Chapter 7 - The Auction of the Linen
The grand ballroom of the St. Regis was silent at ten o’clock on Monday morning.
The four hundred chairs—gilt wood with ivory damask pads—had been stacked in columns of ten against the mirrored walls like miniature golden cages. The floral installations, twenty-two thousand dollars’ worth of white delphiniums, cascading hydrangeas, and trailing jasmine flown in from the Netherlands, were being dismantled by four men in gray jumpsuits who were tossing the wilting blossoms into fifty-gallon plastic trash barrels with dry, rustling thuds.
I stood by the bandstand, wearing my charcoal wool coat and leather gloves, watching the caterer check the silver inventory against a printed clipboard.
The service doors at the back of the hall swung open.
Eleanor Vance walked in.
She did not look like the woman who had organized the Greenwich historical pageant for fifteen consecutive years. She wore an old black cashmere overcoat that had lost two buttons at the hem, her hair pulled back into a hasty, unlacquered bun that showed the gray roots along her temples, her face pale, shiny, stripped of all cosmetics save for a smear of dry pink lipstick that had migrated into the vertical lines above her upper lip.
She was alone. Her husband had taken the early train back to Connecticut at dawn, ostensibly to "manage the opening of the branch offices," but actually to avoid being seen in the lobby by the partners from his law firm who lived on the upper floors.
She stopped ten feet from me, her hands tucked deep into the pockets of her coat, her shoulders rounded as if she were trying to fit her sixty-one-year-old frame into an overhead luggage compartment.
"Claire," she said.
Her voice had the cracked, brittle texture of an old dry-cleaning bag.
"The hotel manager called our house at seven," she said. "He told Arthur that if the balance on the master account isn't satisfied by noon, they are filing a commercial lien against our deposit account at the First National Bank."
I did not turn around immediately. I watched a florist’s assistant snip the wire holding a six-foot garland of ivy to the brass balcony rail: snip, drop, rustle.
"The balance is thirty-eight thousand, four hundred and twelve dollars, Eleanor," I said. "Including the twenty-eight percent service charge and the union overtime for the cleanup crew."
"You know we don't have that liquidity right now, Claire!" she hissed, taking two frantic steps forward, her low-heeled pumps clicking on the bare parquet floor. "Arthur’s capital contribution for the new fund was called on Friday! Everything we have is tied up in the third tranche of the real estate syndicate! Ethan... Ethan told me you had arranged for the billing to go through your father’s corporate account!"
I turned to face her.
The chandelier above us was off; the only light came from the gray morning rain beating against the five tall windows overlooking Fifty-Fifth Street.
"Ethan lied to you, Eleanor," I said.
My voice was very quiet, but it seemed to fill the four thousand square feet of the ballroom with the weight of an iron vault door closing.
"Ethan told you what you needed to hear so you would let him spend twenty-four thousand dollars on a bachelor dinner at Le Bernardin that he charged to his father’s commercial credit line," I continued, stepping toward her until the scent of her stale pastilles was clear in the damp air. "He told you that my father was going to guarantee his partnership draw in Greenwich. He told you that he was a master of the universe, and you believed him because you wanted to tell the women at the country club that your son had married forty million dollars of Old New York real estate."
"He loves you, Claire!" she cried, her voice cracking into that thin, pathetic screech that I had heard in room 412. "He made a mistake! A terrible, stupid, masculine mistake! Men like Ethan... they have pressures! They have anxieties! That girl... that Jessica... she’s a tramp! She’s been throwing herself at him since the engagement party in Southampton! She trapped him!"
I let out a short, dry laugh that had no humor in it at all.
"Jessica didn't trap him, Eleanor," I said. "Jessica was simply the first person who agreed to help him steal the silverware before the dinner was even over."
I pulled a white envelope from the pocket of my coat.
Inside was a copy of the cancellation notice that my father had filed with the surrogate court at eight-fifteen that morning, revoking the third codicil of his personal will—the codicil that would have created a six-million-dollar generation-skipping trust for any male issue born of the marriage between Claire Caldwell and Ethan Vance.
"The St. Regis will have their money, Eleanor," I said, holding the envelope out between us. "My father paid the master account twenty minutes ago."
Eleanor’s breath rushed out of her in a long, shuddering gasp of pure, biological relief. Her hand reached out, her fingers trembling, ready to take my sleeve in that ancient, manipulative gesture of female solidarity that she had used to survive three decades of her husband’s indiscretions.
"Oh, Claire... thank God... thank God Arthur didn't have to sell the club shares—"
"He paid it," I said, withdrawing the envelope two inches out of her reach, "under an assignment of claim."
She stopped. Her hand hovered in the empty air between us.
"What does that mean?"
"It means my father’s corporation now owns the debt," I told her, my eyes locking onto the small, dark pupils behind her reading glasses. "He is the primary creditor of Ethan Vance. And at twelve-fifteen, when the court clerk returns from lunch, our process server will serve Ethan with a demand for immediate payment under the summary judgment provisions of the New York Civil Practice Law."
"You... you would sue your own—"
"He isn't my anything, Eleanor," I said.
I dropped the envelope onto the small gilt table where the guest book had sat thirty-six hours ago, its cream silk ribbon now stained with the green water from an overturned vase.
"He’s just a thirty-one-year-old man who owes thirty-eight thousand dollars to an old judge who doesn't like bad paper," I said.
I walked past her, my heels making a clean, sharp rhythm against the parquet, toward the heavy double doors that led to the lobby.
May you like
She did not follow me.
She stood in the center of the four thousand square feet of empty floorboards, surrounded by the plastic trash barrels and the dead white delphiniums, looking down at the white envelope on the table as if it were an unexploded shell that had dropped through the ceiling of her life.
