Lush Lives, page 29
“Me, too,” Glory said, pushing Parkie’s hair behind her ear. She’d never cared much about hair color before Parkie. But there was something about that changeable, indeterminate hue—now copper, now brass, now a true burnt sienna of the intensity she’d only seen in tubes—that moved her every time.
“There, that’s much better,” came the singsong voice of their guest by way of announcing her descent. She seemed to be referring to her shower, but Glory wasn’t so sure.
Like a child caught red-handed, Glory snapped back into position at Parkie’s side.
“It really is pleasant up there,” Eleanor continued. “Your great-aunt had very fine taste—and such breadth to her interests. Quite cosmopolitan. At least that’s the impression I’m getting.”
“A woman ahead of her time,” Glory said. “And I thought she was trapped in the past.”
*
“Then he said something very like, ‘African American writing might be a subject you could teach here,’” said Eleanor, milking her delivery. “‘But for the Queen’s English and the literary canon, we have a number of tenured faculty who are simply better qualified.’”
She looked from Glory to Parkie for a theatrical pause before erupting into an extended belly laugh the likes of which neither of them had ever heard—or ever imagined hearing—coming from the normally mild-mannered Dr. Eleanor Kenniston.
“So what did you say?” Glory asked, her eyes dancing as much from the cocktails as the fun they’d been having since Eleanor joined them in the living room—she and Parkie on the sofa and Eleanor in the club chair.
“Dr. K. unplugged,” she had whispered to Parkie at one point.
“Oh, I may have said, ‘I’m not African American. I’m from Barbados. We learned English from the queen herself. Does that qualify me to make half a white woman’s salary at your institution?’”
She took a small sip of her old-fashioned.
“Things like that happened all the time when I first came to the States. I expected it because I was one of the darker ones in my family. A true embarrassment to my own great-aunts. They looked white to some of the white people there. Especially the tourists.”
Parkie poured more water from the pitcher into Eleanor’s glass and gave the last of it to Glory.
Eleanor nodded and smiled in response, suddenly looking, Glory thought, more introspective than before. If she was feeling melancholic, there was good reason for it, several reasons, in fact.
Eleanor looked to Glory. “So. Miss de Groot and I are to be the public face of the estate of Lucille Hopkins. I suppose Madeline gave us both the same marching orders. Even before she called me on the carpet I’d been thinking how much I despise that woman. For as long as I’ve known Cuthbert’s would be my last act, I’ve managed to put her life beyond the firm in a box. Out of sight, out of mind. Her friends, her hobbies. Even her politics. I’m an incredible coward, really. It’s not as if once I’d made something of a name for myself, I couldn’t have found another position. I’ve simply gotten comfortable with my head in the sand.”
“We all have to make compromises,” Glory said. “I mean, if we were only willing to work for good people and good companies, most of us wouldn’t have jobs.”
“I’ve read myself that line for thirty years,” Eleanor said. “It may even be true. And it’s easy for me to say this now, I realize. But if good people continue to do what bad people ask of them, I simply cannot see things changing. Not fast enough to make a difference for your generation. We make them richer and more powerful, and they use that to take what they want from us. They give us a carrot or a lump of sugar every now and again—or kick us when we’re down—because they know we need them, or we think we do, to survive. In the beginning I thought, Who else is going to hire a Barbadian immigrant, verily a Black widow, for her expertise in archival research and rare British books?”
Eleanor turned to face Parkie. “And you, Miss de Groot? What did you think?”
Parkie sighed. “I thought, Who else is going to hire someone disabled and a woman and young—who needs a cane to go anywhere—for a public-facing job with a ton of travel?” Parkie said. “And then I thought, I’m so lucky to get this job. I’ll do whatever she wants. Whatever it takes.”
Eleanor nodded. “And you, Gloria Hopkins, what did you think?” she asked.
