The Price of Inheritance (11 page)

“But don't you know why, William? You read the art press. I'm sure you know.”

“Well, I was hoping it was for another reason,” he said, turning away from me and putting my coat on a less expensive chair.

“Did you really lose your job over that thing? I mean, how do they know these Baltimore people are telling the truth?”

“I don't know,” I said fidgeting in the chair. “But everyone seems to be buying their story, and I hate to say it but after all this new information that's come out, it sounds accurate. I just wish I'd known about it sooner. I mean the details.”

“But you didn't get—”

“Fired?” I interrupted him, saving him the embarrassment of having to say the word. “I definitely got fired. I tried to shop around for something new in New York. Save face and all that. But it's not realistic right now. So I came home.”

He eyed me and I knew he knew what I was looking for.

“You were overwhelmed, Carolyn. That's all. Just overwhelmed. I've known you for years and it takes a lot to get you overwhelmed. They shouldn't have let you get there. Louise DeWitt could have helped you.”

“I don't know about that. I should have told her about Baltimore.”

“Maybe, but I don't think I would have, either.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“What do you think I should do while I'm in Newport for a month?”

“Well, work here, of course. That's why you came by, isn't it?” he said, winking at me.

“It is. But I wouldn't fault you for not hiring me.”

“Nonsense. But I'm paying you what I paid you in high school, plus commission. Sound fair?”

Eight twenty-five an hour plus commission? It sounded like I would be eating a lot of macaroni and cheese. I'd go back to New York looking like an orange, rotund noodle.

William stood up from his chair and dabbed his brown eyes with a handkerchief. Years of being around musty furniture and memorabilia made his eyes water like a puppy with a sinus infection.

“You know what I want you to do?” he said, heading to his computer to print something. “I want you to buy for me. Scout and buy. I trust you to do that. You know more than I do at this point so you don't even have to check in with me first. I'll give you a budget for the month and you spend it. I'll split commission with you any time it's over two hundred dollars. How's that sound?”

“That sounds pretty fair,” I said, taking an address from him.

“There have been some very good local auctions down in an old converted fire station in Narragansett put on by a retired fisherman named Hook Durant.” He pointed to the address he had just given me. “You know him?”

William looked at my face and laughed. “Not the crowd you've been hanging out with at Christie's, I guess.”

“Let's just say they have a particular clientele.”

“I bet they do,” he replied. “But that's too bad. I think everyone deserves to own a bit of history and that history can cost five dollars or fifty million.”

“Right. That's why I always liked working here.”

“Oh yeah?” he asked, looking over his reading glasses. “Go after many five-dollar lots over there at Christie's?”

He laughed at himself and kept talking. Before I left the store that day, he wrote down my new working hours on a scrap of paper and handed me a check for ten thousand dollars. I looked up at him, said, “Seriously?” and he gave me a little slap on the back.

“Find me things! Wonderful things. Go, go!”

“Your happiness scares me, William.”

“Carolyn,” he said sternly. “You are a very happy person underneath all this. I'm glad you left New York with all those . . . people.”

Narragansett was a coastal town about a thirty-minute drive southwest from Newport. It was wealthy, but not like Newport, and it was one of those places I was always driving through rather than stopping in. Their old firehouse had been bought and sold a half dozen times since it was built. It was part of a hotel, and then used as a gym, was donated to a church group, bought back by the hotel, used as a lawyer's office, and now, I guessed, was empty and being used as a type of auction house, though it was styled more like a high school gymnasium than any auction house I had ever set foot in.

The first thing that surprised me about Hook Durant's was how casual it was. And then really, how strange it was. To kick things off, they were serving alcohol. Tons of it. I could see what looked like a barrel of oddly colored red wine near the door. Second, the auction was at ten o'clock in the morning and it was full of women. I was expecting around ten people to be in attendance, but at 9:45 in mid-February, there were already thirty people in the room. Some women looked affluent, some looked much less so, and some just looked a little eccentric and curious. There were a few men, too, mostly older, but they seemed to be accompanying the women, not leading the show. At Christie's, it was almost always the opposite.

