Twelve Rooms with a View

by Theresa Rebeck

  In the next stack were more photo albums, and Sophie’s look shifted suddenly and radically into hippie chick/Janis Joplin chic. Cowboy boots and long skirts, tiny little tank tops, hair down her back and in her face, boyfriends in beards and blue jeans hanging all over her. At one point she seems to have had one of those crazy perms that no one would even consider anymore, and in another photo she had cut her hair down to nothing. Then came the wedding album. This was my first look at Bill, the man who had commandeered my mother and left nothing to show for it but old underwear and mystery novels and some pretty good red wine. In the wedding pictures he looked young and terrified. He squinted, he had a bad haircut, and his suit was starting to wrinkle. The groomsmen, of whom there were seven, seemed smoother but unremarkable, all stiff smiles and identical boutonnieres, and the bridesmaids were equally unremarkable, wearing narrow pink sheaths with empire waists and matching headbands. The maid of honor’s dress flushed into a darker, mustier shade of rose, but her transparent complexion was too pale for it, so she looked like a person standing inside a dress instead of wearing it. Bill looked hot and nervous next to all of them.

  In the middle of all this upscale insanity, Sophie truly looked spectacular. Her wedding dress was pristine white satin, with a low scalloped neckline and a tight bodice that came to a perfect point at her waist, like the dress Sleeping Beauty wore when she pricked her finger and fell asleep in the Disney movie. Her gown had miles of train and she wore a huge tulle veil held in place by a ridiculous little pillbox hat. Somehow, she pulled it off, but I hated her for it. Honestly, I hated them all.

  I did. I hated these people. I couldn’t believe the haircuts, the phony grins, the expensive dresses that no one ever wore more than once—all the smug details that money could buy, I hated all of it. The cover of the wedding album was draped in white stuffed satin with a big heart fixed right in the center that actually proclaimed, in gold stitching, Forever. The whole thing made you want to throw up and then just throw the book at the wall. Instead I dumped it back into its box and went back into the room to see what else I could find. I couldn’t stand these people, and I couldn’t get enough of them. Sophie seemed just perfect. I hated her.

  My hunt through the boxes yielded more cowboy boots—which, after seeing pictures of Sophie wearing them, seemed almost eerie in their reality—and lots of thin tights, the kind you wear under skirts and with boots in the winter. I also found four full boxes of wool yarn in about sixteen colors, some of it still in skeins, some of it knitted onto needles and abandoned—half-finished pieces of half-imagined sweaters. There was a box with watercolor paper stuck together at the edges, some matte cutters, and dried-up tubes of time-frozen inks.

  All of the leftovers from so many arts and crafts projects started to get to me—my mom did that with us when she wasn’t loaded, projects with yarn and glitter glue and linoleum cutters—why the hell do you think I tried to be a pottery major?—so my opinion of Sophie was swinging back in her favor. And then the ghost reappeared.

  I knew it wasn’t a ghost; I really did. Somebody in the apartment next door or on another floor even was having a crying jag right next to an air duct or something. But seriously, it sounded so much like a person stuck in a different time that it made your skin crawl. I was sitting next to the doorway, looking through the boxes by the light of the laundry room, and I could hear the ghost deep in the wall all the way across the room, buried by boxes I hadn’t gone through yet. Her unseen and unintelligible argument was so drenched in heartsick rage that I decided she wanted to kill me for going through her stuff. So I quit for the night and went back to my sorry little adopted bedroom, where I stared at the sunset painted on the wall and wondered what had happened to that woman and why my beautiful apartment was so barren and lost that there was no room for anyone but me in it now. I lay there for a long time, wondering if the ghost would follow me, but she didn’t; she was definitely trapped in that secret room. She was trapped in the night too. I heard her only after dark; during the daytime all was quiet.

  Meanwhile, the legal machinations of all the various lawyers were churning away in some other cosmos, and for the moment Alison and Lucy and Daniel had decided to leave me be. I was free to keep pawing through somebody elses’s stuff. And after spending a couple more days going through boxes of dishware and towels and children’s toys and old ski boots, I found more photographs.

