The Jane Austen Marriage Manual

by Kim Izzo

  “I’m going to go to bed. I’m exhausted,” I said and pulled myself up from the couch.

  She nodded. I could hear her clanking dishes in the kitchen as I dragged myself up the stairs. Despite my exhaustion, I sat on the edge of my bed, staring out my window at the treetops.

  12.

  Your Money or My Life

  My conduct shall speak for me; absence, distance, time shall speak for me.

  —Mansfield Park

  I stood in my bra and underwear and stared at my closet. Inside was an uncharted expanse of black with a few gray and chocolate brown patches scattered in the sea of darkness like deserted islands. I grabbed random pieces and pulled them on, shoving fists through armholes and stepping into a skirt, nearly falling over in the process. I was already late and I was in no mood for a meeting.

  My grandmother’s lawyer had contacted me a couple of days after the funeral to discuss the will. There was the house that needed to be signed over to Ann and me, but my sister had to work, so the plan was for me to go alone and bring the documents home for her to cosign.

  The law office was in a small prewar house that had recently been given a stucco face-lift. It was dove gray with black shutters. The lawyer was a woman named Nelly Lemmon, whom my grandmother had used for years. She must be ancient now.

  I stepped out of the car, my heels twisting dangerously on the gravel drive, my delicate velvet shoes no match for the pebbles and small rocks that gave way under each step. Ungracefully, I stumbled to the porch, straightened my skirt, and knocked.

  “Come in!” a woman’s voice shouted from inside.

  I twisted the doorknob and felt the latch click open. Inside the vestibule were stacks of files mixed in with old newspapers and magazines.

  “Is that you, Kate?” the same voice cracked.

  “Yes it is,” I yelped and followed the voice down a narrow hallway strewn with files piled high atop battered steel filing cabinets.

  “I’m back here!” came the voice again.

  I turned a corner and nearly crashed into a goblin of a woman who stood five feet, if that. Her hair was a mass of red corkscrew curls with strands of white poking through like steel wool. She wore mascara and a pale pink lipstick, but otherwise she was deathly pale, as though she hadn’t stepped outdoors in decades. Her face, with chubby cheeks like an overweight cat, was remarkably unlined, no doubt due to a dearth of sunlight. She reached out a hand. “Glad you could come so soon.”

  We sat down. Her desk was shockingly clutter-free except for one legal-size gray file lying centered on the smooth glossy wood with her arms folded on top of it. Nelly leaned forward, her soft fleshy arms jiggling as though boneless, her stubby legs tapping the floor beneath her desk in some imagined rhythm.

  “The will is simple,” she began calmly enough. “You and your sister get the house. But I need to know how you plan to deal with the bank.”

  “Bank?” I repeated blankly. “What bank?”

  She sat back, practically disappearing into her armchair so I had to lean forward to maintain eye contact. “The bank that holds the mortgage,” she said, giving me an odd look.

  “We don’t have a mortgage,” I answered, puzzled.

  She rocked in her chair. We stared at each other; neither of us seemed prepared to speak. She was obviously confused.

  “You mean Alice never told you or Ann?” she said at last.

  “Told us what?” I demanded, anger nipping at my voice.

  “About a year ago Alice and Iris came to me for help,” she explained reluctantly. I sensed she didn’t want to be a rat, but she had no choice. “I take it your mother likes to gamble.”

  My stomach lurched.

  “She plays bingo,” I answered somewhat defensively.

  “A lot,” Nelly said firmly. “She ran up over a hundred thousand dollars in debts. Alice tried to bail her out by getting a mortgage on the house. But your mom never made the payments.”

  I was silent.

  “It’s gone into default.”

  Still silent.

  “The bank is about to foreclose,” she said slowly, as though English were my second language. “You’re to be evicted in thirty days.”

