Twelve Rooms with a View

by Theresa Rebeck

  “Could you be more specific? You actually saw—”

  “I saw a lot, and I’m willing to testify to that,” Len claimed, with seemingly sincere regret. I wanted to rip his face off or at least give Charlie another go. But before he could continue to tell spectacular stories about how evil my poor lost mother was, Vince’s dad leaned forward and whispered something to him. Len tilted his head and listened, then nodded with bemused respect. “I quite agree. I quite agree,” he murmured. Then he looked out at his audience and held up the little packet of papers.

  “Our esteemed board president, Roger Masterson, has made the excellent point that a discussion centering on Bill’s more recent wife, who actually never held any rights in regard to the Livingston apartment, is not the most useful way to spend our time together this evening. What’s more important to all of us is the status of the apartment as designated by the last will and testament of the first Mrs. Drinan.”

  Something was up. Len was curling his sentences on top of each other so deliriously that the whole thing sounded fishy before he even started telling the story. But everyone in the room was eating it up. There was a pause and a hush. He sighed and looked down, sad. “Those of you who lived here then know that there was some difficulty surrounding Sophie Livingston. Those who knew her remember a woman filled with passion and delight. At times she was unhappy, and at times her spirit was greatly troubled. Today some might choose to label these fluctuations in temperament as mental illness. And indeed, her unhappiness led her family to make choices for her that were questionable, and they were questioned.”

  People shifted in their seats. He was taking too long. I could see old Roger Masterson twitching, trying to figure out how to get Len to move the story along. But Len was enjoying his moment. “One evening Bill came to me, explaining his plan, which was to have his wife admitted to a psychiatric facility in the city. I was appalled. My experience with Sophie would never have led me to believe that such a drastic action, a removal, was called for. What I could see, from my vantage point, was that there were problems in the marriage, and the truly rational solution for everyone would be for them to divorce. But Bill was having none of it. What would happen to Sophie, he asked, if she were left alone in that glorious apartment? He was convinced she would do harm to herself. I thought this was nonsense. He didn’t want to talk about it; his mind was made up. And he told me that his two grown sons supported his decision. The most I could do was insist that the facility to which Sophie was taken be the best possible home for her. I contacted a friend at the university where I was teaching, pulled some strings, and got her placed in a wonderful, wonderful treatment center.”

  He paused dramatically and considered the documents in his hand. The room was silent, expectant, waiting for the story to fulfill itself. “I visited her there often,” he explained. “Bill, and Pete and Doug, her beloved sons, did not. They moved on with their lives. But I never thought she belonged there. We would have long talks about her life growing up in the Edgewood, the happiest times and memories for her centering on the building, which was so precious to her parents. And I said to her, Sophie, you belong in your home with us. She felt it was too late for that. And so she asked me to help her make a will.”

  He stopped and held up the little folder. “Which left the apartment to the building.” No one said anything for a moment. Masterson and the lawyer glanced at each other, expressionless.

  “Okay, wait a minute,” someone finally said. I was really wishing I could see that half of the room, filled to the brim with people I knew and didn’t know. What a load of nonsense, I thought, I can’t believe anybody is going to fall for this. But there was money in the air now, and that crowd was particularly attuned to its potential. “You helped her make a will?” the questioner asked.

  “No, no, I am not an attorney, I cannot legally ‘help’ anyone make a will. But I did alert a member of the staff, who wrote down her wishes. She was agitated but definitely in her right mind. So I agreed to serve as a witness, as did the nurse’s aide who helped us. And I was given a copy of the document for safekeeping.”

  At this, Gary the lawyer stood up holding a stack of papers, which he proceeded to hand out to the group. “We have copies,” he announced. There was a rustle of pages as each person obediently passed the copies on to the next, and the lawyer took over the narrative for a moment. “We have contacted the other witness on the will, who is willing to testify about the legitimacy of the document.”

  “This counts? It’s more like a letter,” someone behind the door said, worried.

