Twelve Rooms with a View

by Theresa Rebeck

  “Odds of what?”

  “The odds of something coming out,” Daniel inserted bluntly.

  “What could come out?” I asked.

  “The Drinans are claiming that your mother kept their father in a state of constant inebriation, during which she coerced him into changing his will, which disinherited them and left the entirety of the estate to her,” Grossman stated bluntly.

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said, out of loyalty. “Mom coerced him? He wouldn’t let Mom out of his sight, she was his prisoner, and if he had a drinking problem that wasn’t her fault.”

  “What makes you think he had a drinking problem?” Grossman asked me, suddenly serious.

  “The first day we got there, alcohol was everywhere,” I said.

  “This was the day of your mother’s funeral?”

  “Yes. No furniture, just vodka and red wine.”

  “That was a full three weeks after her husband’s death,” Grossman said pointedly.

  “Well, I didn’t know exactly when Bill died,” I started.

  “She didn’t tell you?” Grossman asked.

  “Not right when it happened.”

  “When did she tell you?”

  Lucy, Daniel, and Alison were all staring at me, silent, as if I were about to betray them. “She …” I started, and then I turned all red as the truth occurred to me. “She never told me that he died. I didn’t know.”

  “What did you think when you heard that he had died? Didn’t it strike you as odd that she never informed you of it?”

  “I didn’t actually think about it. I was upset about Mom. I thought Bill had died a long time ago.” Lucy, Daniel, and Alison kept staring at me like a jury. It was really creepy. “What is the big deal? They didn’t know either,” I commented, defensive.

  “I knew,” said Lucy.

  “How could you know?”

  “I knew because she told me. She was very sad, and she called and told me that Bill had died, but she didn’t want us to come to the funeral.” Lucy stared at me coolly, like this was common knowledge. Next to her, Alison stiffened her spine fiercely.

  “Did you know too, Alison?”

  “Yes,” Alison whispered. “I did.”

  “So that would be another thing you didn’t tell me.”

  “Mom told her not to,” Lucy inserted.

  “Mom told you not to tell me her husband died? The way she told you both not to tell me that she was cleaning houses. She told you not to tell me any of that.” I looked at both of them. Lucy looked back, unapologetic; Alison looked at the floor.

  “Yes, she did,” Lucy stated.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” said Lucy, very plain. Alison’s lips were pursed. Daniel just kept staring at me.

  “This is good, this is good,” Grossman explained smoothly. “It’s wonderful to see you all work out the complications of this situation in terms of communication and confusion. Death is often like this. Certain people know things, others don’t know those things. My understanding, Tina, is that you were out of touch with the family for a while. But your personal circumstances—where you were, what you were doing—are completely irrelevant to the court case and have no bearing on the details of the settlement. So you see why it would be important to keep these personal discussions out of the court record.” Grossman continued smiling at me, like he and I shared a secret, even though it was clear that we did not. “And the amount of alcohol that your mother was keeping in the apartment, even though she was the only person living there, is not something that the court is going to be able to ignore, since it is at the heart of the Drinans’ case.”

  “Bill was a big drinker,” I said.

  “By your own admission you never met Bill,” Grossman reminded me. “And your mother did not share information with you about her marriage. Your testimony is not going to be helpful in this matter. But please don’t worry about this,” Grossman hastened to reassure me, taking the opportunity to reach over and press my hand. “They don’t have much of an argument, given their own family history. The burden of proof is on them. I’m just saying we don’t want to help them out if we can easily avoid it. The first step is making it difficult for them to depose all three of you. We need to name an administrator. Both Alison and Lucy feel that Lucy is the right person for that job. And since you’ve taken on so much responsibility for the daily upkeep of the apartment, no one wants to burden you further.”