  There were about six hundred of them, tossed into a box with a bunch of old negatives and also pasted in three chaotic photo albums with no concern for chronology whatsoever. One album, covered with dark blue leather, held dozens of photographs of two laughing little boys, followed by pages and pages of one laughing little baby, and then pictures of Sophie pregnant and holding the hand of one little boy, and then Sophie, alone, laughing at the camera, pregnant. After the strict chronology of the yearbooks and the wedding album, the chaos of photos had a startling effect; I thought, oh I’m going back in time, and then forward in time, and then backward and forward at once. The other two albums were the same, just a mess of people’s lives with no sense of order.

  Sophie’s boys seemed to be having a pretty good time of it. She took a lot of pictures of them running in the park, eating ice cream, blowing out candles, riding scooters. As their ages leapt back and forth, the brothers maintained a goodwill for each other and the camera that was startling in its consistency, particularly given the grim weariness of the men I now knew as Doug and Pete Drinan. Even well into adolescence, both were blessed with what looked like wealth and happiness, cute girlfriends, fun birthday parties, and an unbelievably cool apartment to grow up in. Some people who may have been grandparents showed up occasionally, and a couple of girlfriends, or cousins maybe, were here and there. Bill was there too, grumpy, a little sloppy, often holding a glass of wine. And Sophie would show up still looking like a hippie chick in long sweaters and Indian-print skirts and cowboy boots. At some point she must have thought she was getting fat, because she started wearing big loose shirts open at the neck over a tank top. Then, when she felt skinny again, she would wear just the tank top without the shirt. In some photos she was wearing wire-rimmed glasses, but she didn’t seem to wear them all the time. Or maybe all the back-and-forth with her weight and the hair and the glasses was because the pictures were so jumbled up. Her mouth was wide, her nose a little too long, and her eyes were large and expressive. At a certain point, it started to seem like she couldn’t look at a camera without mugging a bit. Her hair was dark brown, and it never got gray.

  So that is what the Drinans’ lives looked like. After the high school proms and cotillions and the one big wedding, there were no formal pictures of Sophie or Bill. Except for one. She and Bill are holding hands and smiling at the camera. They are standing in front of a white marble mantel that has three golden glass vases on it and an antique black clock with tiny gilt feet. The wall is painted a kind of pearly dove gray, and you can see from the elaborate carving on the mantelpiece that it’s the one in the great room; they are having their picture taken in their home before going out for the evening. The camera flash has caught Sophie and Bill slightly by surprise, but even so, both of them look traditionally glamorous; he is in a blue suit, and she wears a tight little black dress with pearls and low heels. Her hair is up in a classic knot, which shows off her neck. They look happy and excited for a night out. Except for the fact that they are standing in the greatest apartment I’ve ever seen, they look just like my mom and dad. You can practically see the kids in pajamas watching in awe while the babysitter frames the picture.

  It took me a couple days to hunt it down, but then I thought a bit and pulled out the garment bag that was way in back of everything. Sure enough, the dress was there, carefully folded inside one of the flashier evening gowns from her high school days. So well protected, it looked pristine, almost as if it came straight off the rack. It was a gorgeous dress—black silk taffeta with a fitted bodice and a plunging back neckline. The shoes I found by going
back to the first boxes I had looked through; they were slightly scuffed around the back of the heels, and they were crushed a little by having had something heavy placed on them. They were also a little dusty.

  The pearls I finally found in another box, tossed in as if nobody cared what happened to them, even though they were clearly the real thing, not fake like the jewelry my mom wore when she got dressed up. But there they were, curled at the bottom of the box, a double rope of perfectly matched champagne-colored pearls held together by a heavy gold clasp encrusted with real diamonds. That necklace should have been carefully laid in some dark blue velvet-lined case from Tiffany’s or some store so exclusive that people like me have never even heard of it. Anyway, there it was, in a brown cardboard box, a perfect pearl necklace, lost in a disorderly clutter of shoes, plastic dishes, everyday spoons, and more shoes.

