by Susan Rieger
“Carlo will handle this for now, for me,” Eleanor said. “I can’t answer for you. Dad never wanted anything to do with them.” Disappointment hung in the air.
“We’re not Dad’s heirs anyway. We’re yours. We only have the trusts,” Harry said.
“Only?” Tom said. “I can’t get rid of the money, it’s like sin, ‘a huge heap increasing under the very act of diminishing.’ ”
Carlo had a paralegal find Hannah Bigelow’s number in Havant. The paralegal called three times a day for a week. No one answered.
“I ran the letter by an ADA in the Financial Fraud Bureau in the Manhattan DA’s Office,” Carlo said to Eleanor. “He recommended we CC the Hampshire Constabulary in Havant. Not that they’ll do anything, but it should stop the Sonnegaards.”
“Why did they do this?” Eleanor asked.
“If they did their research, they might know about the Wolinskis and think, Ha, a helpless widow, a patsy. They might think the Wolinskis were frauds too. There’s a reason why people tread beaten tracks.”
“I want a designated mail opener, someone like the king’s food taster,” Eleanor said. She tucked the photo into her wallet.
—
Eleanor wrote a letter to Hannah Sonnegaard. She didn’t want to write the lawyer’s letter Carlo recommended, but a widow’s letter. She showed a draft, stiff and correct, to Will and Sam. “Do you want to say that?” Will said. “Awfully brisk,” Sam said, raising his eyebrows. Eleanor revised the letter, unstiffening it a bit, politening it some. “Better,” Will said. “Third time will be the charm,” Sam said. Eleanor started from the beginning. She never shared the final version, the letter she sent, with any of her sons. “I wrote only on my own behalf,” she said to them. “You must do as you like.”
May 21, 2004
Dear Ms. Bigelow,
I write as Rupert Falkes’s widow and heir. If Rupert was Anders, he is no longer able to claim the family connection or the gift. On a matter of this seriousness and importance, I cannot speak for him but only for myself.
Your parents didn’t register Anders’s birth. They never spoke of him. They acted as if he’d never been born. I think it monstrously self-serving and cowardly of your mother on her deathbed to ask you and your brothers to find him. I understand that you would wish to fulfill her final wishes but I cannot forgive her or your father for abandoning him so completely. I disclaim the bequest, if it is mine to disclaim.
Yours,
Eleanor Phipps Falkes
I don’t believe Rupert could have been ruder, she thought. I will stop now. She would miss him every day. She would be all right.
Sam read his mother’s letter to Hannah Sonnegaard. He saw a copy on her desk, lying there in the open, an invitation to be read. If she didn’t want Harry or me to read it, he said to himself, she’d have put it in a file or destroyed it. He’d come by for Sunday lunch, Gemma in tow. Susanna had begged off. “I need desperately to sleep. Your mother will understand.” He walked into the kitchen carrying the baby and the letter.
“I found this,” he said. “I wondered what you finally wrote.” Eleanor looked at him coolly, not sure if she was annoyed or not. Privacy had always been a trial in an apartment with five boys underfoot, not so much because the boys were curious about their mother but because they were always losing things and looking in the wrong places. “I was thinking of The Purloined Letter, hiding in plain sight,” she said.
Sam read the letter to Will on the phone. “Doesn’t it sound, at the very least, ambivalent about the Sonnegaards: ‘I cannot forgive her’?”
“It sounds angry,” Will said, “as angry as I’ve ever known Mom to be.”
“Funny, isn’t it?” Sam said. “She doesn’t mind the Wolinskis, only the Sonnegaards.”
“I don’t think children are meant to understand their parents,” Will said.
—
Will, Francie, and Mary went to England in early August, to visit Mary’s grandparents. When they married, Francie had exacted a promise from Will that they would visit her family at least twice a year, each visit no less than a week. Will often did business on these trips, a relief to all. Rupert-like, he wasn’t one to coo over a baby, and he saw that his in-laws longed for time alone with their daughter and granddaughter.
After three days of family, saying he had an author’s meeting, Will took an early-morning train down to Havant. Fairfield Road was around the corner from the station. He readily found number 16. The house was detached, a solid, handsome, two-story redbrick structure, with a split flint garden wall and a greenhouse. Gypsies didn’t live there. He walked up to the front door and rang the bell. After a minute, a woman in her early seventies opened the door. She was tall, straight, and lean, with graying blond hair and ice-blue wolf’s eyes.
A writer needs an editor, an agent, and a family cheering section. I’ve been wildly lucky in my set. Thanks to: my editor Lindsay Sagnette who asked after reading a short story I’d written whether I would think about turning it into a novel; my agent Kathy Robbins who read all the many drafts of The Heirs, helping me make it better before submitting it to Lindsay who helped me make it even better; and my husband David Denby and my daughter Maggie Pouncey, writers both, who told me I could write a different kind of novel from my first. I also want to acknowledge with thanks the Crown crew: Molly Stern, Annsley Rosner, Rose Fox, Rachelle Mandik, Sarah Breivogel, Danielle Crabtree, Kevin Callahan, and everyone else who worked on turning the manuscript into a book; Kathy Robbins’s gang at the Robbins Office, especially Janet Oshiro, Rachelle Bergstein, and Eliza Darnton, for reading the manuscript in its various iterations; my son-in-law Matt who checked regularly on my progress; and my two grandsons, Felix, seven, and Dominic, three, the sunshine of my life.
SUSAN RIEGER is the author of the 2014 novel The Divorce Papers. She is a graduate of Columbia Law School and has worked as a residential college dean at Yale and as an associate provost at Columbia. She lives in New York City with her husband, the writer David Denby.
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