Generous Death

  But I never got to finish the thought …

  We were abruptly interrupted by a small, noisy, elderly mob. Three of my favorite Foundation clients had converged upon us.

  “Hello, children!” chirped Minnie “HaHa” Mimbs.

  Hands were shaken, cheeks were kissed and greetings were exchanged all around. With Minnie were her old pals, Moshe Cohen and Mrs. Charles Withers Hatch. Not one of the three was younger than eighty and none of them stood any higher than Michael’s shoulder or my chin.

  The blue-gray of Minnie’s hair perfectly matched the blue-gray of her Chanel suit, which I personally knew to have been designed by Coco herself—many years ago. Seeing her thus, I knew Minnie had dressed conservatively in deference to the solemnity of the occasion. Minnie likes to dye her hair to match her clothes, and since her favorite colors are orange and green, she looks pretty wonderful sometimes. She can get away with it, of course; the old can do as they damn well please if they have the money. Minnie had it in spades and real estate, and what she damn well pleased to do with it was give it away. I knew that when she died she’d be leaving half a million to her Episcopal church and another half to The Foundation, mainly for the benefit of the Martha Paul.

  She smiled gaily at us.

  “Isn’t this nice?” she said. “Arnie would be so pleased to see everybody here, give or take a wife, perhaps. I do just adore weddings and funerals.”

  “And christenings!” This from Mrs. Charles Withers Hatch, who was of the old school and always used her husband’s name. Mrs. Hatch always told me that if I were a “good girl” she’d leave “a little something” to The Foundation, though I knew her first love was the Welcome Home for Girls. I had to promise, she said, to put the money to “good Christian use.” Being of a handy ecumenical bent, I could easily agree to the terms. Just as I could agree to promise Moshe Cohen that most of the money he gave to The Foundation would be channeled to the Jewish causes he so passionately supported. He was also the financial force behind our sparkling new civic theater, due to open Friday night.

  Moshe made himself known from beside Michael’s left shoulder, or rather, below his shoulder. “Veddings, christenings,” he said disdainfully to the ladies. “Give me a good bar mitzvah any time!” He’d never worked up the nerve for the big trip to Israel, so at eighty-two years of age, he had settled for an ersatz Yiddish accent. It drove his old friends crazy.

  “What do you know from bar mitzvah, you old fool?” demanded Minnie. She and Moshe had dated back in the ’20’s and she felt she had a proprietary right to treat him with affectionate contempt. “You haven’t seen the inside of a synagogue since the Six Day War.”

  “So maybe I pray at home and vear a skullcap to bed, so how should you know about Jewish?” He winked at Michael and me. “They try to convert me, these two. For more years than I care to tell you, they try. They think maybe I should lead the local Jews for Jesus? I tell them, I say, Minnie HaHa and Mrs. Charles Vithers Hatch, vonce a Jew, always a Jew.”

  “Oy vey,” said the very Protestant Mrs. Hatch. “Take us home, please, Moshe.”

  “Goodbye, children,” chirped Minnie, with a wave of both of her gloved hands. “You look lovely, my dears.”

  And so, without Michael or me having contributed more than “hello” to their slightly hysterical conversation, off they went in search of Moshe’s chauffeur.

  Michael and I grinned at each other.

  “Do you want to go to the cocktail party at the club before the opening?” he asked, speaking of the gala premiere of Moshe’s new theater.

  “Not particularly. You go without me if you want to, all right?”

  “I think I will. Then I’ll drive by and pick you up on the way to the theater.”

  “Fine, I’ll see you Friday night then. Right now, I think I’d better go introduce myself to Arnie’s daughter.”

  “I met her a few minutes ago.”

  “And?”

  “She likes me.”

  I laughed—absently, probably—and turned toward the end of the room I’d been avoiding. There they waited: Arnie and the daughter for whom he had betrayed his promises to The Foundation and the Martha Paul.’

