The Price of Inheritance

by Karin Tanabe

  I was connected to the main number at the University of Hartford and then connected again to the Hartford Art School.

  “It’s the weekend,” said the operator, who sounded like a student. “You might just get voicemail.” I assured her that that was okay and waited for the Art School’s machine to prompt me for different extensions. Illustration, media arts, painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, digital art, and ceramics. Trying to figure out what I was listening for, I let the prerecorded message play the options again as I stood there, unable to make a move. When it played for a third time, I pushed eight for the last choice: ceramics. The machine prompted me to choose from three different extensions; two were for associate professors and the third was for the ceramics technician, Hannah Lloyd. As soon as I heard her say her name after the verbal prompt had informed me of the extension, I hung up. I let the phone slip out of my hand and fall on the carpeted floor. Hannah was Hannah Lloyd, a potter and a good enough one to work at a major university.

  I walked over to the bookshelf and took the bowl down and held it in my hand. Blair Bari didn’t think it was worth anything, but could it have been glazed over? Repainted? I went to my desk and took out a medical magnifying headset that I had used when I was in appraisals at Christie’s. The bowl was so smooth. There were no visible cracks, no chips; it was in near-perfect condition. I turned it around again and looked at the bottom, at the extremely faint small Hebrew letters. First and the last, that’s what Blair Bari had said.

  I grabbed my computer from the floor, opened it again, and quickly typed in the school’s name and Hannah Lloyd. She came up under the art school’s faculty page but, unlike the two professors, there was no picture and no bio. When I googled her, her name was too generic to show any decent results. But she had worked at St. George’s. I could go there and ask other teachers about her, though that might get back to her. It felt safer to go to Hartford. To fake some sort of inquiry. I lay down on my bed holding the bowl and almost dropped it when my phone rang. I looked at the caller ID, which was blocked. My finger hesitated over the accept button and I pushed it on the fifth ring. But it wasn’t Hannah.

  “Carolyn, this is Nina Caine,” said the voice I had come to associate with everything bad in the world.

  “Nina?” I said slowly. Did she really have the gall to call me from a blocked number? Trick me into answering the phone?

  “Don’t get mad,” she said immediately. “I heard you left New York and I just wanted to check on you, make sure you were doing okay.”

  “How did you know I left New York?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Louise DeWitt told me. I spoke to her a few days ago and pressed her for information about you.”

  “I’m surprised she gave you any. She certainly hasn’t contacted me.”

  Nina cleared her throat nervously. “Listen, I know that somehow with all that went on, you were a casualty. And I just want you to know I didn’t mean for that to happen. I’ve known enough unemployed people in my life to never want to be the cause of someone’s—”

  “Firing? Demise? Undoing?” I chimed in. I kicked off my shoes and sat on the bed with my feet under me.

  “I would never want to hurt anyone,” Nina said, interrupting me. “I think that somehow, you got beat up in all of this.”

  “Well, we all know how the somehow happened,” I said, throwing blame back in her face. “I’m okay now,” I added flatly. “I left New York. I’m in Newport for a while.”

  “I’m glad you’re getting some time to . . .” She thought better of it and changed her phrase. “Did you go home to see your family?” she asked.

  “No, my family is not exactly that type. I went home because I am currently unemployable in my field in New York and I needed a break and some money. People know me here; they gave me a job.”

  “Well, home is always a good idea.”

  Neither of us spoke for a few seconds, and Nina finally said, “I’ll just keep checking in on you then, if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind,” I replied, lying. But what could I say? “Yes, bitch, I mind; lose my number and go play in the river”? I was too well trained to say anything like that.

  “You probably want me to hang up now, but I have some information about the table. Would you like me to tell you?”

  No, I would like you to dangle it out in front of me like I’m a burro hopelessly chasing after a bendy carrot.

  “That would be fine,” I replied politely.

