The Recycled Citizen (16 page)

“And you do want a town house?”

“I’d like something. There are going to be crises, you know, with all these elderly relatives, and it will be easier to cope from here. And you need a place to stay overnight in Boston, darling. You can’t be hopping off a plane from Nairobi in the middle of the night and driving all the way up the North Shore.”

“How often do I hop off a plane from Nairobi?”

“Well, Antwerp or Seattle or wherever. If we didn’t have the house, we’d have to rent another apartment or put you up at hotels. Either of those would probably average out to more than the upkeep of the house, especially if Brooks is willing to pay something toward it. Besides, our children may want the house some day.”

“Yes dear.” Max tucked Sarah into the car rather more carefully than if she were a particularly rare piece of early Chinese porcelain, and they were off.

The distance to Dolph’s warehouse was not great, but the number of one-way streets and panicked wrong-way drivers from out of state made getting there quite an adventure. Perseverance and dauntless courage brought them to their goal, where they were of course unable to find a parking space and had to content themselves with driving slowly past the building.

The warehouse wasn’t much to see, merely a four-story oblong of red brick with dirty windows and a blacktopped parking lot that must have been sadly inadequate for the needs of the former workers. The two interesting points about the place were that it faced on the harbor and that it was flanked by two other former warehouses that had, by ingenious architectural alterations, been turned into handsome and no doubt expensive condominiums for the upwardly mobile.

“This is fascinating,” said Sarah. “Aren’t you amazed at what they’ve done, Max? Dolph and Mary won’t go in for all those fancy ins and outs, naturally, but at least they can rip out that horrid asphalt and make a pleasant little garden for the lodgers to sit in and look at the harbor, since none of them will have cars. It’s not too far from shopping and the subway, and having those condominiums for neighbors will be an advantage, shouldn’t you think? Security must be fairly tight, and the senior citizens won’t always be getting mugged.” -

“Not so many muggings, maybe, but plenty of cold-shoulderings,” said Max. “Can you picture how the yuppies who’ve gone in hock for a few hundred thousand to buy these places are going to feel about a procession of Joans and Annies traipsing in and out with their paper bags?”

“Why should they mind? What makes a city interesting is having so many different types of people all mixed in together.”

“Yes dear.”

For a while Max had to concentrate on getting away from the waterfront and headed toward Brookline, so the few remarks he made were in reference to other drivers and sometimes discourteous. When they were in the clear, he reverted to the subject that was absorbing them both.

“It’s also interesting that Bill Jones ran into Ted Ashe, whose real name may or may not be Wilbraham Winchell, at the rich real estatenik’s.”

“Whose name is Wilton-Rugge, which is the name of Eugene Porter-Smith’s fiancée, whose father is in real estate,” Sarah added. “Now that we’ve seen where Dolph’s warehouse is, I suppose we ought to be asking ourselves why Eugene took his sudden urge to help at the center. He’s never before shown an iota of interest in any kind of social work that I know of, unless you count tossing quarters to street musicians in front of coffeehouses.”

“I’m wondering if by any chance Wilton-Rugge’s the developer in any of those condos,” said Max.

“It shouldn’t be hard to find out, should it?”

“Not unless he’s hiding behind another blind trust like the Thanatopsis gang. I suppose we could ply the daughter with champagne when she shows up for the auction and see if we can get any information out of her.”

That got them started on the auction itself, then they got to Dolph’s and there was nothing else they could talk about. Dolph and Mary led them through more rooms than Sarah had realized the house possessed. Most of them hadn’t been in use for decades. All were crammed with enough stuff to keep the Morgan Memorial going for months.

They found Victoriana, plenty of Art Nouveau and Art Deco and a vast lot of items that could charitably be called collectibles. Max set aside the best of these for one of the big auction houses. The next best, the not so great and the mildly amusing were carried down to the ballroom.

Harry Burr had come out on the
T
to help the two yardmen, Walter and George, with the fetching and carrying. Dressed in clean though shabby overalls and flannel shirt with a nylon windbreaker, he didn’t look like either a preacher or a bartender, just an elderly man who’d probably had a fairly tough life and was glad now to have something useful to do.

