by Karin Tanabe
“My grandmother did live in Baltimore, but not for long,” I explained to Louise. “It was for a year in the early sixties. My grandfather was having some health problems and was being treated at Johns Hopkins.”
“I mentioned your name and the Nicholas Brown Chippendale and Elizabeth asked if you were related to Virginia Everett. When I said you were, she said she wanted to work with you, so there you go. I also put Nicole on there because everyone knows Nicole’s family and I have a lot of faith that you, with some help from her, will handle yourself just fine. You’re the smartest person I’ve ever had in the department, and I don’t say that lightly. Sometimes you’re even smarter than me.”
I smiled in thanks at Louise and thought about what she said. Elizabeth Tumlinson was friends with my dead grandmother? While she was living, of course. I doubt she’d developed a close relationship with the late Virginia Everett via voodoo. I was mad at myself for missing that connection and was glad Louise didn’t seem upset by my oversight. The name Elizabeth Tumlinson meant nothing to me until college and by then my grandmother had passed away, but my parents were American furniture freaks, too. Had she never felt compelled during one of our solemn family dinners to drop the fact that she was friends with the grande dame of American decorative arts collecting?
“I don’t know how to say this without just saying it directly, but we need this sale,” Louise acknowledged, her left hand over mine. “I don’t want her to meet with any art dealers. If she hasn’t met with Sotheby’s yet, I don’t want her to set something up. We need this estate and we need it . . . well, I don’t want to say desperately, but it would be an appropriate word. Last year, Sotheby’s American furniture department outsold ours for the first time in nine years. Nine years! Dominick is putting so much pressure on us to reverse that damage.”
She looked at my face, my embarrassment, and patted my hand. “You know that, of course, and you know that that’s not happening again this year. Your historic sale. The Nicholas Brown Chippendale. It did so much for the department, but I still worry it’s not enough. But if you could get this estate—”
“Louise,” I said, interrupting her. “If I need to slice open my arm and give the woman my bone marrow with a teaspoon, I’ll do it. I will not leave Texas without a signed contract, I swear to you.”
“Good, good,” Louise repeated. “Her collection will determine the American furniture market for the next few years. If it sells well, there will be no more talk of a flat market . . . and Sotheby’s, they would just . . . it would be amazing. I can’t take another year like last year. I can’t. Just get it signed.”
•••
I really felt the weight of what I’d been asked to do as my plane started its descent over the dry plains of eastern Texas. This wasn’t just me going to chat with someone about one table. I was doing an estimation of an entire estate and making an immediate offer. I was taking on the operation of wooing then selling the very charmed life of Elizabeth Tumlinson, and I had to be successful.
When I saw Nicole at the baggage carousel waiting for me, I ran up to her and gave her a huge hug. I was suddenly so appreciative of her friendship, her expertise, and her ability to keep a level head.
“I am so, so glad you’re here,” I said as I finally let her go, untangling her softly curled dark hair from my watch.
“You’re going to kill it,” she said, hugging me back. “I’m just happy to observe your genius.” I let her comment flood me with confidence and smoothed the tiny wrinkle in my fitted blazer. I wasn’t free of nerves, but I knew how to look and live the part.
I’d spent the whole plane ride reading a biography of Elizabeth, sent from the same Houston contact who had told me about her husband’s death. She had grown up in the quaint coastal town of St. Michaels, Maryland, and had met her very rich husband through a mutual friend during a political fund-raiser in Washington, D.C. They hadn’t moved to Texas until he was semiretired and she was in her mid-fifties. Now Elizabeth was heavily involved in everything a very rich older woman was expected to be involved in: the Houston Ballet; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Texas Children’s Hospital; the other children’s hospital; and the Houston Historical Society—her money was sprinkled all over the city. Nicole and I wondered why the Tumlinsons had abandoned the life they had built in Maryland for sprawling Houston, but none of our contacts had been able to give us a hint, so we assumed better weather and less crime.