  “Well, it’s back with us in Baltimore. I’m looking at it actually. After the news came out about it in the Sun, Elizabeth, via Christie’s, agreed to have it returned to us in Baltimore, no questions asked. I never even spoke to her about it and it didn’t take more than ten days for us to get it. Isn’t that fast? Ten days. It was driven here on a truck from New York and now it’s in my living room, with nothing but a few hats on it.”

  Ten days wasn’t just fast, it was suspiciously fast.

  “Well, that seems appropriate,” I replied.

  “Yes it does. Anyway, I enjoy looking at it. Oh, and in two weeks I’m meeting with Elizabeth’s lawyer in Washington, D.C., to sign some papers for Christie’s.”

  “You let me know how it goes?” I asked.

  “I’ll call you after Washington,” she said. “Also, and maybe I should have said this first, I spoke to the family that gave my grandmother the table in the first place. I mean to the surviving daughter. Her name is Rachel. She said to me, ‘I don’t remember very much about your grandmother, except that I loved her.’ ”

  “Well, it’s certainly all become very interesting,” I replied.

  “For me, too. It’s strange that that table mattered to me so much. I don’t know why I latched on to it like I did.”

  “Because it represented a time when you were really happy.”

  “Yes, probably.”

  “Your table, what happened, it’s surprising, but you should know that Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and other major auction houses sometimes sell stolen goods,” I told her. “That’s a fact. We’re not talking Van Gogh’s Poppy Flowers stolen, something plucked from the wall of a well-known museum, but stolen all the same. It happens more often than you’d think, though it’s often works from abroad. Stolen art makes an amazing amount of cash. In the world of criminal activities, looking at how much it grosses, looted art and artifacts are right behind drugs and arms sales. In Italy, about thirty thousand art thefts happen every year. In China, stolen art is believed to be their biggest illegal export. And sometimes those works end up on the auction block. Just last year, a painting by Renoir, Madame Valtat, was sold by Sotheby’s for one-point-six million, though it was stolen from a collector in Japan in 2000. And it’s not just Sotheby’s. Christie’s has done the same, many times over. Roman heads, Chinese relics. And there have been attempts to sell that were barely thwarted, like the sale of Russian army documents or several Nepalese paintings last year. Auction houses are meant to scrutinize provenance, but sometimes they knowingly sell fakes. They may be somewhat aware of the dubious provenance of a piece, but if there is no phone call, no documentation or anyone to stop them, then the sale goes through anyway.”

  “Really?” asked Nina. “Why?”

  “Because it’s money. And at the end of the day, it’s a business all about money for people who love to spend it.” I was supposed to be thinking about Elizabeth when I said that, but all I could think of now was Tyler.

  I cleared my throat and looked at my lifeless apartment. “If you hadn’t called, nothing would have happened. The sale would have gone through, and the buyer wouldn’t have purchased a counterfeit, so what would Elizabeth have cared.” I sat up a little and thought again about how it only took ten days for Elizabeth to return the table.

  “I tell you this, and I’m pretty sure I’m right. Elizabeth knew what she was doing. That’s why she reque
sted that I come, not Louise. She said it was because she was friends with my grandmother, but now I doubt she even knew my grandmother. She was able to say all this stuff to me, make up a strong connection, because I don’t know that much about my grandmother’s life when she was in Baltimore. Why would I have questioned her for picking me? I was just thrilled to get the estate, and she knew I would be. I’m now sure that she would have sold us the estate even if I gave her a terrible deal, because she needed a hook to keep the top person away. So she found me. I was young, but had this big job. Elizabeth knew exactly how her husband got that table, and that’s why she gave it back to you so fast. No fight, nothing.”

  “I think she knew, too,” said Nina. “You can’t be married to a man like that and have no idea of his affairs. Carolyn, I’m going to keep checking in on you,” she said, more decisively this time.

  “You don’t have to check in on me, Nina,” I said. I was not about to form a lasting friendship with the woman who had gotten me fired.

