“You get arrested all the time, you don’t care about being arrested,” she observed. “You said it on television.”
“I said that on like local-access television!” I noted with some exasperation. “Who watches that stuff?”
“Everyone in the building watched it tonight. Everybody knows about it. My mom was on the phone with the whole co-op board.”
This was not good news. “What did she say?” I asked, worried.
“People think your mom was a con lady, she made Mr. Drinan give her the apartment—the same stuff. Not that they cared about him, they didn’t like him to begin with, you know.”
“They didn’t like the Drinans?” This had never occurred to me.
“They were Irish,” Jennifer explained, as if this made everything clear. “I mean, they liked it that he could get things done because he was hooked up with lots of people around the city, but they didn’t want him to live here.”
“Why not? What sorts of things did he do?”
“Look, I don’t know, I just heard some stuff while she was on the phone.” Jennifer sighed. The spark was going out of her, you could see it happen even before I was halfway through the wall. She was sitting on the edge of Katherine’s bed, her shoulders hunched over like an old bag lady who didn’t remember how to hold herself up straight anymore.
“Listen,” I said. “You have to come to me. You have to sneak out and come down. To the apartment.”
“You mean like …”
“Katherine did it. You can do it. You just have to be careful. And while you’re at it, you have to find out if the co-op board is going to do anything like testify for the Drinans or against my mom or something.”
“You mean like spy on my mother?” Jennifer asked.
“No, no, it’s more like—yeah, actually, it’s like spying on your mother,” I agreed. Her eyes lit up, and she sat up for a moment, the wheels turning, as she considered how she was going to pull this off.
“Yeah,” she finally said, with a sort of internal calculating confidence. She was already working it out. “Yeah, I can do it.”
She needed a purpose; I gave her one. Her sly grin bounced back and released me into the darkness. I slipped my legs over the edge and scrambled onto that dark rat-infested staircase, feeling my way back down one foot at a time until I reached my own unknowable home.
22
THE MORNING FOLLOWING MY NOCTURNAL ADVENTURES I FOUND myself completely entangled in about eight conflicting concerns. The biggest problem, as I saw it, was what to do with all the stuff stashed in the forgotten room. It seemed unlikely that the room would continue to be overlooked. When Lucy had invited those real estate agents over, they had just breezed through and offered general ideas about how much the place was worth. But now I felt pretty sure that the subsequent walk-throughs would be more thorough, and the original floor plan surely would alert people to the existence of that back room. And once they found it, all of Sophie’s stuff would be up for grabs. Including, perhaps, the pearls.
I called Lucy; it seemed the necessary first step.
“Hey,” I said, trying hard not to sound too phony in my friendliness. “It’s me! I just wanted to call and find out how you thought it went yesterday with the press conference. I thought it was pretty good.”
“Yes, people seemed to feel it was a success. You made quite a splash, as usual,” she said drily. “You probably didn’t need to share quite so much information about your colorful past, but I guess I’m not surprised that you did.”
“Oh, yeah, I’m sorry, Lucy, it just kind of popped out,” I apologized, trying to keep the conversation on an even keel as long as I could. “Listen, I need to talk to you about when those Sotheby’s people are going to start showing the apartment. Is that going to happen right away? Because I’m a little worried about the moss.”
“I told you to get rid of that weeks ago, Tina, what is the problem?” she asked, exasperated.
“I know I know, but it’s really important to Len, and he’s on the co-op board, and I don’t want to piss him off. You and Daniel and Alison wanted me to make friends in the building and that’s what I’m doing, and I can’t just throw it out, I think that would really be counterproductive.”
“And he won’t move it himself?”
“He’s been hard to get hold of lately,” I said, dropping a little truth in the middle of all the lies. “I’ll keep trying, but it would really help if you could keep Sotheby’s from showing the place for a little while.”
“I don’t know how much flexibility I have on that. The market being what it is, which is obviously not what it should be, we can’t afford to set a lot of rules. The kind of buyer a place like ours might attract doesn’t come along every day. You don’t keep those people waiting.”
