Life Estates

by Shelby Hearon

  She nodded. “At the closing it was the woman’s money made the down payment, and it was the woman’s money was going to pay the house note, but the home was in his name.”

  Listening to her, I felt I’d never been single, not in a business way.

  “You want me to start upstairs or down?” she asked.

  “Up. I’ll show you. I’m Sarah.”

  “Katie.”

  We shook hands on that bit of bonding, that trading of first names. But it was five years later, when we were used to cleaning the house together, in tandem, talking as we worked, that we got the idea for the shop. It was a Monday morning when we were getting the house ready for some monstrously important function, some cocktail-reception-dinner for all the bank directors and their spouses on a Friday night. We’d given over the whole week to it, which wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. Cooking ahead, scrubbing and polishing and sprucing up. Getting flowers. Seeing what dishes needed to be borrowed or rented, if furniture needed to be moved in or out to allow for traffic flow. What to do if it turned cold—it was late March, the week before Easter, and sometimes on the edge of the mountains you could get a cold snap, a sudden drop in temperature that made garden parties into unpleasant shivering affairs where everyone felt locked out of the warmth of the house. We’d decided to hold the whole thing indoors.

  I remembered the moment exactly. Katie was putting paste wax on the huge gateleg table, and I was cleaning the glass doors of the heavy breakfront. We had a checklist for every day of the week; tasks that would stay done were that day’s, Monday’s, chores. I looked up, rubbed my forehead, tired already, and asked Katie, “Why’re we both working for this man?”

  Katie had put down her can of wax and gestured with the soft cloth. “I don’t know, but what I do know is that your wages are better than mine.”

  “That’s because I do double duty in bed.”

  “He didn’t ask me did I want that job. For what you probably get, I might have accepted.”

  We’d looked at each other, two women both turning forty, serving the functions of wife and hired help respectively, and then put down our cleaning supplies and headed for the kitchen. The cook, a German woman I hired for big parties, wasn’t due to show up until Wednesday. We had the big old room to ourselves. I fixed a pot of coffee, percolator in those days, and we moved wicker chairs over to the windows. I was still smoking then, and had a cigarette. Katie got a notepad from her handbag.

  “What could we do instead?” I asked her.

  “What’ve you got in mind?”

  “What do women do to make money—”

  “You want a smart-aleck answer or census figures?”

  “—that isn’t going from the frying pan to the fire?”

  “They type; they deliver mail; they clerk; they answer phones; they sell beauty supplies; they fill prescriptions; they lick envelopes.”

  “They clerk. Anybody can clerk. You don’t need training for that.”

  “You going to work at the five-and-dime? I’ll come see you, buy some mercerized thread from you.”

  “What if we clerked in our own place?”

  “What place is this?”

  “Katie, think. You know how to start a business. You are a business. What could we sell that would make money? That wouldn’t take all our lives to get an inventory? That we’d already know how to sell

  You tell me.”

  “I want us to sell something that people like to buy and are always going to continue to like to buy. But where we offer something a little better, a little different. What do all women do? They fix up their houses. Come on.”

  I walked around the whole downstairs and then the upstairs with Katie following. I was trying to see with fresh eyes the old home that had been Mother’s back before she spent most of her time in Antarctica, Brazil, Nigeria, tracking arachnids. That had been my grandmother’s before that. It took two trips before I saw what my eyes hadn’t seen before. The fabrics, the patterns: on the beds, at the windows, on the walls.

  I’d repapered the rooms myself when Nolan and I moved in as bride and groom. There’d been some awful paper, turn of some century, big prints of trees, meadows, horses, ponds, which Mother must simply have ignored. That was upstairs. Down, there’d been birds of paradise, bouquets and palmettos. Nobody could live with the wrong wallpaper. Every woman wanted to put her own taste on view, and—here was the important part—every woman was permitted to pick out wallpaper. Husbands did not pick out wallpaper. They picked out the cars, voted on the furniture, even had a say about appliances, but the walls and windows they left to her, the wife. That seemed a revelation to me.

