The Social Climber of Davenport Heights (5 page)

“I just feel so lucky to be alive,” I said, “I guess I just want to sort of celebrate that. I’m giving some money to…to some worthy causes.”

David was looking through the stack of sealed, stamped envelopes lined up neatly along the edge of in my out-box.

He read the addressees aloud. “American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, American Kidney Foundation…”

“They’re alphabetical,” I said.

He looked at me quizzically.

“Your favorite charities?”

“I’m not sure I really have any favorites.”

His brow furrowed.

“I got them out of the Yellow Pages.”

“What are you down to now?” He was glancing at my checkbook.

“Special Olympics,” I answered.

David and I never argued. It wasn’t that we agreed about things, it was simply that we didn’t disagree enough to make it worth the confrontation. I wasn’t concerned about his disapproval, I just honestly didn’t quite know how to explain.

“I want to do something good,” I said. “I…I just want to do something good.”

I
WENT BACK
to work that very day, even without having had any sleep. It was as if a burden had been lifted off my shoulders. I had promised to “do good” and I’d fulfilled my end of the deal. I’d given money to forty-seven of the two hundred and four charitable organizations listed in the Yellow Pages—all of the ones that I was familiar with. I’d given ten times the amount of money we’d spent on contributions the year before, and had pretty much blown my clothes and entertainment budget for the rest of the season. But I felt good about it.

Millie and Frank were especially glad to see me. And I think it wasn’t just because I was their heavy hitter. Which, of course, I was. My first day back on the job I got a major deal brewing. I remembered Lexi saying at the club that Barbara Jarman had hired a full-time nurse for her mother-in-law. I called Barb and convinced her that that big old house—a two-story Victorian with double wraparound porches on four lots at the edge of Park Square—was just too much for an infirm old lady, and that the nurse was probably walking off with every antique that wasn’t bolted to the floor.

The Victorian would have to go. The piece of ground it sat
on was prime. With the help of my friends at the club, I knew I could get it rezoned as multifamily. There were at least a hundred developers who would be thrilled to turn that edge of the park into half-million-dollar condos. That would net me a small fortune. And I’d get my little commission for finding the old lady a nice two-bedroom garden home in a complex managed by a trendy seniors living center, as well.

That was a pretty good day’s work for my first morning back. I returned phone calls, caught up on paperwork, and I even managed to leave a little early for a quick trip to Yesteryear Emporium. The narrow, thirties-style revolving door creaked and complained as I made my way through it.

The owner was behind the sales counter, as usual, typing away on his pingy Underwood.

“Look around all you want,” he said without even bothering to glance up.

“I will,” I assured him.

As I passed the mezzanine stairway with its oak steps and rails guarded only by a flimsy piece of cord bearing a sign that read Private Keep Out, I was secretly thinking it would serve the guy right if I went rifling through his apartment. I resisted the temptation only because I figured that as little as the man seemed to know about antiques, there wouldn’t be anything up there even remotely interesting to me.

I wandered happily through the building for the better part of an hour. The store acquired new stock rather haphazardly and it was jumbled together in such a way that you simply had to happen upon things. It wasn’t a very good way to run a business, but it certainly did add a treasure-hunt aspect to shopping. I found a beautiful one-piece dry-sink cabinet. I absolutely loved it, but I’d have to renovate my kitchen to use it. If I hadn’t spent so much money on those charities, I would
have done exactly that. But I
had
written those checks, so I rolled up my sleeves and moved a half-dozen scratched twenties-era machine-made bed frames in front of it, hoping that no one would unearth the cabinet until my new condo deal panned out.

I spend a lot of money buying antiques. But owning them is not a big thing for me. The fact that my house is stuffed to the seams appears to belie that statement. The truth is, I had always been drawn to them. They are like some attachment with history. Maybe because I had no family history I could speculate about, I transferred that curiosity to objects that people from the past held or touched or used.

Whatever the reason, antiques were very special to me. And an afternoon just wandering among them could lift my spirits when they were low, soothe me when I was anxious and entertain me when things were going fine.

In a big wooden bin full of miscellaneous metalwork, I found a very handsome set of silver casters, the three pieces wrapped together with a couple of rounds of masking tape. The price, written in black marker on the tape, was about what they were worth. I figured I could talk the owner down a few dollars and still get them at a bargain. Then I spotted a pair of modern silver-plate salt and pepper shakers. They were wrapped in the same tape and the price on them was less than half of what was on the casters.