“Yeah, but the market sucks. You’ve said so many times. Maybe it makes sense to wait.”
“I hardly think you’re the expert.”
“I didn’t say I was the expert,” I said, trying not to get edgy. “I just mean maybe we should wait until I can get rid of the moss and then have a little time to clean the whole place properly.”
“Sotheby’s will take care of the cleaning.”
“I need some time to get rid of the moss, Lucy!” I finally snapped. “Honestly, I get so tired of the endless go-round that the simplest conversation always turns into with you! Why do they have to come this week? You keep telling me the market sucks—”
“I also keep telling you to get rid of the moss.”
“Oh, for crying out loud! Forget it. Send them over here today. Let’s show the apartment with a ton of moss growing out of the kitchen, that’ll really sell the place. In this shitty market that’ll be a big plus.”
There was a tense silence. Finally she sighed, but not a defeated sigh, more a “Tina’s such a pain in the ass” sigh, which she long ago perfected and always has at the ready. “So were you going to tell me about the pearls?” she asked.
This I did not expect. I had to stop myself from blurting out something that would sound utterly defensive and guilty. I rallied my best tone of aggressive innocence. “What about them?” I asked.
“Where did you get them?”
“Where did I get them? Who remembers? Some thrift shop in Delaware.”
“You said you left all your things out there with Darren.”
“Well, you know what? That idiot Darren actually got it together to send me a box of my stuff finally. You kept telling me I couldn’t have any money for new clothes, so I got Darren to send me my stuff.”
“This is the first I’ve heard of a package from Darren,” she observed, making it sound like the most improbable event of a lifetime, which it would have been, were it true.
“Well, I don’t tell you everything, Lucy,” I said snidely.
“I know that, Tina, and let me just say, it’s a lot of work, trying to figure out what you do tell me and what you don’t and what’s true and what isn’t.”
“Lucy,” I started. “I show up for these dumb meetings. I get dressed up and show up at the press conference. I’m nice to the people in the building. Whatever you ask me to do, I do it! Why am I still the enemy?”
“I didn’t say you were the enemy,” she responded, with so much undisguised bile it was impossible to mistake her conviction that I was in fact the enemy. “I’m just a little curious about those pearls. Alison said the Sotheby’s curator was very interested in them. He seemed to think they were valuable.”
“He was a real estate guy!” I said, inwardly cursing my insanely cocky decision to wear them to that stupid press conference. “What does he know about pearls?”
“I’m just telling you what Alison told me. She said—”
“I don’t care what Alison said. I got those pearls out in Delaware at a thrift shop last summer, which is, by the way, the same place I got the dress I was wearing and the cute shoes. You told me to get dressed up, so that’s what I did. And, by the way, it’s a good thing Darr
en finally sent me that stuff, otherwise I would have nothing to wear, because as you have mentioned oh so many times, I don’t have any money, and since you don’t seem to think it’s a good idea to give me money, and you also don’t want me to get a job, I’m having a little bit of a problem figuring out how to eat, much less get dressed up.”
“You seem to be doing just fine, Tina,” she responded, completely without sympathy. “I thought you had found some jobs around the building.”
“Oh, come on, I babysat for the Whites once, and the guy upstairs pays me to let the moss stay here. But you want me to get rid of the moss, so there goes that cash!”
“That’s right,” Lucy agreed. “The moss is going. You take care of it or I will, because they’re coming over to clean the place on Friday.”
“Friday?” I said, trying not to panic. “That’s in three days.”
“Wednesday, Thursday, Friday,” she said. “Two and a half.”
