Gilded Age

by Claire McMillan

“Who?”

  She grabbed his lapel and pulled him toward her. Selden made her forget about so many things when she was near him.

  • 14 •

  The Estate Sale

  Every Thursday morning if you’re driving through the better parts of the Heights, or maybe at the end of a long driveway in Hunting Valley, you’ll see them—people lining up at six o’clock in the morning for estate sales.

  Jim teases me about my Yankee love of a bargain, but furnishing a house requires a lot of money. So I’d become a member of this dawn patrol, picking up a number at six a.m., leaving to get coffee, and then returning to take my place in line for the frantic door opening.

  I tried to avoid the moving sales. The economy being so bad, sometimes families in foreclosure had to pack in a hurry and sell the rest. These sales depressed me, with the children’s playhouse, too big to move, and the newly upholstered furniture, perhaps too big for the next, smaller house.

  No, the best sales were the true estate sales after a death. After the family had been through and taken what they wanted, they’d hire the one firm in town that would round up everything that was left—from the embroidered place mats to the Tabriz rug to the Knabe piano—place a price tag on it, and let in the thunderous herd of bargain hunters.

  I watched for these sales in the paper, and since I knew each address, I could picture the house. So I was excited one morning when I opened the paper to see that one of the big estates in Bratenahl—one of the mansions right on Lake Erie—was the location of the sale for that week. I actually knew the family. My mother had attended the patriarch’s funeral a few months back. Though I was exhausted daily, a sale like this came around only once every few years.

  I arrived at the scrolling green copper gates of the neoclassical mansion at six the next morning. It was cold, winter now, and I blew steam out of my mouth into the freezing morning. Next to the stucco garden walls, I saw the usual cast of characters.

  The son of one of the main antiques dealers in town was stamping his feet, dramatically I thought, for there was no snow on the ground yet. He rarely bought anything given that he only wanted the finest pieces, which he bought without bargaining. I secretly suspected that he was simply nosy, enjoying seeing the insides of the houses. There were the society decorators of choice, a gay couple whom I’d occasionally run into at cocktail parties. They’d done houses for a few friends of mine, and they pretended not to see me, which was silly, given that everyone knew where they sourced their Sheffield silver and Regency dining chairs. There was the picker who was only looking for Federal period furniture made by Duncan Phyfe or the Seymours, which he’d buy, add a few zeros, and sell to a fancy dealer in New York. God only knows what the dealer in New York then charged for it. There was that strange man who collected records and went straight for the old vinyl without saying anything to anyone. There was the main antiquarian book dealer in town in his camel cashmere coat with his takeout latte. His Internet site was prospering. I saw a woman I always saw at these things with coral lipstick on her teeth who only bought costume jewelry. I was no competition for any of them as I was looking at practical things, pieces they couldn’t resell. They smiled indulgently at me, the young pregnant wife trying to furnish her home.

  Off to the side, huddling against the chill wind from the lake was a group I hadn’t seen at sales before. Some were acquaintances of my mother’s, some I recognized but had forgotten the names, and some just looked out of place. They were all older ladies who usually spent their mornings in group exercise classes or walking their sporting dogs or clipping foliage in their gardens for ikebana arrangements in their front halls.

  The antiques dealer’s son came over to talk with me.

  “When are you due?” he asked, looking warily at my belly, as if I might momentarily explode.

  “Three months,” I said. He sipped coffee. “A new group,” I said, nodding toward the ladies.

  “You must know them,” he said. “Don’t you all go to the same benefits and things? I’ve seen some of them in the paper.”

  “I know some of them,” I admitted. “But I didn’t expect them to be—”

  “Picking the carcass?” he interrupted.

  “Exactly. I wonder if some of them have been eyeing things for years, you know? Looking at the old silver hot-water urn and waiting to get their hands on it.”

  “Is there one?” he asked, interest peaked. “An urn?”

  “It was just an example.”

  “I thought you might have been in there.”

  I saw a sparkle in the corner of my eye.

  “That’s Betsy Dorset, right?” he asked, following my glance.

  I nodded.

  “Oh my God, is she wearing the—”

  “She almost never takes it off,” I said.

  “Well, no, but diamonds at a house sale?”

  “I saw her once at a Christmas party,” I said. “Black tie, pheasant under glass, a very fancy host. And she wasn’t wearing it. The one time you thought she really would. She was wearing this immense hunk of glass around her neck. When I told her I liked it, she said it was a Lalique ornament from her son and he’d given it to her the day before to celebrate his daughter being born. So she said, ‘I’m wearing it in honor of my first granddaughter, my little Christmas angel. It really belongs on the tree.’”

  “Huh,” he said. “Sweet.”

  “It made me like her.”

  He took my elbow and steered me toward the front of the line. People parted the way for me, the pregnant lady, the schooner at full sail.

  The manager of the sale walked down the driveway, which was lined on either side with bare, pruned Japanese lilacs. She crunched on the frosty gravel and opened the green creaking gates. She started taking numbers in her gloved hands, letting in the first twenty-five people. I rushed as fast as I was able toward the grand pilasters that flanked the entrance to the house.