  17

  I CARRIED THE PEARLS OUT INTO THE GRIM LITTLE TV ROOM AND sat on that lousy couch and wondered what to do. I was afraid to tell anybody what I had found, because I knew Lucy would insist that the stuff was all part of the estate, which meant, according to her, that it was ours. And then she would have appraisers from Sotheby’s show up and paw through everything to see if they could find all the really valuable bits, and then those Drinan brothers would again lose everything they had already lost, only this time they wouldn’t even know it.

  I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what had happened in that crazy apartment, to Bill, or my mom, or Sophie, or those boys. The only person who might be able to cough up a few answers, I realized, was Len.

  And that was when I realized I had not seen Len for some time. I couldn’t remember the last time he had stopped by, but a quick investigation of the mossery confirmed that his absence from the apartment had been long enough to have a devastating effect. A dying mossery doesn’t look like what you would normally call a disaster, in that there isn’t a lot of spectacle involved, but when I poked my head into the kitchen and turned on the lights, an unmistakable air of doom hovered over all the beds. It was as if the breath of the room had tiptoed away; it felt kind of cold and dry and was simply too silent for anything to be growing. If you had never been in there before you might not notice anything, but the air wasn’t moist, and the gentle tune of the water being pumped through the teeny-tiny irrigation system had gone silent. The pumps were dead, and the moss was slowly dying.

  It is amazing how panicked a person can get over some dying moss. My heart started to race, and I began pawing around the counter to find the controls to turn the pumps back on. I had watched Len refill them once, so I knew the switches ran along the wall to the right of some beds of a normally purple-tinged forest moss, which had now turned a disturbing shade of gray. But when I turned the switches on, they instantly switched off, with a decisiveness that was frankly startling in an inanimate object. Because I was so worried about the moss, the water pumps’ aggressive refusal to return to life seemed upsetting and perverse until I realized that they were clicking off because there was no water. There was just no water in the trays, in the beds, in the irrigation tubes, anywhere. I hurried to the sink, picked up one of the plastic watering cans lined up there, filled it from the tap, and immediately started watering all the beds. Then I refilled the three reserve tanks, which were tucked in corners around the room, and I tried turning on the irrigation system again. It clunked a few times, but then it started whirring and humming, and the sound of water running around the edges of the trays reemerged from the silence.

  Once I had the water going, I felt better, but every one of those moss beds was in serious trouble. Most of them had gone brown; the previously spongy soil was hard and even brittle in places, and water was now pooling in little brown puddles instead of soaking in gently the way it was supposed to. Len had all sorts of moss-sized gardening implements lined up on the open shelves above the sink, but I had no idea what to do with any of them; watering was pretty much the end of my restorative capabilities. Besides, I thought, where in the world is Len?

  After I checked my phone again, I tried to call him, but he didn’t pick up, and his machine was turned off. So I went up to his landing and knocked on the door. For a moment, I thought I heard a vague rustle of movement, like someone was in there, so I pounded harder and yelled that the moss was in real trouble and he needed to come down and take a look at it. There was no response. So then I went down to the lobby.

  “Hey, Frank! How’re you doing?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Tina. Hi,” Frank said, with less enthusiasm than I was exhibiting. He was sorting through the mail and doing a crossword puzzle at the same time. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

  “I’ve been kind of busy.”

  “Good for you.”

  It was a little troubling to have Frank bristle at me, but I was worried, so I got right to the point. “Hey, have you seen Len?”

  “Not today,” he said, still not looking at me.

  “Did you see him yesterday?”

  “No, Tina, I didn’t.”

  “Well, when was the last time you saw him?”

  This conversation was obviously annoying the new, mean Frank. “It’s not my job to keep track of people, that is not my job description.”

