Chapter 7 - The Box from Webster Avenue
At two o’clock that afternoon, a white Ford transit van with no commercial lettering pulled into the gravel courtyard of the house on Prairie Avenue.
Two men in gray work jackets unloaded four cardboard moving boxes, stacked them on the flagstones beside the kitchen door, and drove away without asking for a receipt.
Emily stood at the tall window of the second-floor gallery, looking down through the iron grilles.
She was wearing a pair of dark wool trousers that Rosa had found in a cedar chest on the third floor—they had belonged to Alexander’s younger sister, who had married a wine merchant in Piedmont ten years ago—and an oversized cream-colored fisherman’s sweater that reached nearly to her mid-thigh. Her hair was brushed, tied back with a black velvet ribbon she had discovered on the dressing table.
Her left wrist was still bound in unbleached linen, but the throbbing had stopped. In its place was a tight, clean stiffness that reminded her she was alive every time she lifted her arm.
Rosa appeared at the top of the stairs, wiping her hands on her apron.
"The things from the house," the old woman said, jerking her chin toward the courtyard. "Alexander said you must look inside. To see if the boy kept anything that belongs to your hands."
Emily walked down the back stairs—narrow, steep steps of unpolished pine that had been used by four generations of domestic staff.
The air in the scullery was warm, smelling of roasting garlic and chicken broth. The four cardboard boxes sat on the scrubbed pine table in the center of the room.
The first box was taped with heavy brown packaging paper.
Emily used a small kitchen paring knife Rosa handed her to slit the adhesive. She pulled back the cardboard flaps.
Her sketchbooks.
Twelve of them. Spiral-bound pads of heavy cotton rag paper, their covers stained with sepia ink, linseed oil, and Prussian blue watercolor. They were the drawings she had made during the three years of her marriage—not the landscape studies of the lake that Derek liked to frame for his partners' waiting rooms, but the secret, furious drawings she had done in the middle of the night while Derek was asleep: the corner of a molding that looked like an iron collar; the curve of a silver soup ladle that resembled a surgeon’s curette; the dead, empty eyes of the stone lions that guarded the entrance to the Art Institute.
Beneath the sketchbooks lay her printmaking tools: four wood-cutting gouges with cherrywood handles that her father had turned on his lathe in Joliet when she was sixteen; two leather brayers; and a small brass balance scale she used to weigh dry pigments.
Derek had hated those tools. They make the house smell like a cobbler’s shop, he had said once, tossing a jar of burnt umber into the kitchen trash. You’re thirty years old, Emily. Stop pretending you’re an apprentice.
In the second box was her winter coat—a simple, dark green wool coat from a department store in the Loop that she had bought with her own money before the wedding. It was clean, freshly pressed, smelling of the dry cleaner’s paper that wrapped the collar.
In the third box were three pairs of shoes: her painting clogs, a pair of worn leather boots with salt stains on the leather, and the flat velvet slippers she wore when her heels were too blistered from Derek’s dinner parties.
The fourth box was smaller.
It was an ordinary shoe box from an athletic store, taped around the edges with clear cellophane.
Emily cut the tape.
Inside lay her passport. Her birth certificate from Will County. A small manila envelope containing three hundred and forty dollars in twenty-dollar bills—the emergency money she had hidden inside the hollowed-out base of a clay sculpture in the attic four months ago.
And at the bottom of the box, resting on a sheet of tissue paper, was a single sheet of heavy legal bond paper.
It was a copy of a decree of absolute divorce, stamped with the purple seal of the Circuit Court of Cook County, Chancery Division.
The date was that morning: November 14.
Beneath the signature of the presiding judge—a name Emily recognized from the society pages as a trustee of the symphony—were two signatures.
The first was Derek’s.
The ink was black, but the stroke was erratic, broken, the tail of the k trailing off into a jagged, trembling line that showed the pen had been held by fingers that could barely pinch the barrel. In the margin beside his name was a tiny, brownish-red smudge—no larger than a dried lentil—that had been blotted with a corner of a handkerchief before the document was filed.
The second signature was hers.
Or rather, it was a power of attorney confirmation, signed by a court-appointed master in chancery whose office was located on the twelfth floor of the Daley Center.
The marriage of Derek Vance and Emily Carter was dead.
Not renegotiated. Not separated pending mediation. Dissolved. Erased from the public registers of the state of Illinois as cleanly as if the ceremony at Fourth Presbyterian Church had been an administrative error that had taken three years to audit.
Emily stood over the table.
She didn't cry. Her fingers, still slightly stained with the yellow wintergreen ointment, touched the purple seal of the court.
The paper was cool. It smelled of ozone from a high-speed laser printer and the damp leather of the runner’s bag.
"He signed it," she whispered.
Rosa, standing by the iron range with a wooden spoon in her hand, didn't turn around.
"Of course he signed it," the old woman said, stirring the pot with slow, rhythmic strokes. "A boy who hits a woman with his fingers is very brave until he sees a man who does not use fingers. When a man like Alexander asks for a name on a paper, people sign. Even the governor signs. If they do not sign, their mothers have to buy a black dress."
Emily looked at the small pile of twenty-dollar bills.
Three hundred and forty dollars.
It was enough for a Greyhound ticket to Minneapolis. It was enough for three nights in a motel near the rail yards where nobody asked for a credit card. It was enough to buy a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, and a pad of cheap newsprint paper from a five-and-dime.
She turned to Rosa.
"Where is Mr. Moretti?"
"In the stable," Rosa said.
May you like
"The stable?"
"Behind the garden," the woman said, waving her spoon toward the back scullery door. "He keeps two horses. Not the kind that run in the park with the little saddles. The big ones from the brewery. The ones with the hair around their feet. Go. He does not like to be watched when he is cleaning the stalls, but today he is in a bad temper because the wind is coming from the north."