I had to make some more phone calls. Len was still not picking up, and neither was Charlie, although at least she had voice mail and I could leave her a message about the complications surrounding this moss situation. I also called the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and left a message for her. Then I spent an hour or so rearranging the storage space and going through the boxes to see if there was anything else I wanted to keep. The thought that I was stealing from a dead woman had evaporated; now I just wanted to save some of her stuff, and since I had just concocted the pretty good story about Darren sending a box of old clothes, I thought I might be able to legitimately pull out some of that stuff without having anyone ask too many questions about where they came from. There was no reason I shouldn’t keep some of Sophie’s things. Otherwise they’d just be thrown out.
I started with the clothes. Sophie’s hippie phase especially had some great moments, and as I had discovered, her clothes actually fit me. So I picked out the best of the Indian-print and tie-dyed tops and skirts, and even a dress with little mirrors all over it. I chose a couple of pairs of cowboy boots and four or five pairs of shoes. I took out two boxes of yarn and knitting needles with the thought that I had always wanted to learn how to knit. And then I grabbed her old Canon, even though it was a film SLR and totally useless anymore.
So I spent the morning and early afternoon picking out stuff to use or save and hanging it up or hiding it in my little room. The way Lucy was talking, I thought, there’s no telling how much longer I’ll be here, and just going through Sophie’s things made me want to turn that sorry old place into a home again. I found a table and a lamp that were old and beat-up enough to look like I might have bought them at a stoop sale. I even found a small Turkish area rug with funny little animals all over it; next to my equally small bed, it made the room quite cozy. I had already lifted a dozen or so mystery novels from the boxes underneath Mom’s bed and lined them against the wall where I slept, so the room was beginning to look as if an actual person lived there.
I picked up Sophie’s alligator clutch from the floor where I had dropped it, wondering where I could hide something that valuable. And then I thought, oh it doesn’t look valuable, it looks like an old purse, nobody’s going to steal it.
So it wasn’t a big leap, frankly, to the next step. I was on the verge of money problems. I had come to that apartment with nothing, really nothing, and then I was lucky enough to find seven hundred dollars, and then I squeezed two hundred out of Len and eighty out of the Whites. I had been living on that for a little over two months! I was pretty much broke now, and that purse was worth at least five thousand dollars. And the dress, I suspected, was worth quite a bit as well. I found a shopping bag and put the clutch in the bottom and the Balenciaga on top of it. And then I dropped the pearls in there too.
In the elevator I took a couple of breaths and turned my brain over to reptile mode, which is what I do when I know I’m doing something wrong—like stealing—but I also know that I’m going to do it anyway. Not that I make a habit of stealing; if I did, I might not be so broke all the time. Or I might be spending more time in jail than the occasional overnight visit. In any case, I don’t steal except in the direst circumstances. And in this case, I wasn’t all that bothered about it. What good would it do Sophie or my mother or me if I just left the stuff back there and let it be tossed or grabbed up by lawyers or Sotheby’s or Mrs. Westmoreland or someone else from the building? Why leave it for any of them? That is what my determined reptile brain was telling me when I stepped off the elevator: I needed the money, no one else needed the money. No one else was going to help me out; only Sophie would.
I didn’t even make it through the lobby.
The response to our cocky little performance at Sotheby’s had apparently been swift and decisive. Right there in the Edgewood lobby I found myself in the middle of another press conference, this one decidedly less civil, particularly with regard to me and my family and what we thought we were doing there. The place was packed; there were at least twice as many reporters and photographers as we had seen the day before, shoved together in every available square inch from the elevator bank past Frank’s podium all the way to the front door. Everybody’s backs were to me as they tried to take photographs and shoot questions at the small but definite cadre of speakers gathered in front of the giant fireplace and trying to answer the questions being thrown at them. There were no microphones at this press conference, so people were shouting.
“Mr. Drinan—Mr. Drinan—Mr. Drinan!” somebody yelled. “Has any court issued a ruling on the status of the will?”