  This guy was a really smooth customer. It occurred to me that he had been flirting with me because he thought it would get him what he wanted, which was my signature and nothing else. It also occurred to me that Alison and Lucy were lying—that Mom hadn’t called anybody when Bill died, because she just hadn’t—and they had secretly consulted with this new smooth lawyer, who told them they didn’t need to put any of this out there. So they had agreed among themselves to lie about it. It occurred to me that maybe she didn’t call me because I was out at the Delaware Water Gap living in a trailer with another loser and I didn’t return phone calls. It occurred to me that maybe Mom didn’t call any of us because we weren’t ever much comfort to her.

  I picked up my sorry little ballpoint pen. Lucy let out her breath with a sound that meant finally!, but I wasn’t actually planning to go along with this just yet. “What is … what …” I started to ask. “Just do it, Tina!” Lucy snarled. “Alison and I have the majority vote, and we can do this with or without you! Just do it!”

  “Now now, no one is being forced into anything. We absolutely want to present a united front here,” Grossman announced soothingly. “Tina, do you have more questions?”

  I did have a lot of questions, so many that I didn’t even know where to start. Most of them were about me and my sisters and why we ended up abandoning each other and Mom, why none of us meant more to the others. But I didn’t think that was what he was suggesting. I thought I’d better stick to someone else’s facts for now. “When you said ‘given their own family history’? The Drinans don’t have much of an argument given their own family history, what does that mean?” I asked.

  “Because of what happened with the first Mrs. Drinan,” Grossman said, nodding like that was a very good question and he was glad I had asked it. “They may try to make that inadmissible, but it clearly relates to why and how the sons were disinherited.”

  “Didn’t she die a long time ago?” Alison asked. “Do we have to deal with her relatives too?”

  “Not at all. The apartment did, however, originally belong to her. Mr. Drinan came into possession at the time of her death. There was no question that he was the sole beneficiary. I think there were cousins or nieces, but they had no claim, then or now.”

  “Yeah, but if it was her apartment in the first place, doesn’t that make it more of a stretch that we should get the place instead of her own sons?” I pointed out.

  “You might argue that, but you could also argue that they were heavily implicated in her death,” Grossman announced, like he was reporting the weather. “There were apparently a lot of recriminations between them and their father about it, but they both supported him when he made the decision to have her institutionalized.”

  “What?” I asked. “What did you just say?”

  “I don’t have the hospital records yet, and it’s not clear that I’ll be able to get them released, but according to Stuart Long they all were in agreement at first that she needed to be hospitalized. I’m told that all three of them signed the admission papers. It apparently wasn’t until later that a lot of hard feelings emerged.”

  “Okay, wait, wait,” I said, trying to catch up. It seemed an inconceivable end to the story that was lying around in scraps in my apartment. “She was institutionalized? And all three of them—okay—”

  “The facts indicate that both his sons agreed that she should be admitted to a psychiatric facility, and then, after some period of time there—I don’t know how long—she died. Obviously the hospital bears responsibility for the
lack of oversight, but no legal action was ever taken. Anyway, upon her death the apartment, which was in her name, became her husband’s property. That coincided with his rift with the sons, so there may have been some overlap there in terms of what they were all upset about. Our argument would be that Mr. Drinan disinherited his sons because of that situation, long before he met your mother. It’s not even an argument; it’s the simple truth. Your mother did nothing worse than fall in love with the man and take care of him in the last years of his life, long after his sons had abandoned him. There’s no coercion involved, none that can be proven in any case.”

  “What was wrong with her? The first Mrs. Drinan?” Alison asked, touched and curious about Sophie’s troubles.

  Grossman shrugged; this part of the story wasn’t relevant to the cash, so it wasn’t relevant to him. “Long maintains that it was some form of depression, but there’s no way to tell unless we get a look at the records, which they most certainly will not permit,” he noted, looking through his papers. “And ‘depression’ covers a lot of ground. She could have been terribly sick or she could have just been angry.”

  “You can lock up people for just being angry?” Lucy asked. Like Grossman, she was not even vaguely interested; she was working her CrackBerry again. It was more of a rhetorical question.

  “Well, that’s a good question, but one that I have no jurisdiction to answer.” Grossman smiled pleasantly. Having finished his gruesome history, he turned his full attention back to me. “Tina, do you have any more questions about the process? We do have a lot to cover today.”