  Stepping into the house was always the part that felt strange at these sales, a violation for sure, though the house had been opened for this. It’s what they wanted, but it made me a little sad, divvying up the scraps.

  Inside, the group quickly dispersed to their areas of interest—the book dealer went to the dark library, the lipstick lady dashed up the stairs. The house overwhelmed me, and I ambled into the first room on my left. The music room was filled with japanned English furniture and a matching gilt harp with pianoforte. The crystal chandelier twinkled at me. I heard the group of ladies come in behind me, shrugging off their sensible fleece-lined balmacaans and folding them over their arms.

  “Look at this room,” one of them breathed. “When Nancy was alive they would have music in here during parties. Are they actually selling that harp?”

  I tried to keep a room’s length between me and them but was interested in what they said. There were updates and talk of their children and grandchildren, and I was distracted by a nice little pen-and-ink drawing on the wall when I heard a familiar name.

  “You know, like that Randy Leforte,” one of them said.

  “Isn’t he your new friend, Betsy?” another asked, chuckling.

  I could hear the smile in Betsy’s voice. “He’s interested in the new wing of the museum, if you can believe it. He’s already become involved in raising the funds for it.”

  “What’s he want in return?” one of them asked.

  “I can’t figure that out. The orchestra wooed him, but he never gave them anything but a few thousand. He doesn’t seem to want to be on the museum board. Seems content to let us pick his pocket.” She said the last three words low. “In exchange for just knowing he’s done the right thing.” She said the last louder.

  “Unique.”

  “In this day and age, yes, I’m afraid.” Betsy picked up a crystal paperweight and turned it upside down, looking for a price tag.

  “He thinks it gives him some air of legitimacy, some social status?”

  Betsy slowed her speech like she was speaking to a d
im-witted child. “As if such things matter anymore, Helen. This is the new millennium. Young men don’t care about society. There isn’t any society to care about.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “It’s true,” Betsy said, moving on from the desk.

  “Well, society’s not the same, but it still exists,” one of them said as if consoling herself.

  “No.” Betsy shook her head, diamonds twinkling. “We’re all that’s left.”

  “Perhaps he’s interested in you,” one of them said. I almost laughed out loud imagining Randy Leforte as Betsy Dorset’s arm candy. I was also a little offended for Betsy; the question was catty.

  “Hardly. At our age you’re either a nurse or a purse, and Mr. Leforte needs neither.”

  I smiled. That put the questioner in her place. I was surprised at Betsy’s savvy, though I shouldn’t have been.

  “And I hear he’s dating Ellie Hart,” Betsy said.

  This confirmed that though Betsy Dorset was no gossip, she knew everything that went down in Cleveland. Come to think of it, perhaps her discretion was why she was so well informed.

  There was a collective gasp.

  Betsy continued. “They were in the bar at the Ritz drinking champagne at three o’clock in the afternoon.” Maybe that’s where she’d been headed the other afternoon, I thought.

  “Can you imagine such a thing in our mother’s day?” one asked.

  They shook their heads in unison.

  “A nice girl having a drink with a man at a hotel in the middle of the afternoon,” someone said.

  “It’s not like we were in purdah,” Betsy said.

  “But you didn’t do that.”

  “Such a pretty girl.” Someone clucked her tongue.

  “Always was,” another said wistfully.

  “She made a mess of that marriage in New York.” This was whispered.

  “She’s out to make a mess out of marriages right here in town,” Betsy said.

  “No.” There was a delighted gasp.

  “Diana told me that she flirts horribly with all the husbands. I wouldn’t be surprised if she made passes at them …”

  They were walking my way, and I was quickly making for the door into the dining room when one of them spotted me and descended.

  “What on earth are you doing here? When are you due?” asked a recent acquaintance of my mother’s whose name I always forgot.

  “You should sit down.” This said by a woman I didn’t recognize.

  “Go home and put your feet up,” said another one.

  “Are you nauseated?” someone inquired.

  “How’s your mother?” asked Betsy.

  It took me a half hour to answer their questions and deflect their advice. It was comforting, being fretted over as only those women of my mother’s generation could, making me feel as special and rare as if this were some sort of immaculate pregnancy. We walked into the butler’s pantry, which broke my heart with the entire contents of the cupboards on the counters, and I heard a low voice at my elbow.

  “Find anything you need?”

  “Cinco Van Alstyne.” Betsy Dorset beamed at him.

  Cinco had always been a great favorite of this crowd. Why hadn’t their daughters married someone like him—someone who would take on family obligations? They professed to want their children to marry spouses with minds of their own, not pushovers but wholly formed people. But when these spouses in question then actually had minds of their own? Here was one member of the next generation, they thought, who understood the importance of roots and family—or at least appeared to.

  I watched him hug them and chat, donning his cloak of respectability, playing the good son. He answered questions about the new roof being repaired on the family farm.

  “Come look at this little pen-and-ink drawing I’m interested in,” Cinco said, taking my elbow and steering me toward the little picture I’d been admiring earlier. “Shouldn’t you be home in bed or sitting on a tuffet or something?” he asked once we were alone.

  “Couldn’t miss this one.”

