The Price of Inheritance (4 page)

“Right you are!” said Louise, lifting her espresso in triumph.

Elizabeth and her late husband, Adam Tumlinson, had the best collection of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and ­nineteenth-century American furniture in the country. Adam had made most of his money by being born to the right parents, early real estate moguls on Maryland's eastern shore, and he'd padded it out nicely by being one of the first to see the potential in Baltimore's many dilapidated warehouses. He flipped the old buildings into ultramodern lofts bought up by Johns Hopkins doctors. The Tumlinsons lived for many years between St. Michaels, Maryland, and the Roland Park historic district of Baltimore, then moved to Texas, where they solidified their status as the top Americana collectors. When Adam Tumlinson died last fall, my department started courting Elizabeth like she was debutante of the year. But she told us, and we knew she'd told Sotheby's, too, that she wouldn't think about selling even a sliver of her collection while she was still breathing and we'd have to move on from courting her to wooing her children after she passed away.

“Wait. Are you sending me to value the estate of Elizabeth Tumlinson?” I asked in disbelief. Louise couldn't just be sending me. She never sent just one person from our team to assess an important estate. I was sure she must be coming, too. Unless Louise was having open-heart surgery at the Starbucks, there was no way she would send someone in her stead to meet with Elizabeth Tumlinson.

“I'm not sending you just to value it. I'm sending you to acquire it as fast as you can. Nicole will be going, too,” she said, reading my mind, and noting that Nicole would meet me in Houston since she was currently in Washington, D.C., looking at an early nineteenth-century Hugh Finlay table. Why would Louise send Nicole and me? We were the two most junior members and she was the department head. Surely she wanted to meet with Elizabeth and explain that Sotheby's was a bunch of cocaine addicts who would take a 99 percent commission.

“You need to work on your poker face,” said Louise as I pulled my hand away from my mouth.

“You want to know why I'm sending you and Nicole and why I'm not going myself,” Louise offered up, pushing another coffee in my direction. Heat and speed were the last things I needed, but I drank it anyway, afraid that Louise would change her mind about my trip if I couldn't drink two grande coffees in ten minutes.

“I suppose I'm wondering a little.” What a lie. This was more interesting than Bigfoot or the Shroud of Turin.

“She requested you. She somehow knew—and liked—your grandmother. She knew her in Baltimore, I believe. Did your grandmother live in Baltimore?”

She knew my grandmother? How had I not figured that out? I had gone through my grandmother's address book eight times when I first started at Christie's, contacting everyone who might have some American-made object to sell, but I had never seen the Tumlinsons' name. I took immense pride in always knowing a connection before Louise did. When Adam Tumlinson died, I was aware of his death before the obits were written, before the body was even cold, thanks to a doctor I knew in Texas. Louise had been the one who contacted Elizabeth, but she had been mighty impressed by my ability to hear about the death even before close family members.

“My grandmother did live in Baltimore, but not for long,” I explained to Louise. “It was for a year in the early sixties. My grandfather was having some health problems and was being treated at Johns Hopkins.”

“I mentioned your name and the Nicholas Brown Chippendale and Elizabeth asked if you were related to Virginia Everett. When I said you were, she said she wanted to work with you, so there you go. I also put Nicole on there because everyone knows Nicole's family and I have a lot of faith that you, with some help from her, will handle yourself just fine. You're the smartest person I've ever had in the department, and I don't say that lightly. Sometimes you're even smarter than me.”

I smiled in thanks at Louise and thought about what she said. Elizabeth Tumlinson was friends with my dead grandmother? While she was living, of course. I doubt she'd developed a close relationship with the late Virginia Everett via voodoo. I was mad at myself for missing that connection and was glad Louise didn't seem upset by my oversight. The name Elizabeth Tumlinson meant nothing to me until college and by then my grandmother had passed away, but my parents were American furniture freaks, too. Had she never felt compelled during one of our solemn family dinners to drop the fact that she was friends with the grande dame of American decorative arts collecting?