  “I’ll be in touch,” she said, ignoring my last phrase.

  As soon as I hung up, I dialed Tyler’s number. He hadn’t called me in two days. Maybe he was trying to lose me, but I was too invested to let that happen.

  “It’s you,” he said when he answered. “I’m glad it’s you.” He sounded tired, like I had just woken him up.

  “I got your note,” I said. I reached for it on my nightstand and held it between my fingers as I said it.

  “Well, good. I’m glad the old note trick still works. What are you doing today?” he asked. I rolled over on the bed, thrilled I didn’t have to ask that question.

  “I don’t know, I was thinking about going to the Breakers. I haven’t been there since I’ve been back and I love it in winter.”

  “I’ve never been there.”

  “You’ve never been to the Breakers? How long have you lived here?”

  “Four years. I’ve seen it a thousand times from the outside. How can you miss it, it’s the size of the sun.”

  “True, but you’ve never actually been inside?”

  “I don’t care about all that stuff. Mansions and rich people’s lives—the Newport appeal. You can see those houses from the outside, and they look nice, I guess, but I don’t know. Doesn’t seem like the most inviting place in the world. And everyone who lived there is dead. It’s strange, like visiting a huge mausoleum.”

  But I was beginning to think that Tyler Ford did care about the Newport appeal. Something about this place was keeping him here.

  “But you’re not going to visit Cornelius Vanderbilt,” I implored. “It’s a museum now. Anyone can go inside for twenty dollars.”

  “I can think of a lot of other things I would rather spend twenty dollars on. Like you. I would much rather spend twenty dollars on drinks for you. Or food. Or whatever you wanted.”

  “But what if what I wanted was to go to the Breakers with you?”

  “Then I would spend twenty dollars on that.”

  We ended up at the Breakers on the first nonfreezing day of the year.

  “It’s forty-five degrees and it feels like spring,” I said as we walked through the door.

  “Yeah, I know. It’s nine degrees back in Wyoming. My grandmother called to tell me. She likes to keep me real up-to-date on the weather.”

  “I like grandmothers. I don’t have any left, but I like them.”

  “Do you? Well, you’d like mine. She worked in our church for forty-five years as the organist. She’s not very good, but no one ever had the heart to let her know.”

  “At this point she probably doesn’t need to know.”

  “Definitely not. I tell her plenty of other things, though. I write to her every week. Old habit from when I was deployed. If I don’t, she worries.”

  I looked up at him and smiled. Tyler had written me a note, but I wouldn’t have guessed he did something that sentimental every week. I loved it.

  It was when we were walking up the stairs to the second floor of the Breakers, past the massive tapestry and below the stained-glass skylight by John La Farge, that Tyler said, “You were getting pretty close with Greg LaPorte last night.” He didn’t say it angrily; he said it almost in passing.

  I walked ahead of Tyler on the stairs so he couldn’t see my face when I responded. “I was with him at the Blue Hen. With a lot of friends. I wasn’t getting close to him, not like that.”

  “Really?” he said. “I thought differently.”

  “Well then, you thought wrong,” I said, hitting pause on our audio tour and turning toward the bedrooms. Who had told Tyler that I was out with Greg?

  “I walked in there last night. I wanted to see you, but when I spotted you at the bar you looked . . . occupied,” he said, turning into Gertrude Vanderbilt’s light-filled bedroom. He still didn’t sound mad. More like someone just making observations about a stranger.

  “I wish I had known you were there,” I said, for the first time not distracted by the beauty of the room. Growing up, Jane and I used to tear through the bedroom like it was our own.

  “Did they tell you about Hannah?”

  I paused to look out the window, toward the water. Hannah. Why was he bringing up Hannah? I thought about my early morning phone call. I hadn’t even left a voicemail and I had been connected twice to her extension via an operator and prompts; there was no way she saw my number. “They mentioned her. They said she doesn’t talk to you anymore,” I replied. I felt the nerves in my voice.

