson estate so I could have four weeks of peace. In a month, my tear ducts would be functioning properly and I’d head back to New York, maybe still a pariah, but one with self-control.

  Before I drove to my rented apartment, I went to the Dalbys’ house. Jane and her husband were staying there while her parents spent the winter traveling. I’d had no communication with her since I texted her to let her know I was alive, but Jane wouldn’t be mad because of my silence; she would just be worried. I turned my car down to the southern coastline of Aquidneck Island toward Bellevue Avenue. There are roads and there are roads, but there are few pieces of pavement in America quite like Bellevue Avenue. If you’re a tourist in Newport, you go there. And if you’re the original old money in Newport, you live there.

  The Dalbys—not just old money, but among the founders of Gilded Age Newport—had lived on Bellevue Avenue since 1875, when the family had built the A. H. Oxmoore house, better known as Morning Star. It was named for the École des Beaux-Arts–trained architect who designed it, then renamed by the Dalby matriarch. Once it was up, the Dalbys never left. Jane was the fifth generation of Dalby to summer in the house, but Jane and her husband now made it a base along with a $10 million house in Boston while her semiretired parents traveled between Newport, New York, Boston, and the other nicest corners of planet earth. The house I grew up in was on the other side of the expansive green lawn on the east side of the Dalbys’ house. My family had lived there, thanks to my grandmother’s very close friendship to Jane and Brittan Dalby’s grandmother, and the two matriarchs had decided that we were all going to grow up together in one big garden. I looked up at the French neoclassical exterior and already felt lighter. All I wanted to do was spend time inside 6460 Bellevue, where I had lived the happiest days of my life. The street, also home to the Marble House and the Elms, carved its way through town, north to south on Aquidneck Island, but as soon as it hit fabled Rough Point, the smell of money turned west onto Ocean Avenue. On Ocean, part of the famous drive, the Atlantic held the huge houses in on the south side, and on the north side were Almy Pond, Lily Pond, and Goose Neck Cove. Holding court on the winding road, built by and for generations of old money, was the very private Bailey’s Beach, where the prosperous and thin scions of the town’s oldest families sipped cocktails before noon, glided through the salty air, and checked up on the goings-on of each other’s tribes.

  I turned toward the water in the tiny red Ford hatchback I had rented, entered the gate code, drove down the long driveway, past the fountain that worked through the winter, and parked outside the sprawling house. It had every Gilded Age comfort one could ask for, including twenty-seven bedrooms. The Dalbys had later added a lawn tennis court, an indoor swimming pool, manicured gardens fashioned after Chatsworth (inspiration for Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice), and a maze of hedges, and had expanded the rows and rows of big bay windows that the sun always seemed to hit just right. In the summer, they were left wide-open and you could call someone’s name and they would put their head out and look at you in the yard. I used to run from my little house toward the Dalbys’, screaming, “Jane! Brittan!” and wait for their heads to peer out the windows, thick brown hair flying in the wind, their laughter bouncing off the 140-year-old walls. In winter, the windows were closed to the freezing air, but the curtains were always pulled open as if to prove to the world that wealth and privilege didn’t always mean one was standoffish, not that the world saw very much of the house other than what they could photograph through the gates. For those scurrying on Newport’s famed Cliff Walk, the back of the house was visible, which was why most of the life that was lived outside was lived in front.

  The Dalbys may have inhabited a $20 million summerhouse, one of the most expensive single-family homes in New England, but Jane didn’t treat it like a family estate. That afternoon, just like every other, I knew their front door would be unlocked. I walked up the path, p
ulling a wool hat tight onto my head, turned the heavy brass doorknob, and shouted, “Hello?” into the foyer.

  A few seconds later, I heard a musical “Hello?” respond.

  It wasn’t Jane’s voice, or her mother’s; it was the Dalbys’ housekeeper, Florentine’s, which was warmer and a little older sounding than I remembered.

  “Carolyn! What a surprise!” She walked up to me and hugged me, just like she had on my visits for the last twenty-nine years.

  “Are you on vacation? Do you take vacation? Jane said the other day that you haven’t gone on a vacation in seven years. Is that true? You shouldn’t do that because your bones will start to cry. And who wants that?”

  “My bones will start to cry?” I asked as she put her arms around me. Florentine and I were the same height, so hugging her meant the warmest, most welcoming hug imaginable. Not like hugging a Dalby, where your head went directly into their muscular shoulders.

  “Oh yes. You should be very careful.”

  She hugged me again and brushed my hair behind my ears. Florentine had been brushing the hair of the Dalby girls and their friends since I could remember. She was a fixture in their house and would always remain so.

  “But you’re here now, and on vacation!” she exclaimed. “Good for you.”

  She thought I was on vacation. Seven years without a real vacation—just Christmas with my parents in Boston for thirty-six hours, year after year—and here was Florentine celebrating the fact that I had some mirth flowing through my body. My instinct was to start wailing and explain to her that I was a failure, but instead I just said, “Nope. It’s not vacation. I was fired. No more job. It’s a long story but I was and, well, I guess that’s just what happened. Now I’m here because I need a break. I rented a little apartment on Memorial but I just wanted to see if anyone was home here before I drove over.”

  “On Memorial? Why aren’t you staying here? You know Jane will be very mad at you.”

  “I know,” I said, looking through the house toward the beautiful water lapping to the east of us. “But I can’t live off the Dalbys my entire life, Florentine.”