The Price of Inheritance

by Karin Tanabe

  “What do you suggest I collect, Miss Everett? Gold boxes? Sporting art? Islamic artifacts? Maybe musical instruments. Do you think this house would look nice lined with rusty tubas?”

  “We try to avoid selling rust,” I answered with a smile that was getting very strained.

  “Will I see you both tomorrow?” she asked.

  She would indeed.

  I wanted to remind her that she was the one who contacted Louise. We hadn’t shown up at her doorstep unannounced with a contract.

  “She’ll sell,” said Nicole after we walked outside. “She asked if we were coming back tomorrow and no mention of any other auction house. She’s ready. But she certainly doesn’t need the money. I can’t figure out why she wants to sell now.”

  “You never know about people’s private lives. Maybe she has some loose ends to tie up.”

  Nicole laughed and got in the little rental car. “Loose ends” was a term many sellers used instead of “I’m strapped for cash, I’ve got debts, my son gambled away all our money in Monaco, we were victims of a Ponzi scheme, Wall Street screwed us, or our daughter is addicted to the devil’s sugar, and we need to pay the rehab bills.”

  Elizabeth had said that if she were to sell, she wanted to lead the January sale. Usually, it took us a full year to get an estate of her size ready for auction. We certainly didn’t want to rush it, and four months was beyond rushing it, but if that was one of her stipulations, I knew Christie’s would do it. Our department was not a big one and we never said no to estates like Elizabeth’s even if we had to work night and day to get it ready for January 18. We only had sales twice a year: September and January. The rest of the time we lived in fear of getting enough to wow the world in September and January.

  I had texted Alex three times since I’d been gone to tell him I was in Houston, potentially working on a huge deal, and he had only written back, “cool.” Really? “Cool?” Did that mean he was chilly? Or that my job was awesome? Or maybe he was screwing someone else and had only been able to pound out “cool” with one of his thumbs while he twisted her into a Boy Scout knot? I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Alex and Elizabeth Tumlinson were flooding my brain.

  The next day, Nicole and I were ready to turn our attention to old auction records, historical records, and previous sales from each of the craftsmen. When we went back to Elizabeth’s at 9 A.M., she told us that she had a meeting with “a few others” that evening so it was good we were planning to wrap it all up that morning.

  “By a few others she means David Marcham from Sotheby’s, you know. Maybe Valerie Hemmet, too,” said Nicole as we inspected an end table on the other side of the house. “Louise is not going to be pleased they’re here.”

  We had thought that with the time Elizabeth was allotting us, David wasn’t coming at all, but we were clearly wrong. David Marcham was a legend in the American furniture industry. He had hair that smelled exactly like fine leather and was on Antiques Roadshow twice a month. He had once made a woman cry when he told her that her antique baby chair was a fake and looked like dog feces molded into the shape of a rocker. His brother was the preeminent expert on American numismatics and had once shot himself in the foot on live television to prove a point about the Civil War era Whitworth rifle.

  It took two hours of talking to Elizabeth to get a thing out of her about Sotheby’s. Nicole didn’t want to ask, I didn’t want to ask, but we had to know if they were definitely coming that night, as we might lift our guarantee a little if they were.

  After we rephotographed a few pieces because the morning light was better than what we had the day before, Elizabeth decided to get chatty, but not about what we were hoping she’d talk about—her transfer of assets from her living room to our New York showroom. Instead she talked about herself. And we listened.

  Sitting tall on a muted blue settee and pulling her hands into her lap, she smiled and looked at us smiling back at her like desperate idiots. She knew she could talk to us about pig intestines for fourteen hours straight and we would have to continue nodding enthusiastically and gasping over the complexities of swine innards.

