A Pinchbeck Bride (2 page)

Chapter Two

Genevieve Courson adored the old place. Ignoring the “Please do not touch” signs, she handled everything: the luminous glass vases, studded with emerald chips and moonstones; the yards of French lace; and the alabaster sphinx on Corinth One’s desk, repugnant to me because it had the white translucence of an especially fat grub pulled from the roots of a diseased lawn. She felt compelled to handle them “because you can’t get to know things without handling them, can you? The way you can’t get to know a city by taking a bus tour. You have to walk and have your feet hit the pavement. You have to have that physical contact.”

She would try on the clothing the Mingoes had left hanging in closets or folded with sachets in bureau drawers: a hat crowned with egret plumes, a paisley shawl, a mourning band, a muff of still glossy sable. She seemed determined to leave her DNA on every object in the collection.

She was sensitive, bright, far more intelligent, I thought, than the average Shawmut student. She admitted as much, one day, when we were walking after lunch and she stopped, lingering by the windows of the Ritz Carlton Hotel on Newbury Street. She was admiring the silver. “What an exquisite candelabra!” She could get away with using a pretentious adjective because she was so enthused and not at all facetious. “I have to admit, I like the finer things in life.”

“How did you end up a Shawmut?” I said, and her posture collapsed slightly. “Well, I was accepted at Brown and Middlebury, but I needed financial aid and Shawmut was a relative bargain.” Then she perked up again: “But I had friends who were going there. That was one good thing. I guess.”

She suggested we walk through the Ritz lobby, much more restrained than the Copley Plaza, just marble and brass railings, and low ceilings and stone urns of pale flowers. The bellhops stared at her, not because she was truly beautiful, but because she was striking, a presence. I think the concierge bowed, ever so slightly, as though he knew her.

She wanted to wander through Arlington Street Church, made of the same chocolate-colored sandstone as Mingo House. “Imagine, all of these old buildings rest on wooden piles driven into the mud. Like the buildings in Venice.” She inspected the church’s Tiffany stained-glass windows. She touched those too, felt the opalescent layers of glass of the saints’ robes and the lilies cascading through a window depicting the Madonna. “Tiffany went around his studio with a hammer, and if he found anything he considered substandard, he’d just smash it.” I’d heard that story too, but I let her talk, let her have the pleasure of conveying it. “I wonder if Clara Mingo ever came here. This church was built when the Mingoes moved to the Back Bay. And she was spiritual, right?”

I had to be honest. “And slightly mad. To put it charitably.”

“Who can say, really? Perhaps she saw another reality. Saw beyond what the average person could comprehend.”

“Do you believe in ghosts?’

We were outside the church. A homeless man, resembling a bundle of linty blankets, slept beneath the statue of William Ellery Channing.

“I think we’re more than a collection of cells. You can’t dissect a soul or a personality, but it’s there.” Then she began dissecting the Mingo House board of trustees. There were factions, the people loyal to the ways of the old guard, like Nadia Gulbenkian, for example, and Rudy Schmitz’s people, especially the young software executive, Jon Kim.

That day, Genevieve brought me to Clara Mingo’s bedroom, showing me her brush and comb set, monogrammed and engraved with doves of peace. One of Clara’s maids swore she saw the brush take flight to follow its owner to the first floor.

“The maid was deep in the cooking sherry that day,” I said.

Genevieve called my attention to the ebony table, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which Clara had used when conducting her séances. It had reverberated with the rapping of the departed, with spirits from her own family and shades of Civil War soldiers, two mayors of Boston, and Abraham Lincoln himself. Clara’s afterlife was racially integrated, since “colored troops” from Robert Gould Shaw’s 54th Massachusetts regiment marched here to speak. Then, scandalously, Clara dared summon the ghost of the Reverend Asa Lawrence Fowle of Trinity Church, Copley Square. That was too much for proper Bostonians; they knew Asa Fowle would have shunned Clara Mingo, whether he was dead or alive. So the family was consigned to social Siberia.

