Twelve rooms with a view : a novel.
Theresa Rebeck.
For Jess Lynn.
I WAS ACTUALLY STANDING ON THE EDGE OF MY MOTHER"S OPEN grave when I heard about the house. Some idiot with tattoos and a shovel had tossed a huge wad of dirt at me. I think he was perturbed that everyone else had taken off, the way they"re supposed to, and I was standing there like someone had brained me with a frying pan. It"s not like I was making a scene. But I couldn"t leave. The service in the little chapel had totally blown-all that deacon or whatever he was could talk about was G.o.d and his mercy and utter unredeemable nonsense that had nothing to do with her-so I was just standing there, thinking maybe something else could be said while they put her in the earth, something simple but hopefully specific. Which is when Lucy came up and yanked at my arm.
"Come on," she said. "We have to talk about the house."
And I"m thinking, what house?
So Lucy dragged me off to talk about this house, which she and Daniel and Alison had clearly been deep in conversation about for a while, even though I had never heard of it. Which maybe I might resent? Especially as Daniel obviously had an interest but no real rights, as he is only Alison"s husband? But I was way too busy trying to catch up.
"The lawyer says it"s completely unenc.u.mbered. She died intestate, and that means it"s ours, that"s what the lawyer says." This from Lucy.
"What lawyer?" I ask.
"Mom"s lawyer."
"I have a hard time believing that that is true," Daniel said.
"Why would he lie?" Lucy shot back at him.
"Why would a lawyer lie? I"m sorry, did you just say-"
"Yes I did. He"s our lawyer, why would he lie?"
"You just said he was Mom"s lawyer," I pointed out.
"It"s the same thing," she said.
"Really? I"ve never even heard of this guy, and I don"t know his name, and he"s my lawyer?"
"Bill left her his house," Lucy told me, like I"m some kind of total moron. "And since she died without a will, that means it"s ours. Mom has left us a house."
This entire chain of events seemed improbable to me. I"m so chronically broke and lost in an underworld of trouble all the time that a stroke of luck like an actual house dropping out of the sky might be true only if it were literally true and I was about to find myself squashed to death under somebody else"s house, like the Wicked Witch of the East. Surely this could not mean that. I continued to repeat things people had just said. "Bill left her his house?"
"Yes! He left her everything!" Lucy snapped.
"Didn"t he have kids?"
"Yes, in fact, he did," Daniel piped up. "He has two grown sons."
"Well, did he leave them something?"
"No, he didn"t," Lucy said, firm. Daniel snorted. "What? It"s true! He didn"t leave them anything!" she repeated, as if they"d been arguing about this for days.
"The lawyer said it wouldn"t matter whether or not they agreed to the terms of their father"s will," Alison noted, looking at Daniel, trying to be hopeful in the face of his inexplicable pessimism about somebody leaving us a house.
"If the lawyer said that, he"s a complete moron," Daniel informed her. "I called Ira. He"s going to take a look at the doc.u.ments and let us know what kind of a mess we"re in."
"It"s not a mess, it"s a house," Lucy said, sort of under her breath, in a peevish tone. She doesn"t like Daniel. She thinks he"s too bossy. Which he is, considering that we didn"t all marry him, just Alison.
So we took a left out of the cemetery in Daniel"s crummy old beige Honda and went straight into Manhattan to the lawyer"s office. There was no brunch with distant relatives and people standing around saying trivial mournful things about Mom, which I didn"t mind being spared. It would have been hard to find anybody who knew her anyway, but I did think that the four of us would at least stop at a diner and have some eggs or a bagel. But not the Finns. We get right down to business.
Before noon we were squashed around a really small table in a really small conference room in the saddest Manhattan office you ever saw. The walls were a nasty yellow and only half plastered together; seriously, you could see the dents where the Sheetrock was screwed into the uprights. The tabletop was that kind of Formica that looks vaguely like wood in somebody"s imagination. I was thinking, this is a lawyer"s office? What kind of lawyer? The overweight receptionist wore a pale green sloppy shirt, which unfortunately made her look even fatter than she was, and she kept poking her head in, first to ask us if we wanted any coffee and then about seven more times to tell us that Mr. Long would be right with us. Finally the guy showed up. His name was Stuart Long, and he looked like an egg. Seriously, the guy had a really handsome face and a good head of brown hair, but the rest of him looked like an egg. For a moment it was all I could concentrate on, so I was not, frankly, paying full attention when Lucy interrupted him in midsentence and said, "Can you tell us about the house?"
"The house?" said the lawyer, seriously confused for a second. And I thought-of course, they got it wrong, of course there is no house.