  “I’ve always been a collector,” she said, pointing out the obvious. “Even before I met Adam. I didn’t have the money to buy the really important things—the Lannuiers, Thomas Afflecks, Duncan Phyfes—like I do now, but I’ve always been taken with collections. Not only did I like to acquire things; I could never get rid of anything, either. My mother, Janet Tivoli, died Christmas Day of 1963, and, well, she was the same way. She once said that throwing out a sweater was like ripping the wings off an angel. That really stuck with me.”

  Holy God. If I took one hundred twenty-seven pieces from her, would I be killing 63.5 angels? Or would that be one hundred twenty-seven angels?

  “I’m just like you,” I told her. “I can’t get rid of anything. I have every letter I’ve ever received, every photo I’ve ever taken. I don’t use digital because I can’t bear the thought of deleting things.”

  Nicole raised her eyebrows at me, sure that I must be lying. She probably took nothing but iPhone photos and had a posh, perfect, clutter-free existence.

  “Your grandmother was the same way, wasn’t she,” said Elizabeth, looking at me.

  “Yes, she really was.”

  “We met at a dinner in Baltimore, you know,” she offered up.

  “I didn’t know. But I’m sure she was very fond of you,” I suggested. Of course, my grandmother had never mentioned knowing Elizabeth, but I was going to ignore that. Just like I was going to ignore the fact that my butt was completely asleep because I had been sitting on this very attractive, very expensive, and very uncomfortable chair for two hours. I felt like a geisha. Soon I would be asked to do a tea ceremony.

  It was somewhere between talking about how she had first collected Revolutionary War era lamps (because she didn’t like to be kept in the dark) and how she then decided to move on to silver soup tureens that she mentioned ­Sotheby’s.

  “David is very interested in my estate,” she announced, as if we had no idea. “We spoke last night and he’s convinced me it wouldn’t be in my best interest to give everything to Maryland, because real collectors, real lovers of the finest Americana, should have a chance to own history just like I did. He made a very good point.”

  Yes, he had. It was one both Nicole and I had made about five times the day before.

  “We agree wholeheartedly with that point, as we voiced yesterday,” Nicole said politely. “I can promise you that Christie’s will put the best deal on the table. Along with the thirty-million-dollar guarantee, half of it paid to you upon signing, Christie’s is very willing to lower our commissions, to waive certain fees, and to commit ourselves to really showcasing your work in the best way for it to sell.” I took out a rendering of Elizabeth’s estate displayed in our showrooms along with a note from our graphic designer that was faxed to us just hours before.

  “Your collection would have its own catalogue, which would go out to thousands of very important buyers,” I added.

  “I like you both,” said Elizabeth, looking at us like we were rabid dogs about to chomp off her ankles. “And I know my husband was very fond of Louise, but Sotheby’s has given some very good preliminary numbers, too, without even seeing the collection. So you’ll understand why I gave them a loose verbal agreement last night.”

  Had Sotheby’s given over a $30 million guarantee? There was no way.

  Nicole scribbled something on her notepad and I looked over and saw the word bluffing, scrawled in her tiny handwriting. She scratched it out while we kept talking.

  Was Elizabeth bluffing? She could definitely be bluffing. She knew I couldn’t just call up David and casually ask.

  “We don’t think that’s the right decision,” I said firmly.

  “We just made history with the Nicholas Brown. We also made history with the Rich
ard Edwards Chippendale pier table when it went for four-point-six-two in 1990,” said Nicole.

  “Yes, but that was 1990,” Elizabeth replied.

  “But the Nicholas Brown was four days ago,” I pointed out. “I arranged that sale. Our record in American art is unquestionably superior to any of our competitors. We have the resources and the buyers and we will get you the dollar amount you deserve.”

  Elizabeth stood up, so we both followed her lead and stood up in front of her. I was only five foot three but in the grand room, I felt even smaller, like a garden gnome.