  “It states her wishes clearly. It counts,” the lawyer asserted.

  “Is this will later than the one that left the apartment to her husband?” someone else asked, also worried.

  “It is the only will,” the lawyer reassured the room. “When she passed six years ago, some questions were raised about when and why her will had not been probated properly. Because of the recent dissent between the two so-called sets of heirs, investigation was made into the failure to probate any will. Court documents indicate that there was no other will and that the apartment was improperly awarded to the husband as the next of kin.”

  “If all this happened six years ago, why are we only hearing about it now?” The unseen questioner was clearly not happy with this situation. He was getting pushy.

  “That—was—my mistake,” Len asserted with a regretful sigh. He was really a better actor than I’m making him sound. He was quite deft during this part of the performance. “Bill was truly bereft when she passed. There was bitterness and recriminations, so much sadness, and finally a real rupture between him and his sons. For years they didn’t speak to each other! So I confess that my friendship with Bill overwhelmed my sense of loyalty to Sophie. I thought, what would be the harm in letting him spend his last years in the home he made with her in better times? He was so lonely. And so isolated there. I thought that when he died I could bring the will forward at that time.”

  “You were taking a lot on yourself,” the angry guy noted with some asperity.

  “Yes, I was, I most certainly was, and I regret it deeply,” Len said. “I wasn’t sure what to do. I consulted several people about the correct course. I spoke to Delia Westmoreland about it at the time; she was such friends with Sophie, and I knew she would understand the dilemma.”

  “Delia, is that true?” asked Mrs. White, as if this possibility might actually change her opinion about this improbable story.

  “Yes, yes he did, he came to me, I can’t remember when exactly—”

  “It was six years ago, just after she died,” Len provided.

  “That’s exactly right,” Delia agreed. She was nervous, but almost everyone seemed to be going along—at least they were listening pretty intently—so she plowed ahead. “I wanted to tell people right away, though. I didn’t like the idea of holding back information about Sophie’s wishes. I never thought it was fair of them to put her away like that and then make a grab for the place, that seemed really bad to me.”

  “He was her husband,” Mrs. White reminded her.

  “He was Irish. He wasn’t even American. And it wasn’t what she would have wanted. Well, she wrote that down, I guess, that it wasn’t what she wanted. And you know she was a feminist, Sophie would never have agreed that Bill could just grab her family’s heritage, she wasn’t into all that male power stuff, that’s why it was so terrible, what he did to her. That he and those boys just sent her off to the asylum, I know that’s not what they call it anymore, but let’s face it, that’s what they did. It’s appalling really. And you know, her parents never liked him. So I wasn’t surprised when Len told me about this. I thought, it serves them right, after the way they treated her, that she would not stand for them getting the apartment too. No, I was not surprised at all.”

  “Did you see the will, did Len show you this document at the time?” prompted Roger Masterson.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Westmoreland. “He most certainl
y did.” I was watching her through the door crack; she was right in my line of vision, and she had gotten the hang of it by then; she was confident and even defiant. “Len showed me the will, but also he told me his concerns, that Bill wasn’t well and that he didn’t have a lot of years left in him and that maybe it would be cruel to just kick him out. Even if it’s what he deserved. Like I said, I thought we should bring it to the board right then. But then Len pointed out he would die soon enough. Certainly neither one of us thought some cleaning woman would show up and try to make off with all of it. That I know Sophie did not want.”

  “But no one else has a copy of this document?” asked the persistent questioner from the corner. “Was it registered anywhere? I just don’t think it looks good that someone in the building had it all along and didn’t bring it forward before now. That doesn’t seem right.” I wish I knew who that person was; he seemed to be the only one in the room with a shred of a clue.

  “I think you need to leave that part to the lawyers,” soothed Gary. “Stranger things have happened over the years with regard to wills and inheritances. And we have several witnesses. Len here, Delia, the aide from the nursing home. We can verify the history of the document. Our case is strong.”