Before long, they were all at it, even Henrietta the maid and Genevieve the cook. Sarah was delegated to stay down in the vast ballroom that occupied one whole wing of the house, ordering the distribution of the merchandise so they wouldn’t have a big pile to untangle later. Another of her jobs was sorting the more deplorable objects into lots of a few pieces, with one fairly desirable thing stuck in for bait.

She had the inspiration of using SCRC tote bags to pack these lots in, persuading Dolph that they’d be good advertising for the fund drive and congratulating herself that she was getting rid of the dangerous carryalls in a worthy cause. It wasn’t likely the sort of people who were coming to the auction would go trailing the bags around Boston afterward, and even less likely they’d be picking up Graperoola cans. Besides, there weren’t anywhere near enough empty boxes in the house, and she was not about to go panhandling around the shops for odd cartons to put the lots in.

By the time they’d knocked off for lunch—Max and Sarah in the breakfast room with Dolph and Mary, and Harry Burr in the kitchen with Walter, George, Henrietta and Genevieve by his own choice—they already had the makings of a pretty good auction. At Teatime they’d just about filled one end of the ballroom and still had a couple of rooms to sort through.

“What amazes me is that the house looks just as furnished now as it did when we started,” said Mary, “only better because you’re not falling over a beaded footstool every step you take.”

“Don’t knock those beaded footstools,” said Max. “You ought to do fairly well with them. Victorian beadwork’s popular these days.”

“Not with me,” growled Dolph, peering into his glass to see if there might be some other salable article lurking behind the ice cubes, for tea in the Kelling family did not necessarily always mean tea. “I’ve loathed the confounded things ever since I can remember. How many did we bring down, for God’s sake?”

“Eight beaded so far,” said Sarah, who’d been trying to keep an inventory list of the more describable objects. “We also have the needlepoint footstools, the turkey work footstools, the tooled leather footstools, the tapestry footstools, the brocaded footstools with the fringe around them, not to mention the stuffed hassocks, of which—”

“Blast it, Sarah, we’ve already broken our backs lugging the things; we don’t have to wear out our eardrums hearing about them. I must say I was surprised, though, to discover that secret compartment in the hassock we took from Uncle Fred’s dressing room.”

“With all those naughty French magazines hidden in it. He really was a sanctimonious old goat, you know, Dolph.” Sarah glanced behind her half fearfully, as if her impiety might bring a spectral voice thundering out of the woodwork: “Little Sarah Kelling, go stand in the corner!”

All she heard, though, was Mary saying, “You’ll stay to dinner, of course.”

“Oh, we couldn’t,” Sarah protested. “Genevieve must be exhausted.”

“She says she’s fine. The staff are always complaining that we don’t keep things humming the way his aunt and uncle used to. It is quiet for them, I’m sure with us in at the center so much. Anyway, Genevieve’s got a ham and a crock of beans in the oven, and she’s baked a couple of her scrumptious deep-dish apple pies. For goodness sake stay and eat so her feelings won’t be hurt. I don’t want my cook mad at me with all that slew of people descending on us Saturday night.”

“Have you any idea how many so far?”

Sarah had put “RSVP” on her invitations, with little hope that anybody would bother. However, people were calling. They’d got twenty-one acceptances at the center. Osmond Loveday also reported thirty-six irate calls from people demanding to know why the auction had been scheduled at such short notice and insisting it be put off to suit their convenience.

Here at the house, Henrietta had taken down forty-three acceptances, seventeen regrets, and only one complaint. That was from the old crank down the road who wanted the Kellings to know what would happen to any car caught blocking his driveway. Henrietta had assured him there’d be guards posted to supervise the parking. He’d threatened dire consequences to any guard caught trespassing on his property and slammed down the phone. They had every confidence he’d be calling again as soon as he thought of something else to fuss about.

They wouldn’t worry about the crank. Sarah was gratified by the figures. Henrietta’s responses had been mostly from people in the area, who’d naturally be quickest and most punctilious about answering. They’d come and bring their friends, like as not. So far the crowd was shaping up just about the way she’d hoped.