  My silence filled the room. Could this be true? I couldn’t imagine Nana agreeing to this and not telling me. But the reality of Iris and all her trips to the bingo hall and the casinos told me that Nelly wasn’t making this up. My mother had become more secretive and anxious in the months before Nana was diagnosed, but her behavior had gotten stranger recently. I’d assumed it was the strain of caring for her dying mother. But there was clearly more to it; there was massive debt and now Ann and I had to deal with it.

  “The bank will put the house up for sale, ‘power of sale,’ they call it,” she continued robotically.

  “We don’t want to sell,” I snapped.

  “Then I’m hoping you have assets of some kind. If you could throw some cash down, say about twenty-five thousand dollars, then that would keep the bank at bay.”

  Of course, my savings! All those mutual funds had to be worth something, even in this damn recession. I always forgot about my investments because they weren’t meant to be touched until I retired. Thanks to the recession I was retired. “I have about thirty thousand. I’ll have to ask Ann what she has.”

  “Thirty would go a long way.” She smiled encouragingly.

  I drove home in a fog, replaying every last word of Nelly’s explanation. She had given me copies of all the foreclosure notices; the evil slips of paper that Iris had been hiding. I had to come up with at least a quarter of the money.

  Stuffed under my bed was a box where I kept all my bank statements. I tore off the lid and dumped the contents out. There were statements from March 2008. I ripped into the envelope: $30,000. According to Nelly I needed only $25,000 to stave off the foreclosure for another month, in which time I could maybe find a job. But March was a long time ago. I found more statements and tore them open. June: $27,000; July: $24,000 … I was becoming more alarmed. I opened my September statement: $19,800. Finally, I found November and I unfolded the statement and just stared at it: $14,890.34. I had lost half of my savings in less than a year. I grabbed my BlackBerry. Ann answered and I told her everything. She was as in the dark as I was. And worse, she had even less money than me because she’d been using her savings for night school, ingredients, and a Web site and logo designer for her sauce idea. I stuffed my statements back into the box.

  Then I heard my mother come in and I froze.

  “Kate?” Iris called out. Her breezy tone irritated me. I didn’t answer her. All I wanted to do was leave the house and figure out what to do. I grabbed my purse and marched downstairs.

  “Everything all right?” she asked with an innocent smile.

  I swiveled around to face her. The tears came back. God, why couldn’t I stop crying? I had lost my grandmother and now, thanks to my mother, I was losing my home.

  “No, Iris,” I said shakily. “Nothing is all right. I just came from seeing Nelly Lemmon.”

  My mother’s lower lip began to tremble.

  “I know about the mortgage,” I snapped. “And the foreclosure. How could you do it?”

  I realized I was shouting. Iris was mouthing something. Probably that she was sorry. But I wasn’t able to hear over my shouts.

  “How you tricked Nana into doing this I’ll never know! But we’re going to lose the house. Our home!”

  “I told Nana to tell you; she wouldn’t let me,” Iris sputtered. “We thought we’d win the lottery and pay it off.”

  “Don’t try and blame Nana for this!” I snapped again.

  I needed to calm down. I gulped for air, then turned and walked out the door.

  I drove around for more than an hour and somehow all roads led back to that same country house I’d seen with my grandmother the weekend before she found out she was dying. I turned off the engine and watched the house as though I were a prowler staking out a target. Then I real
ized I did know what to do. There was only one option now. The article was no longer just a writing assignment worth five thousand dollars. Nor was it an escape from my problems or a guide to help other women; it was my only hope of getting any semblance of a life back. Unemployed, single, and homeless, I was a modern Austen character, only instead of having a mother determined to introduce me to the right sort of man, I had to rely on my own smarts. I was desperate. I had to do more than write the story. I had to live it.

  13.

  Family Matters

  They gave themselves up wholly to their sorrow, seeking increase of wretchedness in every reflection that could afford it, and resolved against ever admitting consolation in future.