  I stared at my ballpoint and the pile of documents in front of me. There were three more stacks of documents at Grossman’s elbow. I felt like Alice going down the rabbit hole. Nothing got simpler, it all just got weirder, meaner, richer. We were all getting richer, inch by inch, billable hour by billable hour.

  “No, I’m fine,” I said. “So where do I sign?”

  19

  THE PRESS CONFERENCE AT SOTHEBY’S WAS DAZZLING. THERE WERE a lot of minions—men in suits, women in expensive, tightly fitted dresses, all of them completely confident that they belonged at Sotheby’s and that you did too. Lucy was wrong when she told me I’d better buy myself some ugly clothes, because there was nothing ugly about any of these people. Maybe they were just a lot of normal people who worked for a lot of rich people, but we were the people they were working for now, so we sure as hell needed to look as rich as possible. I wore the black taffeta dress and the pearls and the low pumps that went with them. The Sotheby’s minions were impressed.

  Lucy managed to pull off an acceptable presence; she wore her best silk suit, gray as usual. Her hair was down, and she had had the foresight to put on a little blush and mascara, so she looked businesslike and thin but in a pretty way. Alison, unfortunately, didn’t quite come up to the mark. She wore a nice red wool dress, which I know she likes, but it doesn’t really suit her; it bunches around the waist and clings to her stomach in a tragic way that makes her look like a dumpy middle-aged housewife, which sadly had never occurred to her until possibly this moment. She kept looking around the room and smiling at everyone with such panicked eyes that I finally snuck around behind her and gave her a fast hug.

  “You look beautiful, Alison,” I said, holding her close.

  “Really?” she said, hungry to believe me. She ran her fingers through her hair, which was losing its bounce because she had been fooling with it incessantly for the past twenty minutes.

  “Absolutely,” I told her. “That color is phenomenal on you. I wish I could wear red.” She smiled at me with sad hope, which had become her habitual expression of late. Daniel came up behind us, looking around as if he didn’t know her.

  “I think they’re about to start,” he informed the air next to Alison. He was wearing a new suit, and he had gotten a haircut, short on the sides but sort of sexy and floppy over his eyes. His eyes raked back toward me and paused, impressed. “You look good, Tina,” he said.

  “Oh, thanks,” I said, not appreciating the glint in his eye. “Look, you’re right, they’re starting.”

  The crowd seemed to be gently drifting toward the other end of the room, where a small podium awaited. We wafted along with the others, catching up with Lucy in front of the podium. “Where’d you get that?” Lucy asked, barely glancing at my dress but noting it with some approval nonetheless. As long as I showed up looking like someone who should inherit fifteen million dollars, she didn’t care if I looked better than she did.

  “Used-clothing place in my neighborhood,” I said. “It didn’t cost a thing.”

  “You look good, you look rich.”

  “That was the plan,” I said. She actually smiled at this, and for a moment there was sincere relief between us that we were on the same page. I wasn’t sure why we needed a big press conference before we’d even made it into court on one of these depositions or hearings or pleadings, but she and our snaky lawyer and our fancy new partner, Sotheby’s, seemed to think it was a good idea. If that meant putting on a nice dress and drinking the Kool-Aid, I was happy to oblige.

  Our host, someone big in Sotheby’s real estate division, approached and took my hand, helping me take the last few steps up to the small staging area they had assembled for our inaugural conversation with the public. His name was Leonard, and he looked like a Leonard, all arching nose under a big head of fabulous white hair. I decided it was true that men age better than women. This guy was a skinny rich old hunk. “That piece is stunning,” Leonard informed me, kissing me on the cheek. “Where did you get it?”

  He was of course talking about the pearls, which were draped around my neck and held there with a fourteen-carat gold-and-diamond clasp.

  “A tag sale,” I said, smiling.

  “The clasp is extraordinary.”

  “Thank you,” I said, demurely.