Glory clinked the ice in her drink, staring into the tumbler as she formulated an answer. “I thought,” she began slowly. Why was it so difficult to say what was in her head? “I thought, A show at Sarkisian will mean that I’m a real artist. And that kind of acceptance, that kind of outside approval, is the most important thing—it’s always been the most important thing to me. To my family. The #MeToo stories and price fixing and tokenism can’t hurt me because I’m smart. They’re giving me exactly what I want. I thought, I’ll finally be in control.”
Even to Glory’s own ears, the curt laugh that came out of her sounded cynical. But when she raised her glass, Eleanor and Parkie raised theirs back with similarly wry expressions.
“To falling scales,” Glory toasted.
“You are going to be a star,” Parkie said. “Just not their star. You will be in control.”
“Honestly, it’s like Eleanor said, time to admit my own place in all this. I don’t want to keep compromising. Not in this house or anywhere else. I owe that much to Lucille.”
“Speaking of dear Lucille,” Eleanor said. “It sounds like you’ve both made considerable headway with the identifications. Parkie linked the descriptions of the book’s brownstone to this one, and there’s plenty else to suggest that Nurse Lily is the fictional alter ego of Nurse Nella, who appears to have spent a good portion of her later years in these very rooms.”
“She never moved here though, did she?” said Glory.
“No,” Parkie said. “She kept her apartment downtown, which was closer to the hospital. Living alone might have stopped her from being involved in any kind of scandal associated with the Colonel and Rita. Especially during the McCarthy era.”
Parkie had begun to refer to the Lucille character in the novella, a decorated Army officer (who was later unveiled as Rita’s mysterious “enlisted friend”), as “the Colonel.” She thought it a delightfully butch nickname.
“The Colonel and Rita. You mean Lou and Rosalind,” Glory said. “Can you imagine the kind of courage it took to carry on basically a polyamorous relationship in the forties?”
“And fifties. And early sixties,” Parkie added.
Eleanor looked at them.
“Oh,” Glory said. “Sorry, Eleanor. That’s what they call nonmonogamous . . .”
Eleanor cleared her throat conspicuously. “Yes, Gloria. I am familiar with the term. And I know exactly what it means, if you can believe it. But indeed, if the novel is autobiographical, the narrative mirrors the love affair between distinguished veteran and musician Lucille Hopkins, advocate for nurse’s rights, and St. Louis publishing heiress Rosalind Westerly—and the Nella Larsen. Well. It’s almost too incredible, isn’t it?”
“Beyond incredible. And the idea that Madeline will probably funnel at least part of the money she makes from selling the manuscript into the Flagg campaign makes me physically ill,” Parkie said. “But technically, Glory’s under contract. And even if she took the manuscript to another house and I quit my job and you retired early, nobody is going to publicize this like Madeline, now that she’s worried about the auction house’s rep. And nobody could bring it to market as quickly. Nor would I put it past Madeline to publicly sabotage the manuscript if it were out of her hands by questioning the attribution or undermining Eleanor. Or me.”
“Just so,” Eleanor said. “Which is why I think we give Madeline every assurance that we’ve accepted her proposition.”
*
Later that night as they lay in bed, Glory came clean. “I’m worried,” she said to Parkie, who was scrolling through an influx of messages.
Parkie put her phone down and drew Glory in, putting her arm around her.
“What about?”
“A couple of months ago I got an envelope from Lucille’s lawyer. I knew I should have opened it but I didn’t. Until last week.”
“And?”
“Property taxes. Like fifty thousand in property taxes. Due in four months. Which, I know is nothing for the city. This place is probably worth a couple million, I guess. But I don’t have anything close to fifty grand. It’s not tomorrow, but that due date will be here before I know it. If I had shown with Sarkisian, the timing would have been great. The money would have been great. Eleanor’s idea makes sense, I guess. But any plan that hinges on Manya Shah and perfect timing makes me nervous. Do you honestly really truly think it will work?”
“I think it has to,” Parkie said. “Cutting myself off from the trust on Christmas seems like a pretty bad idea to me right about now, too. Ditto the four shots of Patron I did before I made the call. But I’m done with Greenwich. If my parents want to see me, they can get their asses down to Harlem.”
