The Price of Inheritance (5 page)

“You can't imagine how lonely it is to be a widow,” Elizabeth said, bowing her head slightly, her tight gray chignon unmoving.

Really? But didn't she have six children?

“Death is terrible,” I said, solemnly bowing my head to match hers. What was I saying? How did I know death was terrible? I had never died.

“Loneliness is terrible,” I said, backtracking.

“It is,” she agreed, patting her eyes with a handkerchief she seemed to have pulled from the couch cushions.

“Loneliness is killing me. My bones are shaking. I need a change.”

She needed a change, did she? Well! I had a change for her. Minimalism! Was it time for me to pull up pictures of Le Corbusier buildings on my iPad? Tell her that stark white walls with nothing on them were this decade's Thomas Eakins paintings? Or maybe I'd suggest the naturalist route. This woman should kiss all this Texas gaudiness away and move to Walden Pond. Really find herself in her final years. She needed to shed the shackles of wealth and make like a Buddhist.

“There are, of course, my six children. I always thought I would leave it in their hands.”

Heartless worms! All children were. They didn't even come visit her, by the sounds of things. They didn't deserve her furniture. What was I supposed to say? Screw your children? Yes, that's what I was supposed to say, just not in so many words.

“It's possible, if they're not passionate about American antiques, that they would immediately sell your collection and spend the money on other things,” I said, talking about how so many young wealthy people wanted private jets and private islands.

“The values are different,” I continued. “They don't want Chippendale and Queen Anne; they want fast money, fast cars, Swedish furniture made of metal.” She physically recoiled when I strung that last phrase together. I could tell she was having visions of her huge house filled with IKEA furniture with impossible-to-pronounce names covered in umlauts.

I wanted to tell her that Bjøoïrniger sofas were sure to be the downfall of the next generation of Americans, but I didn't want to push it.

“I know they don't really care about all these things,” she said, motioning to her end tables and armoires. “But my children aside,” she said, sighing, “sometimes the thought of selling everything, watching my collection, Adam's collection, being torn apart and sold off bit by bit . . . well, it might just send me to an early grave.”

Was seventy-six an early grave? It wasn't my place to ask. And I didn't want this elegant woman to actually die. It's just that I wasn't allowed to walk away with nothing.

“We have a very good offer for you,” said Nicole, cutting the small talk. “We'll of course need to take a look at everything, but I know that the number we are willing to put on the table will exceed your expectations.”

“I need a guarantee,” said Elizabeth, her voice suddenly turning firmer.

“Of course,” we both said in unison.

“And I'd like you to set up a trip for my children to attend the auction. They quite like the St. Regis.”

“Will you want to attend?” I asked, writing notes and knowing that Louise would put her entire extended family and their pets up at the hotel if we could sign Elizabeth.

Just as I was about to stand up and start gently flipping over furniture to find signatures, she shook her head and declared, “All this talk is rattling me. I feel like I'm at a car dealership with Slick Rick and I don't like it.”

What? How was this like a car dealership? We were trying to get her to sell, not buy, and who in this scenario was Slick Rick? I caught Nicole's eye and she mouthed, “You.”

“Maybe I'll just donate everything to my alma mater, the University of Maryland,” Elizabeth said, starting to smile as she reached for her soda water.

The University of Maryland! Why? So that frat boys could puke on cushions that once held the posteriors of the American settlers? While I was thinking about our next move, Nicole was playing the friendship angle, telling Elizabeth all about her recent trip to Maryland. She was also peppering her stories with ten good reasons why Elizabeth should sell her estate.

“The Baltimore Museum of Art has expressed a lot of interest,” said Nicole. “Think about how much of your furniture would return to Maryland if you sold it through us. We have a very high percentage of buyers from museums in the mid-Atlantic.”

Elizabeth smiled and declared, “Good people come from Baltimore.”

What did she mean good people came from Baltimore? Had she never seen
The Wire?
And Edgar Allan Poe was from Baltimore. The original Goth!