  “They said that.” He walked away from the etching near the fireplace of Gertrude as a young woman so he would be next to me. “That’s right. She doesn’t. But it’s probably for the best. She was a nice girl; she doesn’t need to be hanging around me.”

  “Then why am I hanging around you?” I asked.

  Tyler looked around the room, at the bed, the desk, and the view from Gertrude’s windows and said, “One day I’d like to tell you my version of the story. It’s probably a little bit closer to the truth.”

  And that was all Tyler said about Hannah and my night at the Blue Hen. He went right back to acting like himself, the stoic, very sexy man I was happy to be spending the day with.

  “It’s not that bad here after all,” he said when we left the house. “It’s all a little chickish downstairs, and walls made of platinum seems like a waste of cash, but it’s not bad. Are you sure a dude designed this place?”

  “Yeah. A famous dude,” I said.

  “Let’s walk outside,” he said, taking my hand again and leading me toward the garden. It was at that moment, with the confidence that he moved around the corners of the house, that I was sure Tyler had been to the Breakers before. Maybe several times. Probably with Hannah. But my suspicion, my certainty that he was now lying to me, didn’t keep me from feeling drawn to him when he took my hand.

  It was in the high forties by then and the sun was shining brightly on the dark water in front of us. We looked out at the beautiful blue line between ocean and sky.

  “I absolutely love this place,” I said, turning around to look at the house. “It’s my favorite place in Newport. After the Dalbys’ house.”

  Tyler didn’t mention Brittan’s role in his scheme last night, or how he knew who she was. He put his hands on my waist, then moved them up to my face and kissed me. Tyler wasn’t a lips-barely-grazing kisser, he kissed you long and hard. “Follow me,” he said, leading me to the end of the garden. A few people were on the Cliff Walk, and I tried to ignore them as he pulled me toward him.

  “I need you,” he said, pressing his body against mine.

  I didn’t reply and kissed him back.

  “I’m sure hanging around with Greg and Mason you’ve heard plenty of stories about me. Some of them are probably true. But don’t listen to what people tell you about Hannah. Or about me after Hannah. The thing is, and this is the trut
h, after Hannah, during Hannah, I never saw, barely spoke to, another girl until I met you. I’m sure you’ll hear otherwise, but it’s true. There was something about her. She really changed me. And I haven’t looked at anyone since then.”

  “When did you and Hannah . . .” What was I supposed to say? When did Hannah leave you because you broke her face?

  “July.”

  “And now it’s March.”

  “That’s right. Now it’s March and I found you and I hope you don’t end up being one of those girls who believe a bunch of crap circulated by guys who love talking about sex.”

  “Don’t you love talking about sex?”

  “No, I love having sex.”

  Before I could hit his shoulder, he kissed me again and led me across the Vanderbilts’ backyard toward the bushes on the side of the house. He unbuttoned my coat and slid his hands under my sweater, onto my back. He moved them toward the waistband of my skirt all the way around, slowly. When he moved them down my skirt, I took a step back.

  “I can’t, Tyler. This place has cameras everywhere. I don’t want to get arrested for public sex.”

  “That sounds fun,” he said, pulling me back toward him.

  “No, stop. It’s the Breakers and we’re outside.”

  He put his hands back inside my coat.

  “There are many places in Newport where I’d love to take your clothes off. Not just this one. How about I take you somewhere where I definitely can’t try anything.”

  “I can’t possibly think where that would be.”

  “Good, let’s go.”

  It only took us ten minutes to drive from the Breakers to the naval base, but I didn’t think we were going in until Tyler showed his ID, and mine, to the guard at the gate.

  “Base? No, we can’t go here. I’m . . . I won’t know what to do.”

  “We went to your sacred spot, right? How about we go to my stomping grounds now. I wouldn’t say it’s exactly churchlike to me, but I’ve spent a lot of time here in the last couple of years.”