“I don't know how to say this without just saying it directly, but we need this sale,” Louise acknowledged, her left hand over mine. “I don't want her to meet with any art dealers. If she hasn't met with Sotheby's yet, I don't want her to set something up. We need this estate and we need it . . . well, I don't want to say desperately, but it would be an appropriate word. Last year, Sotheby's American furniture department outsold ours for the first time in nine years. Nine years! Dominick is putting so much pressure on us to reverse that damage.”

She looked at my face, my embarrassment, and patted my hand. “You know that, of course, and you know that that's not happening again this year. Your historic sale. The Nicholas Brown Chippendale. It did so much for the department, but I still worry it's not enough. But if you could get this estate—”

“Louise,” I said, interrupting her. “If I need to slice open my arm and give the woman my bone marrow with a teaspoon, I'll do it. I will not leave Texas without a signed contract, I swear to you.”

“Good, good,” Louise repeated. “Her collection will determine the American furniture market for the next few years. If it sells well, there will be no more talk of a flat market . . . and Sotheby's, they would just . . . it would be amazing. I can't take another year like last year. I can't. Just get it signed.”

•••

I really felt the weight of what I'd been asked to do as my plane started its descent over the dry plains of eastern Texas. This wasn't just me going to chat with someone about one table. I was doing an estimation of an entire estate and making an immediate offer. I was taking on the operation of wooing then selling the very charmed life of Elizabeth Tumlinson, and I had to be successful.

When I saw Nicole at the baggage carousel waiting for me, I ran up to her and gave her a huge hug. I was suddenly so appreciative of her friendship, her expertise, and her ability to keep a level head.

“I am so, so glad you're here,” I said as I finally let her go, untangling her softly curled dark hair from my watch.

“You're going to kill it,” she said, hugging me back. “I'm just happy to observe your genius.” I let her comment flood me with confidence and smoothed the tiny wrinkle in my fitted blazer. I wasn't free of nerves, but I knew how to look and live the part.

I'd spent the whole plane ride reading a biography of Elizabeth, sent from the same Houston contact who had told me about her husband's death. She had grown up in the quaint coastal town of St. Michaels, Maryland, and had met her very rich husband through a mutual friend during a political fund-raiser in Washington, D.C. They hadn't moved to Texas until he was semiretired and she was in her mid-fifties. Now Elizabeth was heavily involved in everything a very rich older woman was expected to be involved in: the Houston Ballet; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Texas Children's Hospital; the other children's hospital; and the Houston Historical Society—her money was sprinkled all over the city. Nicole and I wondered why the Tumlinsons had abandoned the life they had built in Maryland for sprawling Houston, but none of our contacts had been able to give us a hint, so we assumed better weather and less crime.

As I turned away from the traffic on Texas Avenue, I kept my foot steadily on the gas pedal and headed toward Willowick Road in the very wealthy River Oaks area of the city.

Before we went to Elizabeth's, Nicole and I stopped in the country club near her house, which one of Nicole's sellers had gotten us access to, and went over the final details of our proposal.

“Well, this isn't Baltimore, now, is it,” said Nicole, looking out at the nearly fluorescent green golf course and women in tennis whites.

“I would meet that woman in a back alley in Newark if she wanted to. I just hope she hasn't contacted Sotheby's,” I said, sitting down at a somewhat secluded table overlooking the golf course. “Or if she has, that we're going first.”

“I know,” said Nicole, looking at the women next to us eating what looked like heaven in a breadbasket. “Christie's is almost always first, but I'm still terrified. I actually dreamt last night that she had us do a Hashiyama.”

I sucked in my breath and nodded understandingly. It was one of those stories that was legendary in the auction world. In 2005, Takashi Hashiyama, the president of a big Japanese company, couldn't decide if he wanted to sell the company's eight-figure art collection with the help of Sotheby's or Christie's. So instead of going with his gut or flipping a coin, he had the head of Christie's Tokyo and the head of Sotheby's Tokyo play rock, paper, scissors. Christie's won and we suddenly all started practicing playground games in the office.