  “We’re going to open a wallpaper store,” I told Katie.

  “Before or after the bank director’s party?”

  “During. We’re going to take this whole week to figure it out while we work.”

  And we had. We’d set up ground rules—in a rush to right old injustices, to offer credit where credit was due. No bank cards, no husbands’ names on checks, no decorators, no copying some friend’s house. We would divide up the customers between us, each following a room from start to finish, and pool the costs and profits. All of western South Carolina, the upstate area, was full of old homes, historic places where John Calhoun had slept, lived, or his father-in-law or his sister, nieces, whoever, had resided. Lovely old places all roped off, in the historical registry, tended by guides. All of them with wallpaper.

  We decided that papers based on these old patterns and faded colors would be our specialty. We would photograph the papers, enlarge and study them, rough out our own variations, the colors, the pattern repeat, and have a commercial artist translate it for us, a manufacturer, preferably a woman, established, who would do our rolls. Custom designs.

  “Every woman can create a room of her own,” I’d said, and then of course the name of the shop was born.

  It had taken work, some wrong starts, some dismal first reproductions, before we found our present team. But we’d had the right idea at the right time.

  The week we’d spent planning it, I’d done homework reading at night, learning that there was quite a precedent for what we were venturing as businesswomen, as partners. South Carolina had been unique in the early nineteenth century in allowing women to declare themselves femme sole traders, to separate their commerce from their husbands’ control and responsibility. In those days, women mostly went into bonnets, corsets, artificial flowers, but they set up shop nonetheless. And not just white women; free black women ran coffeehouses, oyster bars, kept boardinghouses.

  The sign over the counter, SARAH COOPER AND KATIE PEGUES, PROPRIETORS, still filled me with pride.

  Sometimes we spent half a morning sitting here, warming up, flipping through thick pages, looking at wallpapers. Then one or the other of us went on calls, checked out rooms, took pictures, made estimates, while the other minded the shop. We never left it unattended if we could help it. Women were apt to drop in, even from out of town. They didn’t call ahead. It wasn’t like a hairdresser’s or doctor’s appointment that had to be scheduled. Deciding to fix up a room was always somewhat spur-of-the-moment, urged by some event, spurred by some discontent.

  We had customers now not only from Greenville, Spartanburg, Columbia, but from as far away as Asheville, Charlotte, even Atlanta. Still, the bulk of women who came to us were from small Carolina towns like ours—Williamston, Greer, Seneca, Pendleton—women who decided to drive down to Rooms of One’s Own to see if something could be done with that dark dining room, that old bedroom which still had the tape from the kids’ posters on the wall, that half-bath carved from under the stairs.

  Then they could count on lunching at the Mineral Springs Depot, a homestyle cafe that sat atop a hill and was housed in what had been the actual depot, in another location, back when our town was a famous spa, the destination of eight trains a day.

  WHEN THE PHONE RANG, Katie answered, as she always did when we were both in the shop. A kindn
ess for which I was grateful, especially lately.

  “Yes, ma’am, Ms. Cooper,” Katie said. “She’s right here.” Then Katie smiled before she spoke again. “I expect you told me to call you that, but every time I start to say ‘Edith,’ then the whole entire thing wants to come out, ‘Edith Huntt Cooper,’ and I get stuck on the mouthful.” She nodded. “I expect I can.” She handed me the phone. “Your mom.”

  “Hello.” Mother had been out of the country when Nolan died, but had made two trips down in the months before. Widowed some twenty years younger than I was, she’d been attuned to my wobbling feelings.

  “Checking in, dear, before you go to Texas. How are you?”

  “Taking it a day at a time.” I hesitated, thinking she deserved more than that. “Distressed and relieved—”

  “That’s not uncommon.”

  “The widow’s weeds are choking me.…”

  Mother paused. “You don’t mean that literally, do you? I didn’t wear black when your father—But you are speaking metaphorically.”

  “I am. At this hour of the morning.”

  “Your sister said the memorial service went well.”