Glory kissed Parkie on the little V of naked skin not covered by her own old T-shirt.
“I know that’s right,” she said.
Chapter 36
Three weeks later, Parkie and Glory waited together in the brownstone’s chilly entry. It was a Saturday morning in late February, and it had snowed lightly the night before. The auction was today. Cuthbert’s Americana sale would start in just a few hours, at noon, and Parkie had to get there early to troubleshoot and generally be on hand to take inquiries. Glory had made them a light breakfast, but Parkie’s normally cast-iron stomach was roiling. She already regretted the second pour-over.
“You’re pale today, my love. Paler than usual,” Glory said, slipping her arm around Parkie’s waist with one of her serious smiles. She kissed Parkie’s cheek. “Don’t worry. It’s going to be all right. And you look great, baby.”
Parkie didn’t feel great. But Glory’s confidence helped her step into the cold with what was at least a measure of courage. She was wearing a simple gray skirt suit, albeit the usual Parisian make, and the icy air instantly shot through the microfibers of her stockings. All it took was the short trip from stoop to car and she was frozen to the core.
So many things could go wrong in the next few hours. Parkie wished she could simply fast forward to the end of the day when, come what may, she and Glory would be together again in the brownstone to process what the fates had allowed.
Cuthbert’s was, as usual on a sale day, as frenzied as the backstage of a theater on opening night. The air inside the building was always charged before an auction, and while today’s sale was a rather uninspired one even by Cuthbert’s standards, a current of expectancy had steadily built around what Madeline had hideously dubbed “Nella’s notorious novelette.” In the past few days, interest in the lot had grown exponentially and there were now, at 11 a.m., a handful of respectable absentee bids, which meant, to Parkie’s great relief, enough potential buyers believed it to be what Eleanor said it was.
The manuscript was number 326 in a sale of 353 lots. It wouldn’t come up—or need to be retrieved—for quite some time. Until the auctioneer approached lot number 300, the manuscript was to stay in Eleanor’s office, where it had been stored (it was assumed) since the preview. In truth, the “scrapbook” had been kept most recently at Eleanor’s—thence to Glory’s after the eviction—though Eleanor had returned it to the old safe behind her desk that morning. Parkie now had the little vault’s combination, just in case Eleanor couldn’t get back there at the appointed time.
Show-woman and businesswoman that she was, Madeline liked to start every sale by taking the podium at her eponymous auction house, asserting the connection like an evil mermaid affixed to the prow of her ship. In a field dominated by jokey and charming men, she had an uncharacteristically solemn but strangely hypnotic selling style. Her auctioneering was full of pregnant, frozen-featured pauses and two-fingered hand gestures suspended in the air. Nobody would deny that Madeline’s persona lent importance and drama to whatever came under her purview. She generally slogged through the first fifty lots before handing subsequent sections, where less interesting and often lower-dollar lots were stashed, to a younger, inevitably male protégé.
And so it was today, just as Parkie had predicted.
From the beginning, Parkie, too, had wanted to be an auctioneer; several of the junior specialists went this route in hopes of becoming popular Cuthbert’s—and later Sotheby’s or Christie’s—personalities. But a few months after she’d started, Armand let her know, in the gentlest terms, that Madeline required Cuthbert auctioneers to stand for the duration of their time at the podium; she wouldn’t want Parkie to have to “endure” that. Looking back, Parkie couldn’t believe she’d accepted Madeline’s unashamed, not to mention illegal, decision on the matter. But she had.
Although Madeline had seemed to be avoiding Parkie of late, today she had ordered her to be visible on the floor for the length of the sale. “For all your adoring Gazette fans,” she’d said. Eleanor was likewise told to stay near the dais, or on the phone with bidders who couldn’t be in the sale room or didn’t want their identities known. Parkie would be handling phone bids, too.
On the off chance something went wrong with the plan, or someone from the press figured out who she was, Glory wouldn’t be at the auction. Parkie had been covertly texting her from the moment she got in, though. She would give Glory a play-by-play in real time when it mattered.