  —Sense and Sensibility

  I once read that when you leave a place you love you should say goodbye to it. After our belongings had been packed and shipped into storage and the foreclosure sign had been hammered into the lawn, I walked through my house room to room to have a final look inside my past. I lingered in every doorframe, opened each closet, their emptiness a mirror of my own. Like my belongings, my feelings had been stuffed into boxes, their contents to be revealed one day in an as yet undisclosed location. At the end of my tour I came to my bedroom. The Smoked Trout walls were bare and scuffed from the movers. Without the cream sheers the window resembled a giant gaping mouth and the hardwood floors were peppered with dust bunnies. My room looked lonely and abandoned. I’m not sure how long I sat there, but eventually Ann arrived to coax me out of my cover as a pointer does a pheasant before the hunter opens fire.

  “I know you’re sad,” she observed unnecessarily. “Mom is sad, too. We all are.”

  My eyes remained fixed on the open window and the trees outside, their leafless branches twisting and bending in the bitter November wind, the same wind that now lashed my tears dry.

  “I don’t know how I’m ever going to forgive Iris,” I said after what seemed an eternity. I turned and met my sister’s gaze. I could see the pain in her eyes, sympathy for me, for Iris, her own grief mashed up in between. “How are you able to be so nice to her? Knowing what she did?”

  Ann was always the sweet sister; she was softer in every sense, even physically her features were rounder.

  “We still have each other. Houses can be replaced,” she answered. “We all make mistakes and bad decisions. She gave into a weakness. I can’t carry anger around.”

  “Unlike me, you mean?” I asked.

  “It’s time to go now,” she said softly.

  Ann retreated downstairs. Alone once more, I leaned my head against the wall, closed my eyes, and wept. But as I cried yet again, it occurred to me that I hadn’t not wept for weeks. I was sick of it.

  A strong gust of wind blew in through the open window, but the cold was muted by a sudden streak of sunlight that stretched across the room, blinding me for a split second, its heat a welcome surge of energy. I looked directly into the light and as I did, something somewhere inside me snapped. I dried my eyes and took in a gulp of air. Better.

  I’m done crying.

  I repeated the words over and over and in a final farewell gesture slapped my hand on the wall and walked away.

  We drove toward Ann’s Park Slope apartment, just the two of us. It was all arranged. Iris had the spare room. I had the sofa. My laptop would live on Ann’s teak coffee table that would now double as my desk. Privacy would occur only in the bathroom.

  “Mom is seeing a trustee tomorrow,” Ann went on, her eyes focused on the highway.

  “What she needs is therapy,” I said, watching the leafy neighborhood I called home for my entire life flit by with no fanfare. “She has an addiction.”

  “You’re right about that,” she agreed. “But first we have to help her get the debts under control. The house may not sell.”

  “One can hope,” I said. I wondered what Ann would think of my turning the marrying well article into reality. She was always so practical.

  “I have an idea,” she said, preempting me. “Why don’t you become my partner in the sauce thing? Fifty-fifty. You’re living with me anyway and you have more free time now. We can double production because you can keep cooking when I’m at work.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” I said. I did know that I wasn’t going anywhere near the kitchen. Ann’s sauce business had been floating around for years and hadn’t even touched success. Compared to sauce, my eligible bachelor idea was solid gold. Still, I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. “Thanks, that’s very generous,” I began. “Can I think about it?”

  “Sure,” she said, sounding clearly disappointed. “We could have a blast at the National Food Fair in Chicago.”

  The idea of having a blast anywhere seemed impossible. But I kept quiet as we left Scarsdale behind.

  Dinner that night was pizza and soggy Caesar salad with a side of silent resentment. I avoided looking at my mother, choosing to let Ann carry the conversation. But after chasing a final crouton around my plate as they prattled on about their favorite television commercials, I could no longer take the small talk.