  Maybe Elizabeth had no intention of going with Christie’s in the first place. Perhaps David was her best friend and he was actually in some guesthouse suite watching us writhe in our failure on a CCTV feed. He was probably screaming, “Another martini, Jeeves, and some unemployment forms for the girls! This is simply rich!” as he watched me try to control my urges to throw myself on my stomach in front of Elizabeth and beg her to go with Christie’s because she knew my grandmother, because we both loved the great, strangely shaped state of Maryland, because C came before S in the alphabet. Anything! Perhaps it was time for me to fabricate some story about David Marcham being a closet pyromaniac who couldn’t control himself and his little match collection around two-centuries-old mahogany?

  Maybe it was because Nicole seemed to have thrown in her hand and was already talking to Elizabeth about people they knew in common in Maryland, but I blurted out, “Thirty-seven-million-dollar guarantee and a four-percent commission. Anything we make over thirty-seven, we keep. That’s the best offer I can give you and it’s an extremely good one.”

  Elizabeth looked at me startled, her glassy green eyes not quite registering what I had just said.

  “I’ll also waive all fees. The insurance fee, the illustration fee. Everything. You and I both know David won’t put that offer on the table even if you say we did. I shouldn’t be putting that offer out. But I am. You’ll lead the January sales. It’s a very fast turnaround to get your estate ready by January but it seems very important to you—”

  “It’s a deal breaker,” Elizabeth interrupted me.

  “Right, we will have everything ready for January, then. Absolutely guaranteed.”

  Nicole was doing the math in her head as she looked at me looking at Elizabeth. She had clearly figured out how many million I had overpromised by and started to turn very pale and shook her head no at me. I ignored her and repeated the numbers.

  An hour later, as I knew she would, Elizabeth signed our offer.

  CHAPTER 3

  When Alex didn’t return my calls for five days I started to worry. We had always been able to go days, sometimes weeks, without speaking to each other, but we never ignored each other’s big life moments. This was the second time in twenty-two days that he had taken my happiness and shredded it with his silence.

  He finally called me during the last week of September, but didn’t apologize for the time lapse, for ignoring me, or for yet again letting me down when I needed support. He talked to me the way he’d always talked to me and we drifted back to laughing about summers in high school. When everyone we boarded with headed home and we were left to be wild teenagers in Newport. So I forgave him. I wanted familiarity and Alex always delivered that. I didn’t have time to think about why I tolerated the rest of him because I, along with Nicole, Louise, and Erik Wagner, deputy chairman of Christie’s America, had three months to get ready for the January sales.

  My job became my everything. I stopped going out. I ate lunch and dinner at my desk. I talked to Jane Dalby only occasionally and very late at night, when I couldn’t fall asleep. I sent the occasional text to my parents that said, “I’m alive, not to worry.” The rest of the time, I was at work. It was a very cold fall, even for someone used to six months of cold, and my walk to and from the subway became the only time I spent outside. The leaves turned from beautiful to brown, the number of tourists packed into Rockefeller Center thinned out a little before the holiday storm, and my world shrank to my apartment, my office, the deli where I bought coffee, and the occasional inside of a cab when I was too tired or too cold to wait for a train.

  Elizabeth’s estate, or the estate of Mrs. Adam R. Tumlinson as it was called in the catalogue and in the press, was poised to bring in 70 percent of the January sale’s revenue.

  “I thought as much,” said Elizabeth when I called to tell her at 9 A.M. sharp on the first Monday in December.

  “I did, too,” I replied. After all the red tape had been peeled away, Elizabeth had told me more about her friendship with my grandmother. They’d spent time on a museum committee together and had formed a bond that Elizabeth seemed to regret losing.

  “She was a fair bit older than me, you know,” she said as we changed topics from the upcoming auction to the familiar thread that linked us together. “But she was the kind of woman everybody wanted to know. She’d had a child just a few years before.”

  “My father,” I pointed out. “He’s an only child, so that’s how I’m sure,” I explained.

  “Is he now? That’s too bad. Only children tend to develop a mild case of the crazies later in life.”