"Bill"s house," Alison explained. "The message you left on our machine said Bill left Mom a house, and the house would be part of the settlement. You left that, didn"t you leave that-"
"Well, I certainly would not have left any details about the settlement on a machine-I spoke to your husband, several times actually. Is that what you mean?"
"Yes, we spoke, and you told me about the house," Daniel interrupted, all snotty and impatient, like these details were really beneath him. I could see Lucy stiffen up, because Daniel clearly had told her and Alison that he had gotten "a message," when in fact he had been having long conversations with this lawyer that he had no right to have, much less lie about.
"You mean the apartment," Egg Man insisted.
"Yes, the apartment." Daniel was still acting above it all, as if he had a right to be annoyed.
"So it"s not a house," I said.
"No, it"s an apartment. Olivia was living there. Up until her recent death."
"Recent death-that"s an understatement," I said.
"Yes, yes, this is I"m sure overwhelming for you," the lawyer said. He had very good manners, compared to everyone else in the room. "But I take it from your questions that you"ve never seen the apartment?"
"Bill didn"t like us," I said. "So we weren"t allowed to visit them."
"He was reclusive," Alison corrected me. "As I"m sure Mr. Long is aware."
"Mom told me he didn"t want us to visit because Bill didn"t like us," I said.
"That"s ridiculous," said Alison.
"Could we get back to the point?" Lucy said. "What about this place-this apartment? We"re inheriting it, right?"
"Yes, well, the apartment was directly willed to your mother," Egg Man agreed. "Because her death came so soon after her husband"s, the t.i.tle was never officially transferred, but that will most likely be considered a technicality."
"And it was her house," Daniel reminded him. He was really stuck on this idea that it was a house.
"Technically it is, as I said, specifically included in the estate," our round lawyer repeated. "Why don"t you let me walk you through this?"
"Why don"t you just tell us how much the place is worth?" Lucy threw in.
Mr. Long blinked but otherwise ignored her poor manners. "Obviously it"s not possible to be specific about the worth of the property until we have a professional evaluation," he informed the room.
"You really don"t know?" Lucy persisted. "Like, it could be worth ten dollars or ten thousand dollars or a million dollars, but you don"t know?"
Before Egg Man could answer, Daniel tried to rip control of the meeting back to his side of the table. "She"s just a little impatient," he said, smiling. "Sweetie, maybe we should let Mr. Long-"
Lucy rolled her eyes at this. "Just a ballpark, Daniel sweetie," she shot back.
Mr. Long cleared his throat, clearly uncomfortable. "Well, I guess I could-"
"Yes, why don"t you," I said, trying to be nice, because I was feeling a little embarra.s.sed by the way the others were acting. Also, I really wanted him to give up a number. "Just a ballpark," I said, smiling brilliantly, because sometimes that"s all a sad, round lawyer needs: a pretty girl smiling at him. I thought Lucy was going to gag, but it did the trick.
"A ballpark. A ballpark," he said, smiling back at me. "I don"t know-eleven million?"
There was a big fat silence.
"Eleven million?" I said. "Eleven million what?" I know that sounds stupid, but what on earth was he talking about? Eleven million pesos?
"Eleven million dollars," he clarified. "That of course is almost a random number, there"s really no way of knowing. But it is twelve rooms, with a view of Central Park, on a very good block. I think eleven million would be considered conservative. In terms of estimates."
So then there was a lot more talk, yelling even, people getting quite heated, worried about things that hadn"t happened and might not happen but maybe were happening or had happened already, and the solution to all these things that no one understood, apparently, was for me, Tina, to move into that big old eleven-million-dollar apartment right away. Like that very day.
So it was odd how that happened? But that"s where I ended up.
1.
THE THING YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND ABOUT THESE BIG OLD APARTMENTS in New York City is that they are more completely astonishing than you ever thought they could be, even in your wildest dreams. When you walk along the edge of Central Park at sunrise, and you look up at the little golden windows blazing, and you think oh my G.o.d those apartments must be mind-blowing, who on earth could be so lucky that they get to live in one of those apartments? My mother and her husband were two of those people, and they lived in an apartment so huge and beautiful it was beyond imagining. Ceilings so high they made you feel like you were in a cathedral, or a forest. Light fixtures so big and far away and strangely shaped that they looked like some aging star exploding in the heavens. Mirrors in crumbling gilt frames that had little cherubs falling off the top. Clocks from three different centuries, none of which worked. So many turns in the hallways, leading to so many different dark rooms, that you thought maybe you"d stumbled into a dwarf"s diamond mine. The place was also, quite inexplicably, carpeted in mustard-colored wall-to-wall s.h.a.g, and one of the bathrooms was papered in some high-seventies silver-spotted stuff. Plus there was actual moss growing on the fixtures in the kitchen-no kidding, moss. But none of that was in any way relevant. The place was fantastic.