“The Surrogate’s Court has not issued a ruling, but as of this afternoon a cloud has been placed on the title. The Livingston Mansion Apartment, my mother’s family apartment, is not being represented for sale at this time. The announcement that Sotheby’s will be representing the Livingston Mansion Apartment is a complete fabrication,” Doug shouted. “The so-called heirs of Olivia Finn have no claim on it. The will that purports to bequeath the apartment to Olivia Finn has been determined to be fraudulent.”
The alarming and decisive confidence of this assertion pretty much scared the shit out of me for a second, but when I stood on my toes and caught a glimpse of old Doug over the heads of the two gigantic camera guys who were blocking my view, I could see that Doug wasn’t so sure of himself. His air of frustrated defeat had turned into something like a permanent expression of deep unhappiness. His lips had almost disappeared, his hair was disappearing, and his skin was gray, which may just have been the ugly fluorescent lighting in the lobby, but I had seen Frank under those lights a thousand times by now, and he always looked fine. Doug looked paunchy and angry, and while he made it sound like he was winning, he looked like he was losing. But as Doug kept talking, I remembered that someone who is losing has nothing more to lose and is usually the worst enemy you can have.
From where I was standing I couldn’t see anything but backs. There were more camera flashes. Someone else asked a question I couldn’t hear, and somebody else, with a big voice, answered. “It’s possible that the senior Mr. Drinan was never intended to be the heir in the first place. We have not been able to ascertain that the will of the first Mrs. Drinan was ever probated, in which case the document being considered by the Surrogate’s Court at the present time will carry no authority whatsoever. If that is the case, the sons of Sophia Livingston, who grew up in the apartment, are clearly the rightful heirs.”
There were more mumbled questions, and the guy with the big voice made another announcement. “Why don’t we let the board answer that question.”
He and some of the others up there conversed among themselves, and then a third voice started to speak, but there was so much overlap he couldn’t really be heard. The room was getting hot from all the camera lights, and people were starting to shove a bit, because it was so crowded and no one could see what was happening.
“We can’t hear!” someone in the back yelled. After some more frustrated mumbling, the loud voice in the front spoke up again.
“Yes, sorry, sorry, here this seems to help,” it announced. There was some shuffling, and then Len stepped up onto one of the lobby’s wingback chairs.
I just stared. It really was Len, and his hair was combed and he was wearing a lovely dark green suit and tie, but his eyes were crazier than ever.
“The Edgewood in no way supports the supposed heirs of Olivia Finn. Our understanding is that, contrary to the assertions made by Sotheby’s, there is in fact a cloud on the title, but that doesn’t matter because the co-op board will not endorse any sale at this time. These women are no better than thieves as far as we are concerned. It is disgraceful that they have succeeded in this dreadful misappropriation of property to any degree whatsoever,” he hissed. “And it will not be allowed.”
Some more mumbling at Len’s feet apparently struck a nerve, because he became completely incensed. “Yes there is, there is someone living there who has no rights at all, and the building has very much taken note of it, and she is going to be evicted immediately!” he declared hotly. “This is a landmark building, and the indignity—the indignity of this pretender and interloper—will no longer be tolerated. Unless these people vacate the premises within the week, the building will bring its own action against them!” There was some more mumbling, which made Len even madder. “Legality—there has been too much talk about legality! What about what is historic! What about what is right! What about that!”
In spite of the tidy suit, Len was starting to look and sound completely psychotic. I couldn’t believe it; he was like a different person. I wanted to shout at him, I’m taking care of your moss, you asshole! But that would not have helped my situation. His angry exhortations were having their effect on the mood of the room. Some of the photographers in the back were shoving each other to get a decent shot; many were just holding their cameras above their heads and firing off their motor drives, hoping they’d end up with something worth printing. But some of the reporters at the back were feeling left out, so they started shouting questions really loudly, partly out of frustration and partly so they could be heard. “Has the building started eviction proceedings?” a skinny girl in a red jacket shouted. I wanted to hit her, but I was beginning to worry that someone would notice that the evil pretender and interloper was standing right there spying on the proceedings, and they’d mob me.
Twelve Rooms with a View Page 27