“Of course, in this day and age, she'd probably make us play something more timely, like Angry Birds.” Nicole stared at me, checked her high score, and then we both laughed nervously.

“Okay, so if she doesn't make us have some sort of video game contest with Sotheby's, we stick with our twelve percent buyer's premium.”

“Yeah, we probably have to,” I said, making little check marks next to the proposal I had typed up on the plane. “And we waive seller's commission and we give our guarantee, half of which can be paid out to her upon signing.”

“Thirty million.”

“Yes, thirty million. That's high, but it's doable.”

“I've made a list of possible extras,” said Nicole, looking at her list. “Her oldest son, Gordon, he's the one who spent a little time in rehab, he's a huge Ravens fan. I can get him a meet-and-greet in the locker room.”

“You can? How?”

“Don't ask, but I can. As for Elizabeth, I can't pinpoint anything she might want that she can't already buy, so we'll just feel it out.”

I could see the words “American Ballet Theatre, Clydesdale horses, space aviation, and Duke of Gloucester” on her list but didn't ask any questions.

“I also looked and saw that Olivier Burnell was at the rostrum for every New York sale her husband attended in the past fifteen years. We can put it in her contract that he will conduct the auction and if he can't, she can withdraw.”

“Olivier has never missed an auction. Even that time when he sliced open his thumb with a steak knife . . .”

“And just wore cashmere gloves,” Nicole said, finishing my sentence. “I know he never misses an auction, but she doesn't. Let's write it in. I think she'll appreciate it.”

“Okay,” I said, mentally preparing the baskets of Airborne and vitamin C that I was going to start bringing Olivier on a weekly basis.

“Louise said she wants high estimates.”

“They all want high estimates,” I replied, rolling the corner of the piece of Christie's embossed paper in front of me. “It can backfire, but sellers never seem to care.”

“I know, I know, the reserve prices can go too high and then there's the risk it won't sell. But if we don't go high, you know Sotheby's will give her the high estimates she wants.”

“You're right.” I sat on my hands so I would stop fidg­eting and looked at our papers—our talking points, the proposal, everything we had laid out before even seeing any of her collection in person. We typed up our final proposal, used the club's business center to print it out, and paused in front of a wall-to-wall window overlooking a manicured lawn.

“I feel ready,” said Nicole, standing up.

“Me too,” I replied, placing the new contract in a leather Christie's folder.

Elizabeth's house was roughly the size of Belgium and got bigger as we noticed a back wing and then a separate guesthouse. I pressed the button on the loudspeaker next to the gate of her ivory brick mansion, it clicked open, and Nicole motioned to an area on the stone driveway where I should park.

The first thing that surprised me was that Elizabeth opened her own door. I was absolutely sure she would have a dozen
Downton Abbey
–style footmen who called her “your grace” and brushed her hair with boar bristles, but no. And the next thing that surprised me was how beautiful and healthy she was at seventy-six years, five months, and seventeen days old. I expected her to be in declining health if she was thinking of selling a large part of her estate. But here she was, ready to compete in the Mrs. Grandmother of the Universe pageant.

“You must be the women from Christie's,” she said, her cream bouclé suit resisting a crease as she reached her thin hand out to us. “Louise warned me that you were young.” She moved out of the way and let us through the heavy, wooden, double French doors.

“As you both know,
youth
is not the word of the day. We're dealing with old things here, including me.”

Nicole and I started gushing—she looked amazing, sensational, her house was stunning, her collection unparalleled, we were thrilled, no, elated, to get a chance to see it, to meet her, we were bursting at the seams, what an honor—and through our gushing, she just kept a tight smile on her face and ushered us inside her house.

She led us to what looked like the first of eight living rooms. She pointed to a beige high-backed sofa for us to sit on, which was placed next to a beautiful piece, which I recognized as the work of eighteenth-century Annapolis cabinetmaker John Shaw.

We spent the first hour at Elizabeth's not up to our elbows in mahogany looking for signatures and hidden drawers in precise places to authenticate the pieces, but listening to Elizabeth tell us about her late husband, Adam.