As I turned away from the traffic on Texas Avenue, I kept my foot steadily on the gas pedal and headed toward Willowick Road in the very wealthy River Oaks area of the city.
Before we went to Elizabeth’s, Nicole and I stopped in the country club near her house, which one of Nicole’s sellers had gotten us access to, and went over the final details of our proposal.
“Well, this isn’t Baltimore, now, is it,” said Nicole, looking out at the nearly fluorescent green golf course and women in tennis whites.
“I would meet that woman in a back alley in Newark if she wanted to. I just hope she hasn’t contacted Sotheby’s,” I said, sitting down at a somewhat secluded table overlooking the golf course. “Or if she has, that we’re going first.”
“I know,” said Nicole, looking at the women next to us eating what looked like heaven in a breadbasket. “Christie’s is almost always first, but I’m still terrified. I actually dreamt last night that she had us do a Hashiyama.”
I sucked in my breath and nodded understandingly. It was one of those stories that was legendary in the auction world. In 2005, Takashi Hashiyama, the president of a big Japanese company, couldn’t decide if he wanted to sell the company’s eight-figure art collection with the help of Sotheby’s or Christie’s. So instead of going with his gut or flipping a coin, he had the head of Christie’s Tokyo and the head of Sotheby’s Tokyo play rock, paper, scissors. Christie’s won and we suddenly all started practicing playground games in the office.
“Of course, in this day and age, she’d probably make us play something more timely, like Angry Birds.” Nicole stared at me, checked her high score, and then we both laughed nervously.
“Okay, so if she doesn’t make us have some sort of video game contest with Sotheby’s, we stick with our twelve percent buyer’s premium.”
“Yeah, we probably have to,” I said, making little check marks next to the proposal I had typed up on the plane. “And we waive seller’s commission and we give our guarantee, half of which can be paid out to her upon signing.”
“Thirty million.”
“Yes, thirty million. That’s high, but it’s doable.”
“I’ve made a list of possible extras,” said Nicole, looking at her list. “Her oldest son, Gordon, he’s the one who spent a little time in rehab, he’s a huge Ravens fan. I can get him a meet-and-greet in the locker room.”
“You can? How?”
“Don’t ask, but I can. As for Elizabeth, I can’t pinpoint anything she might want that she can’t already buy, so we’ll just feel it out.”
I could see the words “American Ballet Theatre, Clydesdale horses, space aviation, and Duke of Gloucester” on her list but didn’t ask any questions.
“I also looked and saw that Olivier Burnell was at the rostrum for every New York sale her husband attended in the past fifteen years. We can put it in her contract that he will conduct the auction and if he can’t, she can withdraw.”
“Olivier has never missed an auction. Even that time when he sliced open his thumb with a steak knife . . .”
“And just wore cashmere gloves,” Nicole said, finishing my sentence. “I know he never misses an auction, but she doesn’t. Let’s write it in. I think she’ll appreciate it.”
“Okay,” I said, mentally preparing the baskets of Airborne and vitamin C that I was going to start bringing Olivier on a weekly basis.
“Louise said she wants high estimates.”
“They all want high estim
ates,” I replied, rolling the corner of the piece of Christie’s embossed paper in front of me. “It can backfire, but sellers never seem to care.”
“I know, I know, the reserve prices can go too high and then there’s the risk it won’t sell. But if we don’t go high, you know Sotheby’s will give her the high estimates she wants.”
“You’re right.” I sat on my hands so I would stop fidgeting and looked at our papers—our talking points, the proposal, everything we had laid out before even seeing any of her collection in person. We typed up our final proposal, used the club’s business center to print it out, and paused in front of a wall-to-wall window overlooking a manicured lawn.
“I feel ready,” said Nicole, standing up.
“Me too,” I replied, placing the new contract in a leather Christie’s folder.
Elizabeth’s house was roughly the size of Belgium and got bigger as we noticed a back wing and then a separate guesthouse. I pressed the button on the loudspeaker next to the gate of her ivory brick mansion, it clicked open, and Nicole motioned to an area on the stone driveway where I should park.