  “It did. Bess was kind to come help with the little boys.” My sister, a horsewoman, had missed Carolina’s William of Orange Triple Crown, a big event, to be with me, and tend my grandfatherless grandsons.

  “Just remember, you haven’t taken suttee,” Mother said firmly. “Remind yourself you’ve lost a recreation not a vocation.”

  “It’s that I’ve lost the husband but not the title.”

  “How well I remember.”

  “I think I’ll take Gentle Ben and drive around the state parks this afternoon, get out of town.”

  “Do that, by all means.”

  “Any other suggestions?”

  “Put your wedding ring in a drawer.”

  “I put it in Nolan’s cuff link box.”

  “Eat your meals in a new location. Set your alarm for a different hour. However you felt about him or feel about him now, there’s going to be a hole where he used to be.”

  I was touched, as I often was by my mother, who had seemingly not a hostile bone in her body and not a single bad idea. “Thanks,” I said. “That’s helpful.”

  The amenities over, Mother began to talk about her work. “I’ve a chance to go back to Patagonia, based in Tierra del Fuego. I’d be in the field, tropical forests. Exciting work. I’ve decided that seventysomething is the perfect age to travel. One has the resources and the reserves, yet one still has the stamina and curiosity. I think this is my favorite decade; I’ll be sad to leave it.”

  “You’ve done a fine job with all of them so far.”

  “Thank you, dear. Should I drop down to see you on the way?” Mother was in Washington now, able to be on the spot when opportunities arose.

  “No, I’m fine. Sorting it out.”

  “Good, then. Tell Katie that I intend to call her Ms. Pegues until she gets my name right.”

  “She says, Hang in there, Edith, baby.”

  “She said no such thing.”

  “Thank you for calling.”

  I’d long ago forgiven my mother for sending me off to Miss Pritchard’s; for not knowing that her elder daughter would loathe boarding school from first day to last. I knew Mother’s intent had been that I get as good an education as was possible, to her way of thinking at the time; just as she’d sought out for Bess a place where there were horse trainers and shows. I also knew without a doubt that if she, Edith, had ended up there herself, she’d have crawled out the window and down the ivied walls and never come back from the genteel prison all of whose resources went to protecting its inmates’ good names, good reputations and good behavior. I had no doubt that in part my recalcitrant attitude was a result of my anger at being locked up for four years in one of the country’s best marriage preparatory schools.

  “You had two other calls before you got here,” Katie remembered.

  “Everyone is calling—”

  “Will Perry said whenever you’re in the mood to take a dog to the country, let him know.”

  I smiled. Nolan’s seventy-year-old physician was an old friend. “Did he tell you that his pup and mine—not pups anymore—were from the same litter?”

  “I expect he meant himself.”

  “Probably he did. Old dog, old tricks. He doesn’t want me to hold him responsible for Nolan’s dying.”

  “And Theo Kenton said tell you to call first thing when you got in.”

  I hated even hearing Nolan’s lawyer’s name. “You don’t have to go through that reading of the will, do you, if there are no surprises?”

  “You’re asking me? I was the beneficiary of my mother’s will. I got my brothers and sisters.”

  “I don’t understand what probate is or why we have to talk about all that again.”

  “He said call when you got in—”

  “All right, okay. Thanks for not dropping that on me right away. What he wants to tell me is that I’m still married, that I’m still Mrs. Nolan Rankin and that there’s nothing I can do about it.” I put my hand on the phone, but I couldn’t bring myself to lift it.

  Katie stood, stretched. “If you’re going to take your drive this afternoon, I think I’ll clear out now and have a look at that zigzag paper upstairs at the Calhoun house at Clemson. I got an idea something like that might work for Morrison.”

  “What’s she doing?”

  “Turning her bedroom into an upstairs sitting room. She says she can’t have anybody over for a cup of tea or a visit because her son’s friends fill up the downstairs. She’s going to move her bed into what was a spare room.”

  “I thought Morrison’s son was as old as mine.”