  As I worked my way along the edge of the quiet crowd, I purposely avoided the eager glances that Simon Church directed my way. Simon, the director of the museum, would want to discuss Arnie’s plans for the Chinese galleries. I couldn’t bear to tell him there weren’t going to be any plans.

  Ginger Culverson glanced up when I offered my name to her. She looked as if it had rung a bell whose tune she couldn’t quite recall.

  “Who are you?” she said, but it wasn’t rude, not like the same question would have sounded coming from her mother or brother, who would have italicized the are.

  “I was a friend of your father’s.” The going was awkward from there. “I’m the director of The Port Frederick Civic Foundation, which is involved in some charitable activities that your dad was interested in. He and I worked together on some, uh, projects,” I finished lamely. Did she know that her inheritance had scuttled those “projects” supposedly so dear to her daddy’s heart?

  The intelligent eyes she had inherited from him lit up her sad round face.

  “Oh yes, The Foundation. Jennifer Cain. Yes, I’ve heard a lot about you.” And then she giggled. The laughter escaped from her mouth like a burp and she put up a hand to cover it. But it was too late. Behind her hand, the wide mouth like her father’s curled up in the familiar and sweet little smile.

  I grinned back at her.

  “I’ll bet you have.” I made a quick decision. “You wouldn’t want to go get a drink with me, would you? Or a cup of coffee? It’s been a long day and I don’t know about you, but I’ve had it.”

  She gathered her purse and used tissues and stood. The top of her head came just to the bottom of my nose, as her father’s had. “Let’s get the hell out of Dodge,” she said.

  We settled into a cozy table at the Buoy and wrapped our hands around toasty glasses of hot buttered rum. As usual, the ancient bar was packed with a mixed crowd. In the darkest corner were the local fishermen, drinking late because the weather was too foul for work. Upright and chic at the long bar were the urban mariners in their immaculate pea coats and pipes, hustling the women who hustled them. I waved to a few local shopkeepers and smiled encouragingly at the few tourists who were bold enough to brave our February.

  Like an English pub, the Buoy is everybody’s favorite haunt, young and old, and has been for more than a century. The latest generation of owners stood behind the bar, mixing drinks and jokes and goodwill, just as their great-great-great-grandparents had.

  Ginger had remembered the Buoy from her childhood and requested it. I was glad to oblige.

  “I should have known I’d like you,” she said and smiled, “just from all the nasty things my family had to say about you and that Foundation. I do remember that much about them—they’re perfect judges of character in reverse.”

  “I didn’t think I’d like you either.”

  “Because of how my father described me? I was the ungrateful brat, right? The kid who had everything and threw it all away.”

  “Is it true? Were you?”

  “Sure. There was much to be ungrateful for and a lot of baggage to throw away. But I’ll tell you something, Jenny, I’m a pack rat. I’d never throw away anything that was worth a damn.”

  Including your father? I didn’t voice the question, but it hung in the air between us.

  “My father…” The brown eyes like his did not fill with tears or regret. “My father just didn’t have time to raise millions and kids, too.”

  “Evidently he loved you.”

  “Love or remorse, it looks that way, doesn’t it? I’m told he was a lovable man, but I don’t remember that quality about him. Actually, I don’t remember much about him at all. He only seemed very important. Busy. Stem.”

  I could understand how he might have appeared thus to a child. Hi
s world revolved around profits and losses, taxes and capital gains. They taught his language at Pennsylvania where I got my M.B.A., but not at nursery school.

  I ventured the hesitant opinion that she might have grown to like him once she became an adult.

  “You think so? Have you ever known a child who forgave his parents for failing him? Children are an unforgiving lot, I think. I know I am.” She said it with cold finality, “And no amount of money will change that. You probably won’t believe this, but I don’t even want it.”

  I didn’t believe it. But I could see that Arnie’s final “buy” was a loser. He wasn’t going to get back a return of love on his investment of $8 million. I had a mean, Irreverent moment of thinking how much he could have bought with that money if he’d left his original will alone: fabulous, rare pieces for the Chinese galleries; funds to exhibit and maintain them forever; an assistant museum director to relieve Simon Church of too much responsibility; and more. Only a few of us knew just how much more had been promised under the old and now useless will.