  “I have to write an article for Haute,” I announced and got up from the table and walked to my “office” on the sofa three feet away. As if on cue, my mother and Ann dispersed into their respective bedrooms, the double click of shutting doors my signal that I was alone at last. But the solitude didn’t help. The screen was still blank and I hadn’t a clue what the first line of the story should be. Instead, I sat there and began to Google gambling addiction centers for my mother. Not a cheap therapy as it turned out; ironically, it would take thousands in winnings to afford to go to one. Then there were her debts. My grandmother would have wanted Ann and I to do everything in our power to take care of Iris. My plan had to work. It was late but what I had to say couldn’t wait. I knocked on Ann’s door and sat down on her bed and explained what I was going to do. She listened, bleary-eyed, and said nothing until I was finished.

  “It sounds like a fun article,” she said carefully. “But the world doesn’t work like that.”

  “Like what?” I asked defensively. This from a woman who thought her fortune was in a mixture of ketchup and spices?

  “I know you love those books. So did Nana,” she went on. “But marriage isn’t going to solve our problems.”

  “But you’re missing my point. It will if I choose a good husband. I don’t need a Mrs. Bennet to do it for me.”

  “By good you mean rich?” Ann asked derisively. “Oh, Kate. Have some sense. Write the article, take the money, and let’s find a real way to put this whole bad episode behind us.”

  She crawled back under the covers and switched off her light, leaving me to make my way to the sofa in the dark. She was wrong. I knew she was. My plan would succeed and when it did, none of us would be poor, my mother would get the help she needed, and we’d have our home back. All I had to do was make it happen.

  14.

  A Ticket to Ride

  She must escape … as soon as possible, and find consolation in fortune and consequence, bustle and the world, for a wounded spirit. Her mind was quite determined, and varied not.

  —Mansfield Park

  When it comes to stumbling upon dozens of wealthy men, there was only one leisure activity that mattered: polo. Even kings and princes played polo. I had read that West Palm Beach had a vibrant polo scene and Florida was an easy flight; I would start there. I e-mailed Jennifer at the magazine. She thought I was brilliant and arranged for a hotel to put me up. There was just one tiny glitch. I was terrified of horses. But, I told myself over and over, I didn’t have to ride one, I just had to get close enough to a horse to get close to its owner. At least the airfare was taken care of.

  “You two are the best friends ever,” I gushed when they handed me the ticket over champagne at Avenue, as a sort of impromptu bon voyage party.

  “Actually, that may be true.” Marianne laughed. “Look more closely.”

  I raised an eyebrow and examined the ticket
more carefully. It was first class.

  “First class! So fabulous!”

  “You can’t meet a rich guy in coach,” Brandon teased. “Hope that will do.”

  “Does it ever!”

  “She hasn’t even noticed,” Marianne sulked and sank into the sofa with her champagne.

  “Noticed what?” I asked.

  “The name on the ticket, stupid,” Marianne joked. “It’s all about your name.”

  I examined the itinerary again. There was no missing it this time. The ticket was issued to Lady Katharine Billington Shaw.

  “You can travel under your title, too,” Marianne said. “Lady Katharine.”

  “Really?” I asked doubtfully.

  “It’s true,” Brandon continued. “I triple-checked. You’re a real lady.”

  “It’s all aboveboard!” Marianne howled with delight.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off my name; seeing it in print was surreal. On my birthday it had been a cute joke, but now, it seemed official.

  “It will be our little secret,” Marianne said and poured more champagne all around.

  “Absolutely,” I agreed. “It’s not as if I’m going to announce it to the world.”

  BOOK 2

  FREE TO A

  GOOD HOME

  15.

  VIP

  Now there will be a great match and of course that will throw the girls into the path of other rich men.

  —Pride and Prejudice

  How long is this press junket?” Ann asked as she stood watching me pack a second large suitcase to the brim. She was well versed in the last-minute travel whirlwind that had been my life as an acting beauty editor. But she was accustomed to my jetting off for three or four days with only a carry-on.