I spotted Hook right away. He looked like a weight lifter wearing a navy blue sweater. He was chewing on a pipe instead of smoking it and his roving eyes seemed to take in everything in the room, even what was going on behind him. Everything about Hook was big. He was broadly built and had large features and wild, unkempt black hair. He must have electrocuted himself every morning to get it to stand up the way it did. And though he seemed the kind of man who would be far more comfortable in a pair of carpenter pants and a flannel shirt, he was wearing plaid dress pants.

I sat on the back row of the metal bleachers holding my paddle. I was the only person on the row when the auction started, so I quickly slid down to the next row and placed my paddle square on my lap. I was wearing jeans, because the only piece of advice William had given me for the auction was “Wear an old pair of jeans. Hook loves to swindle the rich.” I flipped the paddle over between my fingers, fanning myself even though it was about fifty degrees inside the building. The paddle was nothing more than a thick tongue depressor with a printed cardboard square on it. Inside that square was my red number, drawn in marker, number 37.

At exactly 10
A.M.,
with the room filled with forty-five women who clearly didn't care a thing about indoor voices, Hook started things off with the first lot. I didn't know if the former fisherman knew anything about antiques, though I liked many of his first lots. And the man could definitely call an auction. He sounded like a gypsy who had gotten hold of fifty years of Christie's auction recordings and learned to emulate them adding a thick dose of homespun rhetoric. His voice rose, he scanned the room expertly, never missed a hand, and moved lots for much more than I thought they were worth. I did not plan to pay that kind of money, so I waited. The first thing I bid on was a wooden carved American eagle for $160. Then I bid on a side table of questionable provenance, a nineteenth-century copper weather vane, and an old Amoco gas station sign, but was outbid by a woman in my row who was clearly on the road to getting completely wasted.

“I don't recognize you, do I,” she asked me after she slapped me five across the laps of two other women when she won.

“I don't think so,” I said, introducing myself.

She eyed me and lifted her glass. “Merlot makes everything better, don't you think?”

“Well, maybe not auctions,” I replied. “Level head and all that. I've actually never seen it served at an auction. I think it's illegal.”

“Illegal? I love it. You're a crackerjack! Come on, keep bidding. It's Valentine's Day and I want to beat you again.” She wrapped her plump hand around her paddle and practiced shooting it up skyward.

“Hey, time me! How long does it take me to get my paddle up?”

She waited for me to look at my watch before doing it again.

“Less than a second,” I replied.

“I knew it, I knew it. I'm like a human rocket ship. Kaboom! Bid again, Everett.”

So I kept bidding. And I let her beat me again.

The following Tuesday, I was back at Hook Durant's auction. William had sold the copper weather vane for six times what I paid, the side table was Thomas Molesworth and would certainly make back more than double, and the eagle had previously sold at Christie's for a hair above thirty thousand dollars.

“Did you recognize this eagle, Carolyn?” William said, stroking the head of the painted, gilded object. He gave it a hug and ran his hand down the wing. It was gripping a wooden American flag and a red, white, and blue shield with its claws.

“I thought I recognized it from a 1992 Christie's catalogue. The position of the feet looked familiar.”

“Thought you recognized it. And from 1992! Let's not belittle this accomplishment. You're an absolute genius. You were when you were young and you're even smarter today. Christie's is going to seriously regret letting you go.” We stood together and admired the expensive piece of Americana. “I'm going to try to sell it for thirty-one thousand. That should net you enough of a commission to stay in Newport for another couple of months. You have to stay. I knew you would do well at Hook's. Everyone else there is drunk. Don't drink. Don't even look at that poison Merlot he serves. He makes it in the backyard,” William advised me. “And don't let those old heiresses bid you up too much. They're just there for the game. It's like gambling to them, without the blue-collar reputation or the hookers. I don't know how Hook got such a great eye, but he has one. Luckily yours is better. He can tell if something is beautiful, but you can tell what it's worth. I want you to spend every Tuesday at Hook Durant's. How many Tuesdays do you have left?”