The first thing that surprised me was that Elizabeth opened her own door. I was absolutely sure she would have a dozen Downton Abbey–style footmen who called her “your grace” and brushed her hair with boar bristles, but no. And the next thing that surprised me was how beautiful and healthy she was at seventy-six years, five months, and seventeen days old. I expected her to be in declining health if she was thinking of selling a large part of her estate. But here she was, ready to compete in the Mrs. Grandmother of the Universe pageant.
“You must be the women from Christie’s,” she said, her cream bouclé suit resisting a crease as she reached her thin hand out to us. “Louise warned me that you were young.” She moved out of the way and let us through the heavy, wooden, double French doors.
“As you both know, youth is not the word of the day. We’re dealing with old things here, including me.”
Nicole and I started gushing—she looked amazing, sensational, her house was stunning, her collection unparalleled, we were thrilled, no, elated, to get a chance to see it, to meet her, we were bursting at the seams, what an honor—and through our gushing, she just kept a tight smile on her face and ushered us inside her house.
She led us to what looked like the first of eight living rooms. She pointed to a beige high-backed sofa for us to sit on, which was placed next to a beautiful piece, which I recognized as the work of eighteenth-century Annapolis cabinetmaker John Shaw.
We spent the first hour at Elizabeth’s not up to our elbows in mahogany looking for signatures and hidden drawers in precise places to authenticate the pieces, but listening to Elizabeth tell us about her late husband, Adam.
“You can’t imagine how lonely it is to be a widow,” Elizabeth said, bowing her head slightly, her tight gray chignon unmoving.
Really? But didn’t she have six children?
“Death is terrible,” I said, solemnly bowing my head to match hers. What was I saying? How did I know death was terrible? I had never died.
“Loneliness is terrible,” I said, backtracking.
“It is,” she agreed, patting her eyes with a handkerchief she seemed to have pulled from the couch cushions.
“Loneliness is killing me. My bones are shaking. I need a change.”
She needed a change, did she? Well! I had a change for her. Minimalism! Was it time for me to pull up pictures of Le Corbusier buildings on my iPad? Tell her that stark white walls with nothing on them were this decade’s Thomas Eakins paintings? Or maybe I’d suggest the naturalist route. This woman should kiss all this Texas gaudiness away and move to Walden Pond. Really find herself in her final years. She needed to shed the shackles of wealth and make like a Buddhist.
“There are, of course, my six children. I always thought I would leave it in their hands.”
Heartless worms! All children were. They didn’t even come visit her, by the sounds of things. They didn’t deserve her furniture. What was I supposed to say? Screw your children? Yes, that’s what I was supposed to say, just not in so many words.
“It’s possible, if they’re not passionate about American antiques, that they would immediately sell your collection and spend the money on other things,” I said, talking about how so many young wealthy people wanted private jets and private islands.
“The values are different,” I continued. “They don’t want Chippendale and Queen Anne; they want fast money, fast cars, Swedish furniture made of metal.” She physically recoiled when I strung that last phrase together. I could tell she was having visions of her huge house filled with IKEA furniture with impossible-to-pronounce names covered in umlauts.
I wanted to tell her that Bjøoïrniger sofas were sure to be the downfall of the next generation of Americans, but I didn’t want to push it.
“I know they don’t really care about all these things,” she said, motioning to her end tables and armoires. “But my children aside,” she said, sighing, “sometimes the thought of selling everything, watching my collection, Adam’s collection, being torn apart and sold off bit by bit . . . well, it might just send me to an early grave.”
Was seventy-six an early grave? It wasn’t my place to ask. And I didn’t want this elegant woman to actually die. It’s just that I wasn’t allowed to walk away with nothing.
“We have a very good offer for you,” said Nicole, cutting the small talk. “We’ll of course need to take a look at everything, but I know that the number we are willing to put on the table will exceed your expectations.”