“Everything I'm considering selling is in these eleven rooms,” she said, making a dramatic motion with her arm. “Now, I said ‘considering,' so don't start mentally writing up your catalogue yet. And no fast talk and shouting out numbers. I like to live a civilized life.”

Well, it was a good thing I hadn't done my usual routine of appraising things in a loincloth.

There were one hundred twenty-seven pieces in the eleven rooms and we started in the very last drawing room, taking pictures of each piece from every angle, including inside the drawers and underneath the legs. We looked at the inlays, the mother-of-pearl detail on some, the tongue-and-groove joinery, ran our hands across the claw-and-ball feet of the Chippendale works, inspected the scallop shell mounts on the Queen Anne pieces, made sure the cabriole legs had no splits in them, same for the pierced back splats on the side chairs. We looked for visible saw marks on eighteenth-century pieces and then almost lost it when we found a companion piece to a side table already owned by one of New York's most prominent collectors of Newport-built eighteenth-century furniture.

“We didn't know you had this,” I said to Elizabeth, running my hand across the wood.

“Well, one's life can't be totally public,” she replied. “It was one of Adam's last purchases. It came from a dealer in New York. I have the papers.”

Tracing furniture was very straightforward. We could easily determine the precise time period when a piece was made, the region where it was constructed, and the creator, just by looking at the wood. Certain woods were in vogue at different times and the handmade screws of the past centuries and the oxidation they left behind on the wood helped a great deal. It was possible to forge a clay pot, and at a certain level, it was possible to fake furniture, and could be lucrative, but it was extremely difficult and expensive to do it well.

When it was nearly nine o'clock and Elizabeth seemed rather sick of us manhandling her possessions, she suggested we pick it up again the next day.

“I appreciate you ladies coming, and you've made excellent arguments for why I should sell with Christie's, but all this . . . I don't know. As you're aware, Adam was always the one who did all the actual buying and selling. Maybe I should just wait until I'm older to sell, because right now, it still means a lot.”

“We understand how difficult the selling process can be, but the wonderful thing about selling your estate instead of letting your children handle it later on is that you have control. If you work with Christie's you will have the right individual collectors, museums, universities all bidding on the wonderful collection that you and Adam procured. And if you would like to use the financial returns to build another collection, we would be thrilled to assist you. Maybe you would like to start your own collection. Something you can be known for alone, without Adam.”

“What do you suggest I collect, Miss Everett? Gold boxes? Sporting art? Islamic artifacts? Maybe musical instruments. Do you think this house would look nice lined with rusty tubas?”

“We try to avoid selling rust,” I answered with a smile that was getting very strained.

“Will I see you both tomorrow?” she asked.

She would indeed.

I wanted to remind her that she was the one who contacted Louise. We hadn't shown up at her doorstep unannounced with a contract.

“She'll sell,” said Nicole after we walked outside. “She asked if we were coming back tomorrow and no mention of any other auction house. She's ready. But she certainly doesn't need the money. I can't figure out why she wants to sell now.”

“You never know about people's private lives. Maybe she has some loose ends to tie up.”

Nicole laughed and got in the little rental car. “Loose ends” was a term many sellers used instead of “I'm strapped for cash, I've got debts, my son gambled away all our money in Monaco, we were victims of a Ponzi scheme, Wall Street screwed us, or our daughter is addicted to the devil's sugar, and we need to pay the rehab bills.”

Elizabeth had said that if she were to sell, she wanted to lead the January sale. Usually, it took us a full year to get an estate of her size ready for auction. We certainly didn't want to rush it, and four months was beyond rushing it, but if that was one of her stipulations, I knew Christie's would do it. Our department was not a big one and we never said no to estates like Elizabeth's even if we had to work night and day to get it ready for January 18. We only had sales twice a year: September and January. The rest of the time we lived in fear of getting enough to wow the world in September and January.