The masking tape came off fairly easily. I wadded the casters’ tape into a ball and stuck it into my pocket. I put the cheaper silver-plate price around the silver casters and went to the counter.

The owner was still pounding determinedly upon his typewriter.

“Excuse me!” I said in a high, haughty tone that was meant to convey the idea that
I’m too important to be ignored
.

“One second,” the guy said without looking up. “Just let me finish this thought.”

I was annoyed. It was just more evidence of the failings of the service economy when an owner couldn’t be hurried to take a customer’s money.

Impatiently I began to tap my fingernails upon the counter. It was calculatedly rude, but I was not a woman accustomed to waiting.

Then it suddenly struck me as funny that I was put out because this fellow wasn’t quicker to let me rob him.

As unexpected as the arrival of such a thought was the truth in it. I had grown accustomed to talking this man out of his inventory. Getting a better deal than I deserved. But changing prices was not a negotiation—it was a fraud or shoplifting or…well, it was something and it wasn’t something good. I had promised to “do good.”

Right there, in my favorite store, in the middle of the afternoon, I had an acute attack of conscience.

“Okay,” the owner said, rising from his little desk behind the counter. He didn’t bother with his cane. His gait was awkward, the right leg was scraggly somehow, he moved it keeping his knee stiff, and it was not as well muscled as the left. “Did you want to buy these?”

The question was mostly rhetorical as he picked up the casters. He glanced at the price on the masking tape and reached over to punch it in on the ancient cash register.

“I don’t want to buy them,” I blurted out.

He looked up, surprised.

I don’t think I’d ever looked at him eye to eye before. His were a surprising vivid blue. I’d always thought the man to be about my age, but the depths behind his gaze were like aeons of time. He’d seen a lot. Maybe he’d seen too much.

“I don’t want to buy them,” I repeated. “I…I brought them up because I think they are mismarked. These are eighteenth-century silver. I don’t recognize the mark, but they are obviously American. You’ve got them priced here as if they were ordinary silver plate.”

“Really?”

He examined the three little containers more closely.

I told him what I thought a reasonable price would be for the set. The amount I suggested was a little higher than the one that had been on the original masking tape, but it was what I thought he could get.

“I’d pay that much for them myself,” I said, “but I’m just looking today.”

His eyes narrowed and he glared at me intently. Slowly he nodded as if he understood.

“So,” he said, “you don’t want to
buy
anything. You’re just coming up here to point out what an idiot I am.”

“Ah…no, of course not,” I stammered.

“I’m really busy today,” he told me, his words rife with deliberate patience. “If you want these you can have them at the price marked on them.”

“No, I don’t want them,” I assured him. “I just wanted you to know that the price is wrong.”

“Okay,” he said, though he continued to look at me unpleasantly.

“I’m just trying to help you,” I told him.

“Right.”

“You could say thank you.”

“Look,” he snarled firmly, “I don’t have time for this little song-and-dance number you always do. I’m not sure what you’re up to, but I’m not haggling over this crap today.”

“I’m not haggling,” I assured him a little sharply. “And this is excellent artisan silverwork not crap.”

His mouth thinned into one disapproving line. “What ever,” he said as if it were two distinct words. He laid the casters in my hands. “Take them.”

“What?”

“They’re all yours.”

He turned away as if that was the end of it.

“Wait! No, I couldn’t do that.”

“Of course you can.”

“Then I have to pay you.”

“That would involve coming to an agreement on a price,” he said. “And I just don’t have the stomach for it.”

I stood there staring at him, speechless, dumbfounded.

He relented slightly, his tone more conciliatory. “Just accept them as a gift, Janey,” he said. “They’re yours.”

The sound of my name on his lips was a surprise.

“You know me?”

The man folded his arms across his chest, and in a singsong voice, like a brattish pubescent, said, “Janey Domschke is no dumb-ski, she’s the smartest girl in school. If you don’t believe it, ask her.”

The little taunt was so far in my past, yet so familiar.

“Lofton,” I corrected. “Janey…Jane Lofton.” But…

“Jane Lofton,” he said. “Just take the silver. Think of it as a gift from someone from the old neighborhood.”