  “If you ever want to sell it, I hope you’ll bring it here. We’ll take very good care of you,” he advised me intimately. I was about to say something sweet in response, when Alison turned and stared at me, and then the lights went haywire. The room began to pulse with a million flashes and the press conference was on its merry way.

  “Thank you all for coming on this lovely day,” Leonard announced into the microphone. “I feel very sure that we can make it worth your while.” The small but attentive audience of reporters and real estate agents settled into an expectant hush laced with something that was either awe or greed as Leonard laid it all out for them.

  “It is a rare occasion when a truly historic New York property comes on the market, one that reminds us of the very great privilege we here at Sotheby’s enjoy as stewards of history. The great families of this country—the Morgans, the Rockefellers, the Clays, the Fricks—made their mark in finance, transportation, industry, the art world. They also left their mark in the bricks and stones and mortar that are the heart and soul of New York. Ladies and gentlemen, today it is my great privilege to introduce to you one of the finest historic properties in New York. The Livingston Mansion Apartment occupies seven thousand square feet of the eighth floor of the Edgewood Building at a prime location on Central Park West. Could we dim the lights, please?” The flashes stopped, and a large white projection screen came to life as the lights went down, revealing a stunning black-and-white photograph of the outside of my building. A horse and carriage stood in front, and women in long, sweeping gowns paraded sedately up the street. The Edge in all its glory stood alone—severe, gorgeous, Victorian.

  “The Edgewood was built in 1879,” Leonard informed us, “two years before they broke ground for the Dakota, nearby.” A series of beautiful photographs of old New York wafted across the screen as he continued with his history, which was definitely educational but also a little boring. It got slightly more interesting when he started working in the specifics of the Livingston family, but as it turned out, Sophie’s forebears were just a couple of brothers who made a ton of money by cornering the market on cotton fabri
c around the time when store-bought dresses became all the rage. The most noteworthy thing about the Livingstons, I discovered, was their continued inability to propagate. The slide show had several historic pictures of my endlessly sprawling seven-thousand-square-foot apartment with no people in them, and no matter how many stories Leonard told about the historically important Livingston family, they never seemed to have more than one or two kids, many of whom died childless. Which is how, apparently, the property finally came into the possession of the lone Livingston heir, our own Sophie, whose dress and pearls and shoes I was wearing while the head of historic properties at Sotheby’s blipped over her quiet and terrible end.

  “Eventually the family’s prominence would fade,” Leonard announced happily. “And the apartment would move into other hands. Today Sotheby’s is proud to present this jewel of New York, an apartment almost unparalleled in architectural detail and beauty, to the real estate community.”

  The lights were gently coming up, and hands were being raised. Leonard tipped his head slightly toward a youngish guy with messy hair wearing a corduroy jacket, who was sitting in the front row. “Who are the sellers?” he asked, getting straight to the point.

  “The sellers are the daughters of Olivia Drinan, the second wife of the Livingston heir, William Patrick Drinan,” Leonard replied with simple confidence.

  “Can we get the names?”

  “The names of the heirs to Mrs. Drinan’s estate are Alison Finn Lindemann, Lucille Finn, and Christina Finn, all of whom are with me today,” Leonard replied. He turned and gestured toward us with an open palm. We smiled at the small crowd, as we had been instructed to do, and Lucy stepped forward. Leonard made an elegant little gesture in our direction and relinquished the microphone to her.

  “On behalf of myself and my sisters, I would like to thank Mr. Rubenstein and Sotheby’s for hosting us today,” Lucy announced with clear and gracious confidence. Although she’s relentlessly mean in private, there’s a reason that public relations is her field. “It is a tremendous honor to be a part of this presentation,” she proclaimed. “We are well aware that the Edgewood is one of the most prestigious addresses in Manhattan, and the Livingston Mansion Apartment has long been considered the centerpiece of the property. We very much feel the responsibility and privilege of our stewardship in helping it move into the hands of someone who will value it as much as our mother did.” What utter horseshit, I thought, but the crowd did not seem to notice that so much as the one big detail that no one had yet mentioned.