Vultures at Twilight

by Charles Atkins

‘It’s not fair. After putting up with her bastard son for all those years . . . Well, it’s one thing if she cuts me out, but if she leaves out Bobby . . . I swear I’ll contest it.’

  ‘Where is he?’ the man asked.

  ‘Soccer.’

  ‘But his grandmother’s funeral? He couldn’t . . .’

  ‘He hardly knew her,’ she said defensively. ‘Besides, I asked him if he wanted to come.’

  As I listened, I thought of Evie and of her beautifully kept two-bedroom carriage house in the sprawling retirement community of Pilgrim’s Progress, where Ada and I also lived. I thought about her jewelry, and the sapphire and platinum cocktail ring she so loved. Her great aunt Martha had given it to her for her twenty-first birthday. I suspected that was the object of Carla’s desire. In Pilgrim’s Progress, which catered to retiree New Yorkers and aging inhabitants of Connecticut’s gold coast, we all had our accumulated treasures. Where most of us had downsized, the things we chose to keep were steeped in memory, and frequently, value as well. At fifty-nine and sixty-two respectively, Ada and I were two of the younger inhabitants in the self-contained gated community with its five thousand cedar-sided condos spread across seven miles of exquisitely maintained park-like grounds. We’d both been less than fifty-five, the lower-age limit, when we’d moved in eight years ago. But our spouses, now deceased, had been considerably older. Her Harry by eighteen years and my Bradley by twelve. Younger spouses – almost always wives – were the exception to the age restriction, all of which was carefully spelled out in the tome-like By-Laws and Rules for residents of Pilgrim’s Progress.

  Here, we had our own stores and restaurants, our own ambulance crew, two world-class golf courses, health clubs and bus trips that left daily for Broadway and the Indian casinos. Pilgrim’s Progress nestled on the outer edge of scenic Grenville, Connecticut, where I’ve lived my entire life, with the exception of four years in Northampton, Massachusetts at Smith College where I majored in English and harbored dreams of one day becoming a journalist. Pilgrim’s Progress is a romantic approximation of what the ‘golden years’, that greatest of fallacies, was supposed to be. But while designed with the ‘mature adult’ in mind, Pilgrim’s Progress or PeePee – as Ada and I had started to call it for some unfortunate reasons – did not extend its bounty to those who could no longer care for themselves. It was common – and heart breaking – to see adult children pack up their aging parents’ homes and move them to a more ‘supervised’ setting.

  I shuddered as I thought about older friends and acquaintances that had slowly slipped into Alzheimer’s, or had had strokes and been left unable to care for themselves. They’d been carted off to convalescent homes or down the street to Nillewaug Village, a pricey life-care facility. That would be the last we’d hear of them . . . until their name above a couple carefully worded paragraphs – beloved wife and mother – appeared in the obituaries.

  I shuffled behind Ada and the other mourners toward the bright sun that filtered through stained-glass windows that I’ve looked at my entire life.

  ‘Did you hear that awful woman?’ Ada whispered, pulling out a pair of stylishly large sunglasses as a crisp October breeze rustled the changing leaves.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘In front of us, the one who kept telling us to shut up. Poor Evie, do you remember how she’d show us pictures of her grandchildren? It makes me furious. They never visited; they never wrote. I hope she left everything to charity – serve them right!’

  Not for the first time, I suspected that Ada’s hearing was not as bad as she let on.

  ‘She was one of the daughters-in-law,’ I commented.

  ‘The first one,’ Ada said with authority. ‘Evie said she slept around. Admittedly the husband was a lush, but still . . .’ We headed toward the parking lot and my white Lincoln. ‘Lil, you do realize this is the perfect car for funerals.’

  ‘The black was better.’

  ‘No. White is nicer.’

  ‘Agreed,’ I said, flipping up the automatic locks. ‘Bradley always bought black.’

  ‘That’s because he was a doctor,’ she offered. ‘Black is more serious. But white becomes you.’

  ‘It’s strange, but I can’t imagine ever buying a different car.’ I pictured Bradley, how he’d look in the driver’s seat, tall and thin, or his face as he’d turn to me to ask something, his smile, how he’d sometimes – for no reason – take my hand . . . touch my knee. He’d been dead nearly two years. I felt so guilty when I traded in his last car, like I was somehow going behind his back. Ada had gone with me to the dealer. I was all set to just get the same thing in black, but she’d asked one simple question: ‘Is that really the color you want?’