There was n.o.body to let us in-we had to let ourselves in with the keys the nice round lawyer handed over, telling us about six times that he didn"t think it was "necessary" that we take immediate ownership. He was so worried about the whole idea-that I would just up and move into this huge old empty apartment where my mother had died only days ago-that he kept repeating to himself, in a sort of sad murmur, "There"s no need to rush into anything. Really. You must all be overwhelmed. Let me walk you through this."
"But you said there might be some question about the will," Daniel reminded him.
"No, no question-well, no question about Mr. Drinan"s will. Your mother, as you know, does not seem to have left a will," he said, trying to drag us back into this nonsense. But now that the words "eleven million" had come out of his mouth, none of us was listening.
"We"d really like to get a look at the place," Daniel announced.
"Before we lose the light," Lucy said.
Sometimes I am amazed at the lines she pulls out. She just says this stuff like she really means it, even though she had said maybe a second ago that we needed to get over there and get Tina moved in to make it clear that we were taking ownership right away, because if there was going to be any contention or cloud on the t.i.tle we"d need to have established a proprietary right to the property. She"s not even a lawyer; that"s just the way her brain works. She figures out the meanest truth, gets it out there and deals with it, then a second later pretends that what"s really worrying her is some weird thing about the light. It"s spectacularly nervy and impressive. And maybe Daniel doesn"t like it because Alison is the oldest, which means that they should be calling the shots? But he just married into this situation, and there is no way around how smart Lucy is.
Meanwhile, I am the problem child who doesn"t get a vote. She"s caused too many problems; she doesn"t get a vote anymore. Even when it"s a question of where Tina is going to live, Tina doesn"t get to vote. I didn"t care. The truth was, I didn"t have anything better to do than let my sisters move me into my dead mom"s gigantic apartment on Central Park West. At the time I was living in a trailer park, for G.o.d"s sake, cleaning rich people"s houses out by the Delaware Water Gap. I didn"t even have a bank account because I couldn"t afford the monthly fees, and I had to borrow the fifty bucks for the bus to the funeral from my stupid ex-boyfriend Darren, whose bright idea it was to move out to that lousy trailer park in the first place. Oh well, the less said about the whole Delaware Water Gap fiasco the better, as it was not my smartest or most shining hour. So when Lucy leaned back in her chair and said, "We probably should take ownership right away, just to be safe-Tina can stay there," I wasn"t about to put up a fight. Move into a palace on Central Park West, why not?
So we got the keys, crawled through traffic to the Upper West Side, actually found a meter four blocks away from the promised land, and there we were, before the light was gone, while the sun was setting. The building itself was huge, a kind of murky dark brown stone with the occasional purple brick stuck in. Strange and gloomy gargoyles snarled from the cornices three stories up. Underneath them, two serious-minded eagles with the tails of lions guarded the entryway; these characters didn"t look like they were kidding around, but they also didn"t look like they intended to eat you or spit molten lava at you, unlike the ones above. Plus there were actual gas lamps, the old Victorian ones, burning by the heads of the eagle-lions, and another gas lamp, a really big one, hung dead center over the door, right above a huge name in gothic type: EDGEWOOD. In fact, all the windows on the first two floors had scrollwork and carvings and inexplicable Latin words inscribed above them. It all added up into a gothic sort of Victorian mess that was quite friendly while simultaneously seeming like the kind of place you might never come out of alive.
The foyer was predictably spectacular. Marble floors dotted with black stone tiles, vaulted ceilings, and the biggest crystal chandelier you"ve ever seen in your life. A huge black chair with actual wings, which I later found out was carved ebony, sat right in front of an enormous fireplace, with two more giant eagle-lions on either side. The fireplace was filled with an enormous sort of greenery, which I later found out was made of silk. The doorman"s station, a nice little bra.s.s stand piled with FedEx packages and a couple of manila envelopes, was empty. Behind that were two bra.s.s elevators with elaborate doors.
"Wow," I said. "Check out the chair with wings."
"We"ll have time for that later," Lucy told me grimly, giving me a little shove toward the elevators.
"We should wait for the doorman, shouldn"t we?" I said, looking around. The place was deserted.
"Why? We live here," Lucy announced, pressing her lips together, like don"t mess with me, as she pushed the elevator b.u.t.ton. She kept tapping at that stupid b.u.t.ton, as impatient as Moses whacking the rock, like that might hurry G.o.d up instead of just p.i.s.sing him off.