  “I know what you mean,” he said.

  We both faced the little artwork, a rendering of the harvest coming in.

  “Isn’t your house furnished?” I asked.

  “Hardly. It all got divided up and so now we’re slowly furnishing it with things from these sales. She,” he said, meaning his wife, “can’t stand to come. So I do it.”

  “I don’t mind it. I won’t go to the foreclosure sales though.”

  He paused and then said, “So you look good.”

  I blushed, thinking back to what he’d said to me at the dinner party. “Thanks. I feel huge.”

  The ladies came over to us, curious to see what Cinco was interested in buying.

  “I think I should take you to get something to eat,” he said, turning to me then.

  “You two go off now and discuss things,” they clucked in approval. Cinco, doer of duties and keeper of familial flames, would be protective of pregnant ladies, likely old women and small dogs too.

  “What? Are neither of you buying a thing? Cinco, go buy that pair of huge candelabras in the front hall,” one of them said to him with a friendly push on the arm. “Your farm is about the only place besides this house where they’ll fit.”

  He and I smiled and said good-bye and went out past the card table where a large cash box was already overflowing with money and a lady wrapped newly acquired treasures in tissue paper.

  “You can thank me for my chivalry now,” he said, wrapping a tartan scarf around his neck.

  “You saved me?” I asked, barely able to button my grandmother’s car-coat-length mink. It was well preserved, having spent summers in cold storage. I’d never have bought myself a fur and was slightly mortified to be wearing it. But as Gran had said many times, it was the warmest coat in the world.

  “They’re more vicious than they look,” he said, his respectability cloak slipping off him now.

  I scowled. “Please.”

  “Don’t cross them when they’re in a pack,” he said mock-seriously.

  I laughed as we kept walking down the long drive.

  “Nothing for you?” he asked with a raised eyebrow.

  “Some days I can’t think straight enough to buy anything.”

  We walked in silence for a minute as I pulled my gloves out of my pocket and slipped them on. The sun was melting the frost, but I could still see my breath. “Life on the farm?” I asked.

  “Is good.”

  “Does Corrine like it?”

  “The farm?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think so. It was a very big adjustment for her. She grew up in Manhattan, you know.”

  “Surprising she’d want to leave it.”

  “She didn’t really want to.”

  “So you forced her?”

  He screwed up one eye like I’d hit him on the head. “No, I just … she knew what she was getting into when she married me. She knew the farm was part of the deal.”

  “You guys had a deal?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Thing was, I knew exactly what he’d meant. I think I’d known it even when we were children. I saw it reflected with approval in the eyes of Betsy Dorset and her friends. They knew that the driving passion in his life, the thing he was going to love more than himself, wasn’t going to be a wife. It was going to be a house. This stability unconsciously attracted them.

  I couldn’t think if Jim and I had ever had a deal between us and decided we probably hadn’t. But I nodded at Cinco now to be polite.

  “I don’t mean it was explicit,” he said, backpedaling when I’d stayed silent too long. “But she knew the farm existed. Knew I’d want to live there one day if we got the chance.”

  “What if she didn’t want to?”

  “Then we wouldn’t have.” He turned his face to me. “Luckily my wife’s crazy about me.”

  I laughed. “Oh really?”

  “Doe
s everything I say. I know you feel the same way about Jim. The obey part of the vows you took.” He was joking.

  “I took that vow out.” I laughed. “As did everyone else I know. But it’s true I give him everything he wants.” I said it in a silly, flirty tone.

  This stopped him up short. “Yes, well …” His eyes flicked down to my belly and then he started walking again. “Do you remember,” he asked, “when I came to see you in New York?”

  “Which time?” I asked.

  “The time when you were hanging out with Ellie a lot.”

  “In the beginning, when I first moved there?”

  “Yes.” We crunched down the gravel path to the road. “Do you remember that night I took you out to that dive bar around the corner from where she lived?” he said.

  “The one with the excellent jukebox? Why doesn’t Cleveland have a place like that? You’d think it would do really well. Maybe we should open one.” I linked an arm under his. “With crappy beer, a dartboard, and a tremendously awful open-mike night …”

  “Cleveland has plenty of places like that,” he scoffed.

  “I’ve never been to one.”

  “Then they must not exist,” he said in mock-seriousness. “It doesn’t surprise me that you don’t get out. Look at the crowd you run with.”

  “Ummm, that would be the same crowd you run with,” I said. “Besides, mother-to-be getting tanked at the pool hall is just a little too …”

  “Ghetto?”

  “That word again, it kills me—especially coming from someone like you.”

  “Like me what?”

  “Like living on his manor-estate-thing and calling things ghetto.”

  “Point taken.” He squeezed my arm closer to him, and I had a flashback of this same move with his wife at the Mingott wedding. “But I was talking about New York. You remember that night?” he said.

  I did, but I didn’t know what he was driving at. “Sure, my squandered youth.”

  He smiled. “Do you remember what you said to me?”

  “About?”

  “Home.”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “You said you’d never come back here.” He stopped us and turned to face me. I couldn’t read if I saw regret in his eyes, concern, or mere curiosity.