The ballroom could easily handle two hundred chairs, more in a pinch. Some buyers would leave early, some would come late. They needn’t worry about fire hazards with French doors on three sides and plenty of windows. The big triple doors at the end that connected to the main house could be opened and the crowd allowed to spill over into the huge drawing room and the dining room beyond, where the champagne would be set out and the actors moving among the patrons with their trays of refreshment. It was a safe bet a good many, notably the husbands, would be more interested in the champagne and the young actresses in their flapper frocks than in the bidding.

Except for the foyer and the downstairs lavatories, the rest of the rooms would be shut off. The house had been laid out for just such grand-scale affairs as this, though none had been held for a long time. It was ironic that Dolph and Mary had finally got around to using the place as it was meant to be used, not for a grand ball or a formal reception but to clear out some of its overflow in preparation for a time when it might never be used again.

They must, Sarah thought, give at least one really dazzling waltz evening here for the benefit of the fund drive. How Theonia would love that! She’d looked positively queenly here the other night, sitting in the dining room with the candles and flowers on the table in front of her and all Great-aunt Matilda’s polished silver gleaming on the sideboard behind her.

Later, back in the library on Tulip Street, Theonia had seemed a different kind of queen. She should have had violins wailing and horses stamping and a different kind of firelight casting wild gleams and shadows on her crimson gown as she hurled a perfectly good piece of antique Canton ware into the flames and sailed off into the darkness without a word of explanation.

Theonia wasn’t crazy or anything like it. She’d had a mad life, but she’d handled it sanely enough. How many orphans, on their own at thirteen without a cent or a whole pair of shoes, in a world whose ways they’d never had a chance to learn, would have managed as well as she? She’d kept herself as respectable as circumstances allowed, educated herself, acquired the social graces and the appearance of the lady she longed to be and in fact always had been, though nobody had ever told her so.

However you looked at her, Theonia was an admirable person and the last in the world to smash a family heirloom on a whim. Then why had she broken that cup?

There were things one didn’t ask. If Theonia wanted to, she’d explain sooner or later. Sarah shook her head and went back to bagging up knickknacks.

Genevieve’s dinner was good, but by the time it was over they were all too tired to sit chatting. “Come on, Sarah,” said Max, “let’s get the kid to bed. Where’s Harry Burr, Dolph? I’ll be glad to give him a ride back to Boston.”

“I’ll go find him,” said Mary, but she came back alone. Harry had eaten his supper in the kitchen, then said he had to get back because he’d promised to be somewhere. George had run him down to Chestnut Hill Station.

Sarah wondered if Harry was bartending again tonight at the Broken Zipper. Tuesday he’d preached at Chet Arthur’s funeral. People really did lead awfully strange lives.

O
NE OF THE FINDS
Max had set aside for the big auctioneers was a small, quiet landscape Dolph had picked off a wall in one of the never-used bedrooms. Neither Uncle Fred nor Aunt Matilda had ever liked it much, he said. Frederick Kelling’s taste had run to battle scenes and enlarged photographs of himself having his hand shaken by persons of note. His wife had preferred huge, dark oil paintings of large, ferocious animals devouring each other.

Max, on the other hand, had liked the landscape well enough to take it home for a better look. While Sarah was getting ready for bed he gave the surface a gentle preliminary cleaning and went over it inch by inch with a jeweler’s loupe. The next morning, even before he started telephoning Marseilles, he showed Sarah what he’d found.

“George Inness? Max, how lovely. Is it authentic, do you think?”

“As far as I can tell, but I’m not an authority on the American school. If you have nothing better to do this morning, I thought you might like to take it over to the museum and see what they have to say.”

“I’d adore to, but wouldn’t you rather go yourself?”

“Somebody’s got to mind the store.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? That you have bigger fish to fry, I suppose. What are you going to do?”

“Right now I’m going to make some phone calls.”

“As when were you ever not? All right, dear, I’ll go. What if they want to keep the painting?”

“If it’s for study, get a receipt. If it’s for their collection, request a check. And look, Sarah, don’t go down in the subway. Don’t go anywhere by yourself. Take a cab from the house. Wrap the painting in a towel or something and put it in a bag.”