“That’s when Corinth One really put his foot down. He ordered a Congregational minister to come and more or less exorcize the place. I think Corinth paid a priest to sprinkle the house with holy water too. He wanted to cover all the bases.”

So Clara took the waters at various German spas, and when she and Corinth One returned, she became a respectable recluse, doing non-controversial embroidery for the poor and becoming an early advocate for the prevention of cruelty to animals. “She paid for a lot of drinking troughs for work horses all throughout Boston. The last one was on the Esplanade. It was vandalized by some idiots ten years ago. It had a bas-relief of Clara’s favorite pony. I think the Museum of Fine Arts may have gotten what was left of it. August Saint-Gaudens supposedly designed it. But if he did, it wasn’t his best work.”

I peered beneath the table, which seemed to be Indian, judging by its carving, and discovered no levers, cranks, or cables to simulate ghosts.

“Clara wasn’t a fraud. She really believed she was a medium.”

“But her husband didn’t. Obviously.”

“He was a businessman. Whose business was death.”

“So was hers.”

“Touché. Sort of.”

Chapter Three

Over the course of my weeks of shadowing Genevieve, I met the trustees one by one, as they dropped by Mingo House during the hours when docents gave tours. I was startled by how few there were: a mere five. Then, finally, the chaos of their commitments subsided, and a meeting was scheduled one humid Thursday evening.

I was the first trustee to arrive. I found Genevieve and Dorothea Jakes, another older docent from Wellesley, lugging something naked and flesh-colored down the staircase.

“Don’t be alarmed,” Dorothea laughed. “It’s only ‘Maude.’”

“It’s a mannequin. From a department store,” Genevieve said.

“We got it when Jordan Marsh closed.” Dorothea was gasping a bit, but shooed away my offer to help. “Eventually, she’ll be clothed…and sitting…at the dining room table.”

“Maude” was thin and resembled Audrey Hepburn in
Roman Holiday
. Genevieve and Dorothea draped her in an old sheet and propped her in the front hall by the coat-rack.

“We don’t want her to startle the ghosts,” said Dorothea.

“Do you have any?” I asked.

“Clara Mingo thought so,” Genevieve reminded me.

Nadia Gulbenkian, the senior member of the board in both age and years of service, arrived just as we were laughing because the sheet had slipped from the mannequin. “Terrible, terrible,” Nadia was muttering. She was a dark woman in her vigorous sixties, with the suggestion of a moustache above her upper lip and the air of a person living in a state of perpetual blitzkrieg. Her late husband had been a political science professor at Harvard and the author of several books about the Cold War and McCarthyism, and Nadia was often a delegate to the Democratic national convention. She had served on the Mingo House board of trustees for a good decade, but tonight she seemed especially upset, her face flushed, her gray hair rebelling against the tortoiseshell combs supposed to tame it. “It’s the roof over our heads,” she said. She threw down her heavy faux-alligator pocketbook onto the vulnerable table by the door, disrupting the neat piles of brochures. “This board is going to have to act instead of pontificate. And we do not have a lot of time.”

Then she rummaged through her pocketbook, taking out a crossword puzzle clipped from some newspaper, an English-Italian paperback dictionary, two tortoiseshell compacts, and a tube of Rolos before finding what she wanted. “It’s the report from the architects, on the structural state of the roof. In a word, it’s unsound, dangerous or close to it.” She waved the document in her heavily veined hand. “Mingo House is doomed. To think this collection has survived intact for all these years and now,
because of carpentry
, it just may vanish.”

Then Rudy Schmitz, the chairman of the board, sauntered in. He was a thin man with a salt-and-pepper ponytail and a face desiccated in a patrician way. He cultivated the air of a Brahmin progressive, but was neither. A native of Baltimore, he’d come north for college, then become a real estate broker before accumulating the capital to found some of the city’s toniest businesses, including Flex, the gym with mirrored walls and a sushi bar, and Chill, the gelato place on Charles Street. He lived, I was told, in a lavish spread on Beacon Hill.