“Four, counting today,” I answered, surprised that I'd already been in Newport more than a week.

On that next Tuesday, feeling very optimistic and hungry after last week's buys, I sat on the top bleacher in Narragansett again. Unlike houses that had auctions by department, Hook Durant ran his little auction like he was putting his hand in a magic suitcase and selling whatever he found. He would sell a gun, followed by an oil painting, and then some antique children's toys, collectible wine, a Chinese vase, whatever he had in his arsenal. And the best part about it was that in Rhode Island, in the winter, when the population around Newport was reduced by half, there was still a buyer for almost everything.

I had passed on the first twenty-three lots that Tuesday, but Lot 24 piqued my interest as soon as Hook set it on the card table next to him.

“Next up we've got this little bowl! Who doesn't love a bowl. This bowl is about a foot across and definitely from the Middle East. Arabic origins. Yemen or Egypt perhaps. There's Arabic writing inside. And look at that detail. This looks like it took fifty years to paint.” He flipped it on its side so we could see the beautiful, intricately detailed vegetal motif. “It's small, but it packs some historic punch! Of course, I have no idea what that is, but I'll leave it to the lucky buyer to find out. Could be very old, could have been made yesterday. Let's all have a big swig of Merlot and then we'll get the bidding started at five dollars.”

Hook actually waited for people to drink, singing part of a drinking song that involved a pirate, a girl named Sue, and another girl named Sue, which sounded very perverted. Then he was off.

“Who's got five dollars for me?” He scanned the crowd and pointed his finger at a woman with short red curly hair and purple glasses sitting in the front row.

“Crazy Annie! You've always got a fiver for me. How about it?”

Crazy Annie? And he was telling her to bid? Insisting that she bid? I was obsessed with this place. There were plenty of Christie's customers I would have loved to tell Olivier to call Crazy Annie.

Crazy Annie started the bidding at five dollars.

Middle Eastern art history was my weakest field, and there was nothing noticeably ornate about the bowl, but it was uncharacteristically attractive for a piece that didn't have an original shape or any gilding so I bid on it, too. I wanted to let Crazy Annie off the hook and I was hoping the bowl might be a hidden five-figure gem like the wooden eagle. For a few bucks, it was worth a gamble.

“New girl, give me more money,” said Hook, pointing at me. “You got twenty for me?”

“Sure, why not,” I said raising my paddle.

No one bid me up, and like that, I had my first purchase of the day. I finished the auction with ten Italian coins, the bowl from the Middle East, a Japanese stoneware drinking vessel, a stained-glass lamp, a Windsor chair, a colonial era American flag, and a vintage Dior evening gown. I was definitely going to have to ask William for more money.

When I was walking down the bleachers to leave, Hook stopped me and commented on my purchases.

“You're buying all over the map. I like that. And you've been here two weeks in a row. I like that, too.”

“Yes, I have,” I said, reaching my hand out to introduce myself. “I'm working for William Miller for a little while.”

Hook scowled and then barked like a dog. He actually barked like he'd eaten a St. Bernard for lunch. “You're working for that crook? Well then, I'm going to start demanding more money from you.”

“He's not a crook at all,” I said, a little peeved. No one was allowed to insult William except for me. And that was only when he bought things because he thought they would be lonely without a good home.

“Yeah, yeah, I know, lighten up,” said Hook. “How about a drink?”

I declined his homemade chuck and he lowered his eyes until he was looking at me through his squinted eyelids.

“Are you boring or something? What's your story?”

“Yes. I probably am boring. I'm not in the habit of drinking at auctions. Though I have been drinking a lot in the morning lately.”

“Good! I knew it. You're not boring. You're very pretty. Pretty women are never boring. In my opinion anyway,” he said grinning. “You single?”