  “No, I know, I just—”

  “And you don’t have any rights here.”

  “What?” I said, surprised at how direct and horrible that statement sounded, coming from Frank. I was truly hurt. I guess my face must have made that clear, because he flushed a little, like he was privately ashamed for half a second, before the mean version of himself could take over again. It took the sting out of what came next.

  “I just mean you’re staying here, okay, obviously no one can stop you from doing that, but it’s unclear what’s going to happen next. People want to make sure you are aware of that.”

  “Of course I’m aware of that.”

  “All right, then.”

  “So like … what? Has the building been talking about us?”

  Frank glanced up, then took a small step back, like he wanted to make sure he wasn’t too close to me. “Yeah, the building has been talking,” he said.

  More than anything else, that little step smacked me in the heart, but there was nothing I could do about it. Frank worked for the building. I tried to remember why I had come down to speak to him.

  “What about Len?” I said finally. “I really need to get hold of him, there’s something he needs to know, and I haven’t seen him for at least two weeks and now I can’t get him on the phone.”

  Frank looked up at the ceiling as if he had to find the nerve to keep up the nasty edge, and it was hiding somewhere up there, in the corner maybe. “Like I said, it’s not my job—” he started, still bristling.

  “Okay, I got it, Frank! If you see him, tell him I need to talk to him, and it’s important,” I hissed. Frank turned all red, like I had really hurt his feelings. Like most nice people, he was terrible at being mean; he didn’t know how to pull it off and he also didn’t know how not to be hurt when someone was mean back. So of course I felt ashamed of myself immediately. It is no fun picking on nice people; I don’t know why anyone ever does it, honestly.

  Back up in my apartment, with no idea what I was doing, I did my best to fertilize and feed the dying moss. In the corner of the kitchen, Len had stashed dozens of plant nutrients—potassium, nitrogen, magnesium, something with an oxidized-silicate formula, arsenic, and bromides—all of which had different functions. His main supply of plant foods came in little glass bottles with droppers, and you had to mix them up into various solutions before you poured them into a thing that looked like an IV lead, which fed into the water supply. It took me three hours of following the pictures on the backs of the boxes and putting that information together with what I had seen Len do the few times I had watched him work in there before I felt like I might be making progress. I couldn’t tell if I was giving any of the plants the right amount of these different versions of fertilizer, but si
nce I still couldn’t find Len—his phone just rang and rang whenever I tried him—I was left with my own haphazard guesswork.

  After two days of working on the moss with mixed results, I decided I’d better get help.

  I took the express train from Seventy-second Street to Park Slope, where the Eastern Parkway stop lets you off right at the front gate of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. When I told the man in the ticket booth that I was looking for Charlotte Colbert, he didn’t even make me buy a ticket, he just directed me to the conservatory, where another cheerfully helpful employee pointed me toward a side room that held a subdivision of bonsai trees.

  The bonsai room was bright and hot and full of light. Long wooden tables along the walls held a series of bonsai trees, each more surreal than the last. There was a tiny maple with a whorled trunk and perfect five-point leaves, a miniature stand of beech trees with whittled bark, a tiny juniper with elegantly twirling branches. An impossibly miniature dogwood gracefully presented fresh miniature pink blossoms. An ancient bald cypress, I learned from the metal plaque on its base, was over three hundred years old. Even though there were no other visitors, it took me a moment to locate Len’s daughter, Charlie; she had drifted into a tiny alcove just off the main display area, her entire attention focused on a miniature pine tree, which she was pruning with extraordinary care. As Charlie looked up, in the same plant-induced daze I had seen on Len’s face, I realized that all of the trees in the room were growing in trays covered in moss.

  “Can I help you?” she said, not recognizing me.

  “Hi, I’m Tina, Tina Finn? I met you at your dad’s apartment.”

  “My father?” She didn’t actually perk up at this; what she did was more the opposite. She set her pruning shears on the table and looked down as if trying to decide whether or not to say something she might regret. “What about him?”