“Next up, lot two hundred twenty-six, a letter from founding father Thomas Jefferson requesting a cake recipe from Paris,” said the current auctioneer. His name was Cramer Lyddell and he was a slender New Yorker in his forties with a long, waxen face, wavy hair, and wire-rimmed glasses. Given the audience, he was the perfect choice to move rapidly but genially through the various Federalist pamphlets and constitutional amendments. With a hundred lots to go, Parkie would have to closely monitor Cramer’s pace—there were only a few standout items likely to generate the kind of tennis match that could slow him down.
Thirty minutes later, when her phone bidder dropped out, Parkie scanned the room for Madeline, who, happily, was nowhere to be found. Then again, neither was Eleanor, though this was not what they’d agreed on. Cramer was already pushing lot 275. At this rate it would be forty-five minutes or less until the manuscript came up.
Parkie slipped a scrap of paper with “bathroom break” written on it to one of her even more junior colleagues, who gave her a pitying look. She rose to make her way behind the long table of people on the phones, overhearing Nicholas as he flirted unabashedly with one of his bidders.
The hallways were quiet except for intermittent electronic ringing in the empty offices—people always called whoever they knew on staff for unofficial intelligence during a sale. Eleanor had correctly anticipated that Parkie wouldn’t have much time, and she was surprised to find that while the door to Kenniston’s office had been left ajar for her, the overhead lights were off. When Parkie flipped them on, the first thing she noticed was the door to the little safe behind the desk. It was wide open. And the manuscript was gone.
“There you are, Parkie,” said the last voice in the world she wanted to hear.
She turned around to see Madeline in the doorway, grinning one of her awful grins. “Are you looking for what I’m looking for? Listen to this one. Some idiot—who will no longer work here on Monday, I guarantee—seems to have sent the manuscript up to cold storage. Can you imagine? We’ve got to show it to sell it. Be a dear and help me find it, will you? I’ve never actually seen the thing. If we don’t get it down here right away, Cramer may have to spell me when it comes up.”
Parkie was speechless. And furious. And very, very freaked out. But what could she possibly say?
There was no universe in which what Madeline was telling her was true. But if there had been, Parkie would have had no excuse not to do as she said. She couldn’t exactly tell her employer that this really sucked because she and Eleanor were planning to pull the manuscript from the sale at the last possible minute—while Madeline was on the podium with all eyes on her, unable to protest—and that this newly made wrinkle in their blueprint was most unwelcome. You had to have it to pull it.
“Sure, Madeline, of course,” Parkie said. “Just let me text Dr. K. in case she needs me. I’ll go get Armand’s cold storage key from my desk.”
“No need,” Madeline said, her serpentine eyes flickering. “I have my own key. And Eleanor will be fine. She’s on the phones anyway, so hers should be off. Better be. Now come.”
This elevator ride was even less friendly than their last one, at the fucked-up preview for the Flagg sale. What goes up, Parkie thought, preparing to elude Madeline as soon as possible. Once she determined Lucille’s property was safe, she would find a way to outmaneuver her.
In a way, they already had. There was a built-in plan B. Because, no matter what her boss was up to, with all the interest so far, the manuscript would almost certainly sell above estimate. There might even be a bidding war. Odds were, if it came up, the Larsen manuscript would end up with one of the competing institutional buyers—Parkie hoped the Schomburg had the funds. That outcome hadn’t sounded bad to Glory, until Eleanor and Parkie reminded her that as long as the manuscript was sold at a Cuthbert’s auction, Madeline would make a healthy commission on both ends—a percentage from the buyer and from the seller. Money made on the resistant backs of Black women, as Eleanor had put it, since she now considered herself to be one of them. Plan A, however, was to sell the novella privately themselves after the auction when the interested buyers would be known to them, and the manuscript had been properly vetted by real experts. If Madeline balked, Parkie would keep blowing her whistle while Eleanor and Glory laughed all the way to the bank.