  “Could you tell us what it even means?” Len asked, sweetly mystified. “I never really considered the question, even though I helped make it happen. How can a building own an apartment?”

  “We hold it in trust and arrange for its sale. The proceeds go into a fund that we can use as an endowment of sorts to support the maintenance of the building,” Roger Masterson explained. I thought he was going to start licking himself any second, he was enjoying this so much. “It’s quite an exceptional situation. It gives us the opportunity to protect and restore a historic property and also support our own investment in the building as cooperative owners of the property. And you all should know that it’s our importance as a historic property that is in play here. Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Corcoran—all the brokers of important properties—have agreed to wait and let our own interest play out here. No one is going to provide any real opposition to our position. It is not in their interest to do so.”

  “Isn’t that like price fixing?” the malcontent in the corner called out.

  “Not at all,” Gary said with a cool, knowing smile. “Here, let me walk you through the legalities of a situation like this.”

  “You have to go,” someone breathed into my ear. I almost fell over I was so startled, but she reached out and held my arm firmly to keep me steady and to keep me from giving myself away. I turned slowly. The most beautiful face I’ve ever seen was right next to my own. “Before they finish,” Julianna whispered. “They can’t find you here.” And then she stood and silently reached her hand out to me. I took it and followed her into the kitchen, where she moved with graceful assurance to the cabinet door that opened onto that terrifying crawl space. I looked around, realizing that I would have to get back in there. But Julianna passed right by the cabinet as if it were invisible.

  “I presume you came up the fire escape,” she said, opening the kitchen window onto the night air. “Quickly, quickly!” she urged.

  30

  IT WAS SIGNIFICANTLY EASIER TO CLIMB DOWN THE RICKETY OLD fire escape than it had been to climb up the twisting staircase trapped inside the walls of the building. The skeletal ladders fit together like a perfect wrought-iron jigsaw puzzle, and within seconds, it seemed, I was on the landing outside the window of my own apartment. The euphoric sense of relief I had experienced as I clambered down the outside of the building waned slightly when I realized that I once again was unable to get into the apartment because, not surprisingly, the window was locked. I stood there and pondered this for a moment. And then I saw the ghost.

  She was right there at the window, looking at me. At first I didn’t know what I was seeing; I thought I was looking into a pair of disembodied eyes afloat in an undifferentiated and murky universe. They frightened me so completely that I pulled back and careened for a moment near the edge of the space that opened on the landing beneath me, at which point she held up a hand, instinctively, to warn me to be careful. Then she looked over her shoulder and back at me, and I thought, the ghost, it’s the ghost. Her hair was pulled back under a kerchief, and her skin was as dark as the air around her. I took a step forward and reached my hand out to the window she stood at. There were bars across it. She looked like she was in a cage.

  We considered each other for just a moment, and then I knew what to do. “Stay there,” I said. And I took off my shirt, wrapped it around my fist, and stuck my hand through my own window, which was right next to hers. Then I reached in, turned the window latch, yanked the window up, climbed inside, and found my cell phone.

  “You have to get over here now,” I said to Pete when he picked up. “Now, right now, you have to come right now.” Then I ran through the apartment, undid all the locks, and headed down the stairs, because I didn’t want to wait for the elevator.

  “Frank,” I said. He looked up from his little stand, where he was reading yet another magazine. “You have to come. You have to bring the master keys. There’s a person trapped in Mrs. Westmoreland’s apartment, she’s locked in there, you have to help me get her out.”

  “Tina—look, I don’t know,” he began. “You know they’re saying you’re not supposed to be here. I’m not allowed to help you with anything. They told me I could get fired if I did.”

  “She’s an illegal, Frank,” I said. “Westmoreland’s got an illegal up there, locked in a room. She’s an illegal.”