“I need a guarantee,” said Elizabeth, her voice suddenly turning firmer.
“Of course,” we both said in unison.
“And I’d like you to set up a trip for my children to attend the auction. They quite like the St. Regis.”
“Will you want to attend?” I asked, writing notes and knowing that Louise would put her entire extended family and their pets up at the hotel if we could sign Elizabeth.
Just as I was about to stand up and start gently flipping over furniture to find signatures, she shook her head and declared, “All this talk is rattling me. I feel like I’m at a car dealership with Slick Rick and I don’t like it.”
What? How was this like a car dealership? We were trying to get her to sell, not buy, and who in this scenario was Slick Rick? I caught Nicole’s eye and she mouthed, “You.”
“Maybe I’ll just donate everything to my alma mater, the University of Maryland,” Elizabeth said, starting to smile as she reached for her soda water.
The University of Maryland! Why? So that frat boys could puke on cushions that once held the posteriors of the American settlers? While I was thinking about our next move, Nicole was playing the friendship angle, telling Elizabeth all about her recent trip to Maryland. She was also peppering her stories with ten good reasons why Elizabeth should sell her estate.
“The Baltimore Museum of Art has expressed a lot of interest,” said Nicole. “Think about how much of your furniture would return to Maryland if you sold it through us. We have a very high percentage of buyers from museums in the mid-Atlantic.”
Elizabeth smiled and declared, “Good people come from Baltimore.”
What did she mean good people came from Baltimore? Had she never seen The Wire? And Edgar Allan Poe was from Baltimore. The original Goth!
“Everything I’m considering selling is in these eleven rooms,” she said, making a dramatic motion with her arm. “Now, I said ‘considering,’ so don’t start mentally writing up your catalogue yet. And no fast talk and shouting out numbers. I like to live a civilized life.”
Well, it was a good thing I hadn’t done my usual routine of appraising things in a loincloth.
There were one hundred twenty-seven pieces in the eleven rooms and we started in the very last drawing room, taking pictures of each piece
from every angle, including inside the drawers and underneath the legs. We looked at the inlays, the mother-of-pearl detail on some, the tongue-and-groove joinery, ran our hands across the claw-and-ball feet of the Chippendale works, inspected the scallop shell mounts on the Queen Anne pieces, made sure the cabriole legs had no splits in them, same for the pierced back splats on the side chairs. We looked for visible saw marks on eighteenth-century pieces and then almost lost it when we found a companion piece to a side table already owned by one of New York’s most prominent collectors of Newport-built eighteenth-century furniture.
“We didn’t know you had this,” I said to Elizabeth, running my hand across the wood.
“Well, one’s life can’t be totally public,” she replied. “It was one of Adam’s last purchases. It came from a dealer in New York. I have the papers.”
Tracing furniture was very straightforward. We could easily determine the precise time period when a piece was made, the region where it was constructed, and the creator, just by looking at the wood. Certain woods were in vogue at different times and the handmade screws of the past centuries and the oxidation they left behind on the wood helped a great deal. It was possible to forge a clay pot, and at a certain level, it was possible to fake furniture, and could be lucrative, but it was extremely difficult and expensive to do it well.
When it was nearly nine o’clock and Elizabeth seemed rather sick of us manhandling her possessions, she suggested we pick it up again the next day.
“I appreciate you ladies coming, and you’ve made excellent arguments for why I should sell with Christie’s, but all this . . . I don’t know. As you’re aware, Adam was always the one who did all the actual buying and selling. Maybe I should just wait until I’m older to sell, because right now, it still means a lot.”
“We understand how difficult the selling process can be, but the wonderful thing about selling your estate instead of letting your children handle it later on is that you have control. If you work with Christie’s you will have the right individual collectors, museums, universities all bidding on the wonderful collection that you and Adam procured. And if you would like to use the financial returns to build another collection, we would be thrilled to assist you. Maybe you would like to start your own collection. Something you can be known for alone, without Adam.”