He was eating lemon sorbet from a cup emblazoned with the distinctive Chill logo, the Leaning Tower of Pisa wearing earmuffs. He knew perfectly well that all food and drink was banned from Mingo House but was chuckling at his little transgression. “Sorbet is mostly water. It doesn’t have the fat content of dairy, so it won’t stain. And I’m almost done.” He had scant awareness of other people’s feelings: “That’s a lovely dress you’re wearing, Nadia. You’re looking extra chipper tonight.”

Nadia seemed to be the type who would have scolded him about the sorbet but she had bigger things on her mind. “The roof is a disaster waiting to happen.” She thrust a copy of the architects’ report at Rudy. “Read it and weep.” Instead of doing either, Rudy turned toward the eavesdropping docents. “Thank you as always. You may go now.” Genevieve spoke up. “I’ve made the usual arrangements for rain upstairs,” she told Nadia. “It looks pretty black over Cambridge.” Nadia nodded and Genevieve opened the front door, revealing a sky in which thunderheads were multiplying. As Genevieve and Dorothea left, the remainder of the trustees came trudging in: Jon Kim, a dapper software executive from Cambridge; and Sean Ahearn, the vice president of a hospital in Somerville.

We were meeting at the rear of the house, on the first floor, in the dining room, which, as always, was set for a dinner that would never take place. A round mahogany table was covered by gilt-edged, raspberry pink-china and bewildering silverware only Victorians would comprehend, odd little forks, threatening spoons…Everything in the room seemed breakable, from the mirrors with their spiky gilt flowers to the score of figurines crowding every flat surface, the Meissen peasants minding sheep, milking cows, depositing a newly caught perch into a basket…I pressed my briefcase against my chest, so as not to swing it and shatter some artifact, as I made my way to the circle of metal chairs positioned near the windows for our meeting. A painting of three solemn girls—all lace and blonde ringlets, clustered around a chocolate-colored Newfoundland dog—seemed to stand sentinel behind us.

“Welcome to your first official meeting of the board of trustees of Mingo House, Mark,” Rudy said, squeezing my bicep and holding the muscle a few seconds too long. “We may need a little comic relief. As well as your perspective about working with the media. I’ve told your fellow trustees all about your advertising expertise. Your Clio Awards. Etcetera.”

From her pocketbook Nadia extracted four more copies of the architects’ report. Mine, like the others I saw, was smeared with streaks of a fragrant and no doubt costly face powder. “To give you the executive summary, we need a new roof. In fact, the report stresses that the entire ‘envelope’ of the building is in question, structurally.”

Various people sighed. Jon Kim emitted a long, low whistle. He was hard not to notice: he had a handsome face sculpted with high cheekbones, linebackers’ shoulders, and a suit so tailored it might have been sprayed on. “Wow. And I mean wow,” he said.

The estimates for the work of roof men, plasterers, electricians, pushed the cost to over $200,000.

“It’s a tragedy, a tragedy pure and simple.” Nadia had taken the Rolos out of her handbag and was putting several into her mouth, which was large and emphasized by a coating of caked scarlet lipstick. Looking in her direction, Rudy gave a stage sigh as if he wished that the troublesome roof and the troubled trustee might both be gone. “We have some serious fundraising to do. We can kick that off with the big party in August.” He glanced in my direction. “And Mark can help us with some serious grant-writing.”

“Won’t the city just close us down? Aren’t we endangering the public, just permitting people on the premises?” Jon Kim asked.

Rudy laughed, displaying his nicotine-stained teeth. “Nadia, your fear is contagious. You’re giving poor Jon a panic attack.”

Jon Kim opened his obsidian-black laptop. “Couldn’t we contact some surviving member of the Mingo family? To donate some funds? Is that a possibility? I’ll Google ‘Mingo’…”

“Forget it,” Nadia said. I knew Jon had joined the board six months ago, and Nadia now treated him like the novice she thought he was. “The Mingoes are extinct. You’d need a medium to summon them.”