"Seriously, we can"t just go up there," I said. The whole situation suddenly seemed dicey. Alison started pushing the elevator b.u.t.ton too, pressing it really hard. Both of them were in such a rush, like rushing through all this would make it okay. It reminded me of Darren and the whole Delaware Water Gap fiasco-things happen too fast and you end up stuck in the middle of nowhere with a complete s.h.i.thead and a boatload of trouble. I was about to explain this to my sisters when the elevator dinged and Daniel swung open the outer door.
"You guys, wait a minute," I said. "We should wait for the doorman."
"Who knows where he is?" Daniel said. "We"re not waiting."
And since no one showed up to stop us, I got in.
According to the keys the Egg Man had given us, Mom"s apartment was 8A, so we took the elevator to the eighth floor, where it disgorged us on a horrible little landing. An old green fluorescent strip light flickered feebly, making us look like ghosts, and the venetian blinds at the windows were so old and cracked and dusty that even a hapless loser like me found them offensive. It was startling to find a landing so grungy in this fancy building, but this was the least of the improbabilities that were coming my way. It was taking Lucy a long minute to figure out how to work all the keys and I was in a bad mood by this time. I thought we really should have waited to tell the doorman we were there, and I was worried about a total stranger showing up and saying, "Hey! What are you doing?" A door to the side and behind the two elevators had been painted a sad brown maybe a hundred years ago, and next to it was another door, painted a gorgeous pearly gray, with "8B" in heavy bra.s.s. The "8A" on our door by contrast was in those sticky-backed gold-and-black letters that you buy at the hardware store. It was a sad little sight; it really was.
And then Lucy figured out the locks, and there was a click and a sort of a breeze, and the door to the apartment swung open.
You couldn"t tell how big the place was right away. The blinds were drawn, and we didn"t know where the switches were, so we all stepped tentatively into the gloom. It smelled too, a sort of funny old-people smell, not as if someone had died in there, but more like camphor and dried paper and mothb.a.l.l.s. And far off, in with the mothb.a.l.l.s, was a hint of old flowers and jewelry and France.
"Hey, Mom"s perfume," I said.
"What?" said Lucy, who had wandered into the next room looking for a light switch.
"Don"t you smell Mom"s perfume?" I asked. It seemed unmistakable to me, even though she hardly ever wore that stuff because it was so ridiculously expensive. Our dad had given her a bottle of it on their wedding night, and they could never afford it again, so she wore it only once every three years or so when he had an actual job and they got to go to a c.o.c.ktail party. We would watch her put on her one black dress and the earrings with the sparkles and the smallest little dab of the most expensive perfume in the world. Who knows if it really was the most expensive in the world, I rather doubt it, but that"s what she told us. Anyway there it was in that huge apartment, in with a bunch of mothb.a.l.l.s, the smell of my mother when she was happy.
"What was the name of that stuff?" I asked, taking another step in. I loved the apartment already, so dark and big and strange, with my mother"s perfume hiding in it like a secret. "Mom"s perfume. Don"t you smell it?"
"No," said Alison, running her hand up the wall, like a blind person looking for a doorway. "I don"t."
Maybe I was making it up. There were a lot of smells in there in the dark. Mostly I think it smelled as if time had just stopped. And then Daniel found the light switch, and there was the smallest golden glow from high up near the ceiling. You could barely see anything because the room was so big, but what you could see was that time actually had stopped there. Between 1857, say, and 1960, things had happened, and then just like that, they had stopped happening.
The ceiling was high and far away, with shadowy coves around the corners, and right in the middle of this enormous lake of a ceiling was the strangest old chandelier, glued together out of what looked like iron filings, with things dripping and looping out of it. It must have been poorly wired, because it had only three fake-candle fifteen-watt bulbs, which is why it gave off so little light. And then there was this mustard-colored s.h.a.g carpeting, which I believe I have mentioned, and one lone chair in a corner. It was a pretty big chair, but seriously, it was one chair.
"What a dump!" Daniel whistled, low.
"Could we not p.i.s.s on this before we"ve even seen it, Daniel?" called Lucy from the kitchen. But she sounded friendly, not edgy. She was having a pretty good time, I think.
Alison was not. She kept pawing at the wall. "Is this the only light? There has to be another light switch somewhere," she said, all worried.
"Here, I"ve got one," said Lucy, throwing a switch in the kitchen. It didn"t really do much, because the kitchen was a whole separate room with a big fat wall in front of it, so there was just a little doorway-sized bit of light that didn"t make it very far into the living room, or parlor, or whatever you wanted to call this giant s.p.a.ce.
"Oh that"s a big help," said Alison.