  I looked at Ginger Culverson and realized how incredibly rich she was very shortly going to be.

  “Ginger” I said impulsively, “how do you feel about ancient Chinese furniture?”

  She looked bewildered for a moment. Then the light dawned and she began to laugh that rich, infectious laugh of her father’s.

  “Oh, Jenny,” she said, and finally there were tears, but tears of sympathetic laughter. “Oh God, Jenny, I’m just sorry as hell.”

  I was laughing too by that time. And damn near crying.

  Chapter 4

  I broke the news to my staff the next morning, the day of Arnie’s funeral. They were not stoic.

  “Arnie did what?” said Marv Lastelic, the controller.

  “How could he promise us everything and give us nothing?” cried Faye Basil, my secretary.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” said Derek Jones, my assistant director. “What a lowdown miserable thing to do.”

  I let them get it out of their systems. After all, they’d been working hard on Arnie’s plans; he’d led them down the same fantastical garden path that had ended in a brick wall for me. They were disappointed, flabbergasted, angry. It was important for them to say so, and to me.

  “Didn’t you have a clue?” they finally asked suspiciously.

  “No.” I threw it back at them. “Did you?”

  They admitted to complete surprise.

  “Although,” Derek mused, “he was sure acting funny the last couple of days. Maybe he had a guilty conscience, huh? Maybe he didn’t have the courage to give us the bad news.”

  “Well, you’d have thought he’d at least leave us a note!” Faye said indignantly. “Suicides are supposed to leave notes, for heaven’s sake.”

  “My gosh, all those financial statements and meetings and …” Marvin was pale at the memory of the hours he’d devoted to Arnie’s army of lawyers and accountants. “Jenny, do you realize what this does to our projections? Do you know what it will do to the museum budget? Do you realize how it will affect our net worth and earnings?”

  “I know.” Dear God, how well I knew.

  “So when are you going to break the news to the trustees?” Derek murmured, going straight to the most intimidating point of all. “And how?”

  “Today,” I said weakly. “I’ve called an emergency meeting for lunch.” But I didn’t have an answer to Derek’s second question. I didn’t know how I would tell the five trustees of The Foundation that the $8 million feast over which they’d been licking their lips had just been cooked and served to another customer.

  “Well.” Derek gazed appraisingly at my conservative gray business suit. “I suggest a change of clothing for that meeting. Sackcloth and ashes.”

  My meeting an hour later at the museum with Simon Church was even worse than my staff meeting.

  I walked into his closet of an office unannounced. He looked up impatiently from his overflowing desk, but his harried frown turned to leering welcome.

  “Jenny, Jenny, Jenny!”

  Simon puts the lie to the stereotype of the effete artist: He looks like a lumberjack, with the ribald personality of a truck driver.

  “Jenny, my love,” he said, “if I could get you alone in the European painting collection, I’d show you an Old Master! How are you this gorgeous morning, my darling? Come to sit on Simon’s lap and tease him with visions of new galleries of Chinese furniture? My God, Jenny, I did like the old fart, but if he had to go, wasn’t it nice of him to leave it all to us?”

  I looked at him and felt rotten.

  “Jenny?” He misunderstood my serious silence. “Oh shit, I’m sorry. I’m so damned tactless.”

  “We’re not getting the money, Simon.”

  Sudden silence.

  “Excuse me, Jenny. I thought you just said we’re not getting the money.”

  “We’re not. He changed his mind. I don’t know when or why. There’s a new will and we’re not in it. He left all his money to his daughter.”

  “Did you say there’s a new will that bequeaths all the money to his daughter?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “You don’t mean all of it.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Simon rose and turned slowly away from me. His massive shoulders blocked the light from the small, single window. The cubicle was instantly dark and uncomfortable.

  “I didn’t know, Simon.”

  No answer.

  “Please, Simon, I feel as terrible about this as you do.”

  No answer.

  I left him staring at the death of his grandest dreams.