  I had to agree. At times I felt like I already had an acute case of the crazies. The next time I went to the doctor he’d glance at my pupils and say, “It’s the crazies! And you’ll have them for life. Here’s a pill, it will do nothing for you.”

  “Is it true that by the time you were born, all the family money was gone?” asked Elizabeth, touching on a subject I tried very hard to avoid.

  It was true, I told her. The Everett steel money was nearly depleted. My grandfather had lost a lot of it in his final years, when he was trying to make good business decisions with a mind that wouldn’t allow them. And when my father married my mother, “a penniless academic,” according to my grandmother, she refused to give him what was left, since he had killed her hope of his marrying some heiress who could keep them living the life she had raised him in. She lived with us for thirteen years, promising my father would inherit what remained, but she gave it away instead, changing her will at the very end of her life and leaving half a million for my education and a little less for my parents, who, she stated, “were smart-asses enough to not need any more education.” I gave Elizabeth the very short version of the story.

  For the last couple of weeks, talking to Elizabeth—who almost always spoke to me, rather than to Louise, Nicole, or Erik—I had started to think that she had known about me before Louise mentioned me. My name was in bold under Louise’s and Erik’s on our department website and I had been in the auction room in New York with her husband before. We all knew Adam Tumlinson, but Elizabeth had never been present at a New York auction. I started to wonder if her familiarity came from research rather than name recognition. If it did, it didn’t really matter. Maybe it swayed her decision to go with Christie’s, and if so, I was just lucky to have the right name.

  •••

  By the end of the first week in January, I felt like the world was releasing its grip a little. The auction was catalogued and organized and generating great buzz and Louise and Erik were absolutely fine with the guarantee we’d given Elizabeth. Even Nicole had forgiven me for the way I’d handled things in Houston, mostly because Art in America had valued the Tumlinson estate at $39 million, but speculated that it could hit $40 million.

  So when I received a call on my office phone from an unknown number that afternoon, I answered it with a sprightly hello instead of letting it roll over to voicemail.

  “Is this Carolyn Everett?” a man with a deep voice asked, mispronouncing my last name. He sounded very hesitant.

  “Yes, it is,” I replied. He explained that he’d been transferred to both Louise and Erik but neither had answered their phone and he wanted to speak to someone in the American furniture department.

  “Well, you can talk to me,” I said
cheerfully. “How can I help you?”

  “I don’t know that you can, but I’ll tell you what’s what and then you can tell me if you can help me.”

  “Okay . . . ,” I said, starting to regret that I’d picked up the call.

  “My name is Richard Jones. I live down in Baltimore and I’ve got no real interest in American furniture.”

  Wonderful. Thank goodness he called the American furniture department at Christie’s then. Perhaps I should call up a butcher, introduce myself, and tell him I’m a vegetarian.

  “But here’s the thing. My sister Nina Caine, Nina Jones Caine, she’s a librarian at Three Rivers High, that’s here in Baltimore . . . and . . . well, she’s very interested in American furniture. Has been since the sixties. She pays attention to all the buying and selling and stuff like that and she came around last night and showed me the magazine for your upcoming sale—”

  “Is that one of our January catalogues, you mean? Your sister has a catalogue?”

  I knew everyone our catalogues went out to and I was not familiar with the name Nina Caine, but they were for sale online and found in university libraries.

  “Right, your catalogue. I don’t know all the lingo, but what I do know is that Nina showed me the catalogue, the Property from the Collection of Mrs. Adam R. Tumlinson catalogue, and she was very upset because right there on page seventy-three was a picture of a table she owns. Well, we own it because it was our mother’s, but it’s on page ­seventy-three of your catalogue and it’s also in Nina’s living room.”

  It wasn’t rare for Christie’s to receive phone calls when catalogues came out about something being inauthentic, but the calls were usually nothing to be alarmed by, just people wanting to make a quick buck off the Picasso they had just “found” in their grandmother’s attic. But it didn’t happen in the furniture department.