Jon commenced to laugh, and then Nadia, her face rigid with rage, reached into her bag. For an instant, a small, shrill part of me thought she might draw out some sort of weapon. Instead, she took what proved to be a flask of honeysuckle toilet water and dabbed some onto the loose skin of her neck. “Sometimes I wonder why I remain on this board. Sometimes I wonder.”

Clearly Rudy was restraining himself because Nadia’s cut was aimed at him, at his “new regime”: she was the last trustee recruited to the board by the previous chair, Burrage Hone, the late authority on colonial America and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

“The death of a cultural institution is not an occasion for frivolity. Mingo House means more than some club or restaurant that gradually loses its Zagat stars and expires.”

Everyone recognized this as a reference to Rudy’s one major failure, Tank, his gay bar by the harbor in South Boston. Its location was too remote for lazy clubbers to trek, so it had lived up to its name in less than a year.

Hugging his laptop, Jon Kim rallied to Rudy’s defense. “Nadia, that was uncalled for. Rudy brings some much-needed business acumen to this board. And knowledge of the consumer taste, local and national. Not to mention a cool head.”

To my surprise, Rudy squeezed Jon’s arm just as erotically as he’d squeezed mine, and as far as I knew Jon was married and straight. He wore a heavy gold wedding ring.

“Remember, Nadia, we’re the trustees of Mingo House, charged with its care and capable of providing it. Throwing up our hands at every crisis that comes our way is hardly what Corinth Two would have hoped for when he gave this museum to the people of Boston and the world.” Rudy was quoting some rhetoric from the brochure visitors received when they paid the docents for a tour. Nadia, long ago, had helped write this brochure, and her own words seemed to calm her.

Just then, a great crack of thunder, like a cliff slide in a quarry rent by dynamite, resounded, and rain came seething down. Nadia gazed almost fondly at the tall windows behind us, seemingly pleased by the wrath of nature. “Why don’t we take a little walk upstairs, to assess the situation in the library? Why don’t we see things first-hand?” Yanking her pocketbook from the floor, she stood and led the group away from the hesitating Rudy, who was the last to follow.

We trudged up the staircase. Just for conversation, I asked Rudy, “Who are those three girls in that painting in the dining room?”

“Oh, Aginesse, Alva, and Araminta, the triplets—Corinth Two’s sisters who all died from complications of diphtheria. That really undid poor Clara.”

“The Mingoes were kind of a hard-luck crew.”

“Well, Clara felt cursed because of the money the family made during the Civil War. Manufacturing firearms.” Rudy quickly tickled my nape. “Silly isn’t it? Were we supposed to defeat the Confederacy with slingshots?”

As we reached the top floor, we could hear an ominous dripping. Sure enough, someone had assembled a potpourri of containers—wastebaskets, pails, some cooking pans, and plastic tubs—to catch the steady drip of water assaulting the library from its ceiling.

“Genevieve, the docent, the Shawmut College student, knows this building intimately. She knows exactly where to put the containers.” The ceiling was moist with rivulets of water and appeared ready to break open like a piñata.

Jon Kim was sheltering his laptop under one arm. “This is worrisome. This is worrisome. We can’t let this go. We’ve got to be proactive.”

“Proactive?” Nadia scoffed. “The time to be proactive was five years ago, Jon. Long before you came on board.”

“Let’s not trade recriminations, Nadia.” A drop hit Rudy on his shoulder. Nadia nudged him aside, and, from behind the red velvet sofa that had so many rips and tears it seemed to be molting, she dragged yet another wastebasket, one someone must have brought to Mingo House specifically for this purpose, since it was circumvented with a map of the world, a schoolchild’s battered cast-off. Nadia aligned the wastebasket with the latest leak, and, in the process, again bumped against both Rudy and Jon Kim. Rudy was frowning at the various receptacles; he seemed worried that they marred the décor.

“Of course the first thing we need in this process is a record.” From her bag, Nadia retrieved a digital camera and began photographing the ceiling, the pans, the monsoon outside.

Rudy kept chuckling. “I swear, Nadia, some day you’re going to pull old Corinth Two himself out of that bag.”

No one else joined him in his mirth.