  That was all it took. Frank and his master keys got us into Delia Westmoreland’s apartment, where we found the ghost hiding in a closet and praying to the gods of her homeland to come and save her. She was so lost in that other universe she didn’t fully recognize the real thing when we showed up. She fought and cried and insisted in some strange tongue that we had to go, that they couldn’t find us there. Then Mrs. Westmoreland showed up and insisted that she was calling the police to have me arrested. I told her there was no need, as they were already on their way, which she didn’t take too well. Then when Pete arrived, Mrs. Westmoreland went into a rage and claimed to have sponsored the ghost—whose name was Gcina—for citizenship, out of the goodness of her heart.

  In the middle of all the yelling, Pete took us all down to the local precinct, where I dragged him into a corner for a minute to tell him what I had heard at the board meeting. You could tell he didn’t really believe me, but before I could explain, I was dragged into an interrogation room and asked about the ghost. I told them I had been hearing her in the wall for weeks and I knew she must be in some kind of trouble, but I didn’t put it all together until I saw her. Meanwhile Gcina was giving up her story in an interrogation room down the hall. And then some cop asked me what I was doing out on the fire escape, and Pete said go ahead, tell them about the other stuff, so I told them about the co-op board meeting, and rather than laughing me out of the room, the cops went back to the building and asked Julianna Gideon to come to the precinct and verify my story. Her mother, predictably, threw a fit and insisted on coming with her and calling a lawyer and generally screaming at everyone in the most horrible way possible. She especially reamed out Frank, who was just sitting in a corner quietly waiting to be told he could go home. Then when the lawyer arrived, the cops wouldn’t let Mrs. Gideon go with Julianna into the interrogation room, where she apparently validated every detail of my story about what was said at the board meeting. They took all of that back to Mrs. Westmoreland and told her she was going to be on the hook for abduction and harboring an illegal alien, but that conspiracy to defraud the courts was even more serious, and if she would flip on the whole cabal of board members at the Edge they’d take that into consideration.

  So she gave up everything and got a walk on the other charges, because Gcina was from Somalia and no one knew who she was or where her family was, and in the end she didn’t matter as much as the Livi
ngston Mansion Apartment did. The police issued warrants for the arrest of every member of the board, including Roger Masterson and Len, who was in especially hot water because Westmoreland had admitted that the whole will scenario was a fake, and she claimed it was his idea. Then Gary the lawyer showed up and explained that Roger Masterson did not have to come down to a police precinct in the middle of the night and they could speak to him in his office the next day. Then some uniformed officers brought Len in and walked him right past me, as I sat in the waiting room with Pete. Then some lady from INS arrived and took Gcina off, and when I asked Pete where they were taking her, he admitted that she would be put in jail, and they would hold her probably for months and then send her back to Somalia unless she could prove that she needed asylum.

  “They can’t,” I said. “Come on. You can’t put her in jail. She’s been in jail for months. We don’t even know how long. But at least months.”

  “I still can’t see how you put that together,” Pete said, checking his nails. “You really didn’t have any evidence, just somebody crying in the next room. You know, if you had brought that to me, I couldn’t even have gotten a warrant on it. It’s a good thing you got Frank to open the door for you. No cop in the city would have done it.”

  “Because she’s nobody?”

  “Because you didn’t have any evidence.”

  “I’m on the same landing with them. I could see, when Westmoreland opened the door going out or coming in, that the place was getting cleaned every day. And no one ever came. I never saw anybody.”

  “Still not enough.”

  “I cleaned houses myself,” I said. “I know what it’s like to be locked in a trailer out at the Delaware Water Gap.” And then I went on a crying jag, and Pete said he’d take me home.

  Which is where we were the following morning when Doug showed up. Unfortunately I had not, for once, locked the door from the inside, both because I was so tired and because I had my own cop, and I wasn’t worried about someone bursting into my world. I had not counted on Doug Drinan getting a tip-off from Len Colbert, who had used his one phone call to tell Doug that his brother might be here, fraternizing with the enemy, and he might want to come see for himself.