  “So? He’s living at home. Back home. Still home. Home. Hey, it’s a grand house. Why move?”

  “I thought you hated that zigzag paper.”

  “I’ve been reassessing it. It’s gold and silver—gold and gray to be correct. She wants pink and cocoa, rose and cocoa. And first I was thinking along the lines of something patterned after a French brocatelle, but that’s too formal. This would be different, sophisticated but cozy. The trouble is, I can’t recall what formed the pattern. It might be tiny rows of flowers? I need to see.”

  Katie and I divided up our customers according to our sixth sense about who could work best with whom, as well as who could get enthusiastic about a particular room. But Morrison was not only an unlikely candidate for Katie, for some years she’d refused to be a client of Rooms at all. She’d come in—eight years ago? nine?—swept in, brushed right past Katie as if she were the help, stomped up to me at the counter. Explained that she wanted to match a wallpaper that a friend of hers in Savannah had. For me to order enough for a twenty-by-twelve-foot room with twelve-foot ceilings with moldings—she’d have a paperhanger pick it up. For me to send the bill to her husband’s office; he was a developer.

  I’d explained that, first, we didn’t duplicate friends’ papers, that we were a custom outfit, and, second, that we did not bill husbands. I explained how our system worked: we had a large ledger in which every woman had a page, and in which we wrote what she had contracted for and which she signed. Then, if she paid on time, she could do up another room when she was in the mood. If she didn’t, then her account was closed. I explained that we didn’t take credit cards, and, furthermore, that we didn’t want to see any proof of solvency or need any identification. The client’s signature was her word.

  We’d worked that out because neither of us wanted to penalize the woman—of which there were legions fifteen years ago—who had no credit of her own, who didn’t have her own bank accounts or charge cards in her name. We figured that if a woman had sixty days to pay, she could get the money somewhere. And that she would welcome the chance to work out her own financial arrangements, no questions asked. Word had spread faster than chicken pox.

  But Morrison (we never used titles—Mrs., Ms., Miss, Dr.—a woman was just a
last name to us until she became friendly enough to be a first name) had stormed out, taking care to slam the door. Not staying to hear that, third, we used our own paperhangers, a pair of women we’d trained ourselves.

  Neither Katie nor I thought we’d ever see Morrison again. But then about a year and a half ago, her husband, Poindexter Morrison, Sr., had dropped dead. And she’d appeared in the shop, contrite, her finances in shambles, her son, Junior, absolutely no help, terrified. She had remembered the terms, the offer of Rooms of One’s Own.

  She hadn’t made a peep, her bulk tottering on high heels, when Katie said, “I’ll be glad to help you.”

  Instead, she’d said, getting the name off the sign above the counter, “You might want to see the room first, Ms. Pegues.”

  “Take your time,” I told Katie now. “Detour by Ashtabula if you’re in the mood. I don’t need an audience to get mad talking to the lawyer.”

  “You want me to pick up a sandwich?”

  “No, I’ll get something on my drive.”

  I went to the bathroom in the back, thinking how glad I was I’d quit smoking fifteen years ago, and wondering if you ever reached a point where you didn’t want one anymore. I washed my face, put water on the back of my neck, put some color on my lips. Freshening up.

  I resisted the impulse to stall further. “Theo?” I said into the phone. “Sarah.”

  I pictured him, the great messy hulk of an attorney, lounging at his desk, belly hanging out, hair crisscrossed over his bald spot, spanking new bright red suspenders and red bow tie to make him think he was one of the new breed. Wingtip shoes he’d forgot to trade for Nikes. He had something sly on his mind, I could tell from his money-sweetened tone.

  “Sarah, how are you? Getting ready for your trip to Texas? Or have you already been? Don’t tell me. I don’t want to hear a single Texas tale today. But you’re doing just fine, aren’t you? That’s what I hear.”

  “What is it, Theo?”

  “I’ve got Nolan’s will before me.”

  “And—?”

  “I don’t believe you ever saw a copy of this most recent will. I’m fairly certain of that.”