  ‘I love your car, Lil,’ she said as she nestled into the tan leather, the seatbelt’s motor humming as it glided up to her side. ‘More importantly, I love it that you drive. I so regret having never followed though with getting my license.’

  ‘It’s not too late. I’d be happy to teach you.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Although, it was one thing not driving in New York City, but out here . . .’

  ‘The offer stands,’ I said, thinking how much I’d like to roam the countryside with Ada, get away from all of these dying friends and chopped-off fingers.

  ‘Let me think about it.’ She gazed out her window as my cell chimed from my purse.

  ‘Do you want me to get that?’ Ada asked.

  ‘Please.’

  She fumbled through my black clutch, and retrieved the phone. ‘Unknown name, unknown number,’ she said. ‘Should I pick up?’

  ‘Sure.’

  She pressed the accept button. ‘Hello? Hello? Anyone there?’ She waited. ‘Hello? That’s odd, it says “call ended”.’ She quickly pressed a couple buttons. ‘And no number comes up in the history. Strange . . . you’ve been getting a lot of these.’

  ‘I know, I just assumed it was a wrong number. But why would they keep calling?’ And why am I so nervous? I flipped on the lights, and as the car in front of me started, I shifted into gear. ‘You know, Ada . . . you were right about Evie.’

  ‘That she was lucky to go when she did?’

  ‘Exactly. How much longer could she have stayed in her condo? I wonder if we did her a disservice by helping as much as we did.’

  ‘Lil, they would have put her away. She would have had to leave her home and all her things and share a room with some incontinent woman with no memory. People are always screaming in those places, they stink, and the nurses never come when you need them. We did right. Evie would have hated that . . . I’d do the same for you.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, not wanting to cry. ‘What do you think they’ll say when they find out we’ve been doing her checkbook and her taxes?’

  ‘We do it for enough of the others. Her books are perfect. The real fight is going to be over her estate. She had enough to make it interesting.’

  I looked at Ada, with her startling blue eyes and short spry frame that seemed dwarfed in the bucket seat. She’d know to the penny what Evie had. And her finances weren’t the only ones she handled. For the forty years she’d been married to Harry Strauss, she had kept the books. If Harry were alive, he might argue the point, but it was Ada’s savvy that had turned H.S. Strauss, which had started as a family business on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, into a twenty-store discount clothing chain. When they’d eventually sold out, they’d realized a tidy profit. My silver-haired friend stayed on top of changes in tax law and investment strategies. She was forever twisting my ear and getting me to invest in favorite stocks, mutual funds, and bond offers. She was even able to get us in and out of a couple IPOs; neither of us was hurting for money. At times it bordered on clairvoyance as she insisted I liquidate almost all my stock and shift into bonds, just a few short months before the financial crash of 2008.

  As an unadvertised sideline, Ada helped the majority of our bridge and Scrabble clubs with their finances. It was because of this that she was the first
one to diagnose Evie’s Alzheimer’s.

  ‘How much longer do you think we could have kept her at home?’ I asked.

  ‘Another year. Maybe longer.’

  I kept a steady distance behind the car in front of me as we turned into the Grenville cemetery. ‘What about the will?’ I asked. ‘Any idea?’

  ‘She never told me,’ Ada said. ‘She said she had taken care of it; I wonder if she did. Especially once her memory started to slip. She said that after Bill died she had the whole thing changed. I have no idea how she left things.’

  ‘There’ll be fights,’ I commented as I parked and clicked open the locks.

  ‘No doubt.’ She opened the door and with cat-like grace pushed up from the bucket seat. ‘It is a shame, though.’

  ‘What is?’ I asked, following her gaze toward the darkly clad mourners.

  ‘That,’ she said, hoisting her matching bag on to her shoulder. ‘They all come now, a flock of vultures. But if they’d come before . . . when—’ She stopped herself as a wave of emotion choked in her throat.

  I put my arm around her shoulders, and looked toward the gravesite.

  ‘Evie just wanted them to visit, and they never did,’ she said.