“We knew each other in Sunnyside?”

“Middle school,” he answered. “I’m Scott. Your project partner in seventh-grade science. Sedimentary-rock strata.”

I’m sure my jaw dropped open. I stood there looking at his face, remembering him from another lifetime.

“Scott? The junkman’s son?”

That designation would have been an insult back in Sunnyside. Scott held out his arms, indicating our surroundings.

“Of course, we don’t call it junk anymore, Janey,” he told me with more than a hint of condescension in his tone. “Now we say ‘antiques and collectibles.’”

I was too disconcerted to even comment. Fortunately, it wasn’t necessary.

“If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’m very busy. Take your gift and run along. Next week, I promise to bargain like a fishwife.”

He turned back to his grimy typewriter and I walked out, reluctantly carrying the silver casters.

All the time I’d been getting bargains off the junkman’s son from Sunnyside. I shook my head with disbelief.

Sunnyside was an area of town that now existed only in the memories of those who had lived there. The final leg of the interstates that brought suburban dwellers into downtown had its three-level interchange built right over the neighborhood. The junior high, directly underneath one of the massive cloverleafs, was the first thing to go. Our class of impressionable thirteen-year-olds had been scattered by buses to distant schools. I’d gotten a scholarship to St. Agnes. When the house we lived in was slated for demolition, my mother moved us to an apartment closer to the hospital. I never saw any of my fellow classmates again.

As far as I was concerned, that was just as well. The last thing in the world that I would ever want to do is to wax nostalgic about my working-class origins.

My mother was a smart, attractive, ambitious young woman. I think perhaps she only made one mistake in her life. That was marrying my dad. Leon Domschke had been suave and handsome, a German Frank Sinatra, my mother had said. A difficult type to imagine. And imagine was all I
could ever do. Mom left him when I was just a toddler and there was not a photograph of him in her possession. As a teenager I conjured up the idea that he was like Allison MacKenzie’s father in
Peyton Place
, just a name made up to hide my out-of-wedlock birth. But after Mom died, I found her divorce decree among her papers. There had, indeed, been a Leon Wilbur Domschke. Where he came from or went to, I never knew.

I put the silver casters, still wrapped together in the wrong masking tape, in the cup holder of the Z3.

I should have gone ahead and cheated him, I thought to myself. The junkman’s son at least would have gotten half the money he deserved and I wouldn’t feel as though I owed the man anything. But no, I had to try doing something good, get my motives questioned and end up with an unwelcome obligation.

Annoyed, I started up the car, slipped it into gear and laid rubber as I drove away. Back at the office, I’d just walked in the door when Kelli, the receptionist, said I had a call. It was from the Shelter for Displaced Wild Creatures asking for a donation. It was the first ripple in what turned out to be a tidal wave.

The next few weeks were some of the strangest I had ever lived.

The response to my night of check writing was immediate and overwhelming. Never underestimate the scope and range of a donors list. It was as if my phone number had appeared out of thin air on the speed dial of every solicitation organization in the world. There were reputable, well-known philanthropic organizations, obscure, esoteric charities, and there were scams of every form and function.

I became very adept at saying no. I’d given what I had given and that was all I intended to give. I was forceful and certain.
Disabusing any and all about my willingness to make further contributions.

David was more irate than I was. Not as much at the unwelcome callers as at me for the chaos that had been brought into our lives. The charities, solicitors and con artists were just doing what they do, but I had brought this on us. And I had never really been able to explain my motives to him. Now we had strangers, often unpleasant strangers, intruding on our privacy day and night.

With his parents beside him, David finally confronted me. We were having a cocktail together beside their pool before going for an evening at the club.

“This whole business is some kind of craziness,” he said. “You are just not acting like yourself.”

“I am myself,” I insisted. “I just feel differently about some things.”

The three original members of the Lofton family shared a look confirming my suspicion that I had already been the subject of a long and involved discussion.

“I think you ought to see a therapist,” Edith said. “Oprah is always telling us not to be afraid to reach out for help.”

David and W.D. nodded in agreement.

“That’s a great idea,” David said. “It will give you an opportunity to talk about what happened.”

“I’m surprised that you don’t have a psychiatrist already,” W.D. said. “Edith, don’t most of those women friends of yours go to shrinks?”