I had texted Alex three times since I'd been gone to tell him I was in Houston, potentially working on a huge deal, and he had only written back, “cool.” Really? “Cool?” Did that mean he was chilly? Or that my job was awesome? Or maybe he was screwing someone else and had only been able to pound out “cool” with one of his thumbs while he twisted her into a Boy Scout knot? I couldn't stop thinking about it. Alex and Elizabeth Tumlinson were flooding my brain.

The next day, Nicole and I were ready to turn our attention to old auction records, historical records, and previous sales from each of the craftsmen. When we went back to Elizabeth's at 9
A.M.,
she told us that she had a meeting with “a few others” that evening so it was good we were planning to wrap it all up that morning.

“By a few others she means David Marcham from Sotheby's, you know. Maybe Valerie Hemmet, too,” said Nicole as we inspected an end table on the other side of the house. “Louise is not going to be pleased they're here.”

We had thought that with the time Elizabeth was allotting us, David wasn't coming at all, but we were clearly wrong. David Marcham was a legend in the American furniture industry. He had hair that smelled exactly like fine leather and was on
Antiques Roadshow
twice a month. He had once made a woman cry when he told her that her antique baby chair was a fake and looked like dog feces molded into the shape of a rocker. His brother was the preeminent expert on American numismatics and had once shot himself in the foot on live television to prove a point about the Civil War era Whitworth rifle.

It took two hours of talking to Elizabeth to get a thing out of her about Sotheby's. Nicole didn't want to ask, I didn't want to ask, but we had to know if they were definitely coming that night, as we might lift our guarantee a little if they were.

After we rephotographed a few pieces because the morning light was better than what we had the day before, Elizabeth decided to get chatty, but not about what we were hoping she'd talk about—her transfer of assets from her living room to our New York showroom. Instead she talked about herself. And we listened.

Sitting tall on a muted blue settee and pulling her hands into her lap, she smiled and looked at us smiling back at her like desperate idiots. She knew she could talk to us about pig intestines for fourteen hours straight and we would have to continue nodding enthusiastically and gasping over the complexities of swine innards.

“I've always been a collector,” she said, pointing out the obvious. “Even before I met Adam. I didn't have the money to buy the really important things—the Lannuiers, Thomas Afflecks, Duncan Phyfes—like I do now, but I've always been taken with collections. Not only did I like to acquire things; I could never get rid of anything, either. My mother, Janet Tivoli, died Christmas Day of 1963, and, well, she was the same way. She once said that throwing out a sweater was like ripping the wings off an angel. That really stuck with me.”

Holy God. If I took one hundred twenty-seven pieces from her, would I be killing 63.5 angels? Or would that be one hundred twenty-seven angels?

“I'm just like you,” I told her. “I can't get rid of anything. I have every letter I've ever received, every photo I've ever taken. I don't use digital because I can't bear the thought of deleting things.”

Nicole raised her eyebrows at me, sure that I must be lying. She probably took nothing but iPhone photos and had a posh, perfect, clutter-free existence.

“Your grandmother was the same way, wasn't she,” said Elizabeth, looking at me.

“Yes, she really was.”

“We met at a dinner in Baltimore, you know,” she offered up.

“I didn't know. But I'm sure she was very fond of you,” I suggested. Of course, my grandmother had never mentioned knowing Elizabeth, but I was going to ignore that. Just like I was going to ignore the fact that my butt was completely asleep because I had been sitting on this very attractive, very expensive, and very uncomfortable chair for two hours. I felt like a geisha. Soon I would be asked to do a tea ceremony.

It was somewhere between talking about how she had first collected Revolutionary War era lamps (because she didn't like to be kept in the dark) and how she then decided to move on to silver soup tureens that she mentioned ­Sotheby's.

“David is very interested in my estate,” she announced, as if we had no idea. “We spoke last night and he's convinced me it wouldn't be in my best interest to give everything to Maryland, because real collectors, real lovers of the finest Americana, should have a chance to own history just like I did. He made a very good point.”