  ‘I know.’ My tears started. I stood, not wanting to move, glad to have Ada beside me, and not caring who saw my grief. I was going to miss sweet Evie. But in truth, I’d already said goodbye as her dementia had worsened and taken away my sharp-witted friend.

  ‘Vultures,’ Ada repeated, looking toward the tent-covered grave, her head resting against my side.

  There was such comfort in the closeness and I resisted the impulse to kiss the top of her head, which smelled faintly of green-apple conditioner. ‘You’re right,’ I said, wishing we could just stay here and watch. ‘So much greed, all jockeying to see what she’d left. All wanting their share.’ Again I pictured that damn dog with her bloody prize, snapping and growling not wanting to give it up.

  ‘Come, Ada,’ I said, taking my hand off her shoulder, ‘let’s go,’ and we tromped across the squishy lawn toward the grave.

  Now I’m not superstitious, but as we neared Evie’s family, I felt a chill. I took a deep breath, but the usually comforting smells of a fall day were tainted with the scent of decay, and all I kept thinking was: something bad has come to Grenville.

  TWO

  ‘Rude,’ Ada muttered as she hung up on Graham Hennessy, owner of Epoch Antiques. Seated in front of her computer on the carved mahogany desk, from which she’d run H. S. Strauss for over thirty years, she typed Gonif – Yiddish for thief – next to Hennessey’s name, then highlighted it and crossed it out. She fumed as she recalled the conversation.

  ‘Well,’ he had said, after she had described Evie’s treasures, ‘what you might think are valuable antiques, may not be worth much. But,’ he’d quickly added, ‘I’d be happy to come out and take a look.’ His tone had communicated that he thought Ada was either slightly retarded, or headed to the dementia ward at The Hillside Convalescent Home.

  This no longer surprised her, having been at this all morning. Why had Evie done this to her? Much as she had loved her friend – the first person in Pilgrim’s Progress to welcome her and Harry when they moved in eight years ago – Ada wished she had picked someone else to be executrix. Or at the very least, Evie could have warned her.

  One more, she told herself, scrolling down the list of dealers that she’d cut and pasted from the Grenville Antique Dealers’ Association website, and then a cup of tea. Before she dialed, it rang.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, bracing for another interaction with one of Evie’s sons, sons’ spouses, or sons’ ex-spouses.

  ‘Hello,’ a man’s voice answered, ‘I’d like to speak to Mrs Strauss.’

  ‘This is she.’

  ‘My name is Tolliver Jacobs; I was given your name by Attorney James Warren. He said you might need some assistance in liquidating an estate.’

  The name was familiar, the accent slightly British, but she couldn’t . . . ‘I see, and you are with . . .?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m one of the owners of Grenville Antiques.’

  Ada glanced at her list. She hadn’t planned on calling Grenville Antiques, mostly because of its reputation for being the most overpriced store in the Grenville constellation of dealers. While Evie had good taste and had accumulated a few better pieces of eighteenth-century furniture and Chinese Export porcelain, Ada had assumed that the scale of her estate was below what Grenville Antiques – a firm that put multi-page ads in Architectural Digest, and catered to high-end designers – would consider.

  ‘Did Jim Warren give you some idea of the extent of the estate?’ she asked, trying to keep excitement out of her voice. While she and Lil would never buy at Grenville Antiques, they loved to browse their well-stocked showrooms, identifying similar pieces that they owned, but had purchased at a fraction of the price.

  ‘He wasn’t at liberty to say, but we’ve handled a number of estates from Pilgrim’s Progress. What most people don’t realize is that we liquidate entire estates, everything from high-end Chippendale down to the chipped jelly glasses in the kitchen; we even broom sweep when we’re done. It’s quite a popular service, because we take care of the whole shooting match. You’d be amazed,’ he said, ‘that people are forever choosing the busiest person they know to be their executor.’

  ‘Ain’t that the truth,’ she said, finding it hard to keep up her decades-thick New York wariness; there was something likable and familiar in his friendly tone and candid pitch.

  ‘Anyway, the other reason we get a lot of business is price. We give top dollar for the better things, and if you’re not under the gun time wise, we can take anything really good on consignment. That way the heirs can realize the maximum amount.’