  But the worst was yet to come—in the persons of five men, pillars of what passes for an establishment in Port Frederick, staunch defenders of the faith of capitalism, cautious and cagey doers of good.

  They were my bosses, the trustees of The Foundation, appointed for life to oversee the accrual, investment and expenditure of the funds.

  And they were waiting for me, twiddling their salad forks’ and swirling their martinis, at the Bosun Club downtown. After lunch, we’d all be adjourning to the Harbor Lights Funeral Home for one last meeting with Arnie.

  From the tight smiles on their faces when they looked up to greet me, I guessed that Edwin Ottilini had already passed the bad word to his fellow trustees. He was one of the five.

  “Good morning, Jennifer,” said Jack Fenton, the seventy-seven-year-old chairman of the board of First City Bank. “Well, here we are in plenary session.”

  “I’ve saved you a chair by me.” This command from Pete Falwell, retired president of Port Frederick Fisheries, the town’s major employer.

  “Good morning,” I said in my most confident director’s voice. Dealing with them on anywhere near an equal basis requires a bit of bluff at the best of times; this lunch was going to win me an Oscar. I took hold of the conversational lead before they could wrest it from me.

  “It looks as if you already know about the Culverson bequest,” I began cautiously, with a glance at Edwin Ottilini.

  “What Culverson bequest?” Roy Leland, the rotund chairman emeritus of United Grocers, closed in quickly. “One day we’ve got $8 million, the next day we’ve got nothing.”

  Jack Fenton snorted. “Let that be a lesson to us,” he said. “Never count your inheritances until they’re hatched.”

  “Well, how did we screw up?” Roy demanded. He’s stubborn and arrogant, but those qualities are mitigated by the good common sense that helped him rise from fish skinner to company president. “Did we offend the old buzzard? Did we make him mad at us? Disappoint him somehow? What the hell happened is what I want to know.” He and Arnie were good friends; I sensed Roy was feeling personally betrayed.

  “I’m not convinced we did anything wrong,” I said. “It’s just possible he had a simple change of heart.”

  “I think that’s it,” Pete Falwell said. “People do, you know, when mortality starts closing in. Why, my fat
her didn’t speak to his brothers for thirty-seven years and then on the day he died he insisted we call every one of ’em up so he could make amends.”

  “But we didn’t have a clue,” Roy insisted. “You’d of thought he’d of told somebody.” That was a broad hint for Mr. Ottilini, whom they all knew to have been Arnie’s attorney. He took it.

  “He told me,” he said and five faces, one of them mine, turned to stare accusingly at him. A wisp of a smile creased his wrinkles. “He called me the week before he died and told me what he planned to do about the will. And yes, it was a change of heart, simple as that. He loved his daughter very much when she was a child; lately, he said, he’d begun to feel an overwhelming guilt for having neglected her and possibly driven her away.”

  “You knew a whole week ago?” Roy expressed my own vexation. “And you didn’t tell Jennifer or any of us?”

  “Of course not,” the lawyer said primly. “He was my client and he asked me not to. He very definitely said he would tell you himself. He meant to do so quite soon. He understood that anything less would be quite unfair.”

  “Well, why didn’t he?” Roy again. Sometimes it’s nice to have a buzzsaw in a group, to hack through the niceties to the brutal truth.

  “He was having a hard time working up the courage.” That wisp of a smile appeared again. “You know, he stopped by my office that last day to pick up his copy of the new will. He confessed then that he still hadn’t found the nerve to tell Jennifer or Simon, or any of you, for that matter. He was quite in a dither.”

  “Well, I should hope,” Jack said indignantly, but we were all relaxing a little now that some of it was beginning to make sense. Then he looked shocked. “You don’t think, do you, that he killed himself just to get out of telling us?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Roy said, and that settled that.

  “Why did he commit suicide, Mr. Ottilini?” I said. “And why didn’t he leave us a note?”

  But this time the wise old eyes held no smile or wisdom for me. “I do not know,” he said tiredly. “I simply do not know.”