  ‘I had no idea.’ Ada wondered if her search might not have come to an end. She liked this one, he wasn’t too pushy and the British accent didn’t hurt. And then it hit. ‘You’re on that show, aren’t you? I love Trash to Cash!’

  ‘I am,’ he admitted. ‘So would you like to set up a time?’ he offered.

  ‘That would be lovely. Of course,’ she added, sounding slightly British herself, ‘I will need to get quotes from at least three dealers.’

  ‘That’s wise,’ he agreed. ‘You’ll be amazed at the range you’ll get back.’

  ‘Trust me,’ she said, looking over her screen filled with crossed-out and annotated names, ‘after a lifetime in New York, little amazes me.’

  Tolliver Jacobs chuckled politely, and agreed to meet at Evie’s condo in the morning.

  Now, Ada thought, hanging up, definitely time for tea. She hummed as she left her office – the condo’s converted third bedroom – and went to the galley kitchen that opened on to a light-filled living room/dining room combination. The furniture was a cozy mix of mahogany and walnut Chippendale reproductions that had followed her and Harry from their Brooklyn Heights brownstone, and all new couches, armchairs and a stunning cream and navy Persian carpet she’d purchased following his death three years ago. The man was a cigar smoker and nothing could be done to get rid of the smell.

  Finally, she thought, progress. She was half tempted to take the first offer that Mr Jacobs might make. ‘Sorry Evie,’ she said as she spooned two heaping teaspoons of sugar into a mug adorned with a bright green cat, ‘but your sons are a piece of work.’

  As her fingers worked away at the lid on the four-pound tin of Danish butter cookies from Costco, the phone rang again.

  ‘Pheh,’ she said, picking up the kitchen cordless. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Mother, it’s Susan.’

  Ada wondered why her only daughter always felt it necessary to identify herself. ‘Hello dear.’ She cradled the phone in the crook of her neck, and continued to work away at the lid.

  ‘Just called to see how you’re doing.’

  ‘That’s nice. How are the kids?’

  There was a pause. ‘They’re good. Aaron’s starting t
o think about college and Mona’s completely boy obsessed.’

  ‘Well, she is at the age,’ Ada said. And before she could stop herself, she asked, ‘Is this one Jewish?’

  ‘I haven’t asked,’ her daughter admitted. ‘It would be nice, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘She’d make her grandmother very happy.’

  ‘So you’ve told her,’ Susan stated.

  ‘What? I’m not supposed to talk about these things? Do you realize that the intermarriage rate is over fifty percent?’

  ‘We did our part,’ her daughter answered defensively. ‘They both went to Sunday school, synagogue on Fridays. It just doesn’t seem to matter. Aaron was in the youth group for a bit, but lately he’s more interested in going on the Internet, skateboarding and hanging out with his friends at the mall. I can’t think of the last time he went to services.’

  ‘Do you ask him?’

  ‘Of course I do. But he’s at that age where everything is a potential fight. Sometimes I don’t have the energy.’

  As the kettle whistled, Ada asked, ‘And how is Jack?’

  ‘Busy. They’re in the midst of another downsizing; he’s convinced they’re going to lay him off.’

  ‘Didn’t he say that the last time?’

  ‘I know. He makes himself crazy. He always needs something to get mad about. Now he’s convinced that there’s something wrong with Aaron.’

  Ada stopped, the creamer poised over her mug. ‘Wrong? What do you mean?’

  ‘I probably shouldn’t say . . .’

  ‘Susan, don’t do that.’

  Silence stretched. Finally, Susan blurted, ‘Jack thinks Aaron might be gay.’

  Ada poured her milk and stirred. Why doesn’t this bother me? she thought, wondering if perhaps her daughter’s words needed to gain momentum. He could be gay. ‘What’s so bad about that?’

  ‘Mother! Did you hear what I said? Do you know what I’m saying?’

  ‘You said that Jack wondered if Aaron was gay, and from your tone I’d say you were having the same thoughts. Not a big deal, as long as he’s careful, plus he’s only sixteen . . .’ She was about to add: how could he know? And then stopped, her thoughts catapulted back forty-five years to a schoolgirl crush, and a name attached to a dark-haired beauty with laughing eyes – Miriam Roth. With the memory, a rush of feelings, longing, regret . . . She snapped back. ‘Is this more than suspicion? Does he have a . . . boyfriend?’