Almost True Confessions

by Jane O'Connor

  On Eighty-First Street they made a right turn and headed in the direction of Fifth Avenue, Mary nattering on about Charlotte’s granddaughter. “Barbara never had children, such a shame.” A freak accident in Vail had left Barbara a widow. “I don’t think her husband was even forty. He skied straight into a tree, smashed his head wide open, just like that son of Ethel Kennedy’s.”

  The side street was poorly lit. Daisy lost her balance and nearly fell. “Oh Lord, that’s the second time today,” she said, gripping onto Rannie. “I really should use a cane.” Then she sighed. “You never think you’ll get old. Sometimes I look in the mirror and wonder who’s that staring at me?” Daisy peered across at Mary. “Mims, I realized the other day that I’ve known Charlotte seventy-five years. Isn’t that astounding?”

  Quick mental math told Rannie that Daisy, though over eighty, was still a generation younger than Charlotte Cummings. “Was Charlotte a friend of your mother’s?” Rannie inquired.

  “No. I was great friends with Charlotte’s daughter, Madeline. We met the first day of kindergarten at Spence.”

  “Poor Madeline,” Mary said. “Melanoma. They found a tiny mole, no bigger than a freckle. Three months later we were all at Saint Thomas’s for the funeral.”

  It never ceased to amaze Rannie: when it came to cause of death, her mother-in-law had astounding recall, able to recite chapter and verse what had done in even the most casual of departed acquaintances.

  “I was bereft, but Madeline’s death just about killed Charlotte,” Daisy said. “That’s when we—Charlotte and I—became close. It was as if she adopted me.” They had reached the corner of Eighty-First and Madison Avenue just as the light turned red.

  “And then about a year later Charlotte saved my life! I’m not exaggerating. Charlotte Cummings . . . saved . . . my . . . life!” Daisy uttered each word separately for added emphasis. “I was very sick.”

  “Throat cancer,” Mary elaborated as they crossed the street. “Stage three. Daisy had had an agonizing sore throat for months but refused to do anything about it.”

  “I couldn’t bear hearing a doctor tell me that I had cancer. When I finally did go to a specialist, he gave me a year, two at most, and that was only if my whole pharynx was removed. Charlotte was with me when I got the news. We went straight from the doctor’s office to the Carlyle, and as painful as it was for me to swallow, we did not leave that bar until I’d finished three martinis.” Daisy relayed the last fact as if it were an especially heroic achievement, her refusal to let pain interfere with her intake of vermouth and gin.

  “The very next morning Charlotte appeared at my apartment with a large box from Bergdorf Goodman. I thought, ‘Oh Lord, it’s something depressing, a bed jacket for the hospital.’ But it was a painting. A painting of St. Godelieve—she’s the patron saint of sore throats. It was from Silas’s art collection. The painting is five hundred years old. Charlotte insisted I keep it because I needed a miracle.

  “So I hung Godelieve in my bedroom—she’s a creepy, little pasty-faced thing, yet I wouldn’t part with her for the world. I started praying to her every night. And right away I started feeling better. When I went for a follow-up MRI two weeks later, the tumor had shrunk by half. And a month later it was gone. Vanished. Absolutely no trace of it. I have been cancer free ever since.”

  “The doctors at Sloan-Kettering were baffled, absolutely stupefied!” Mary confirmed.

  “So-so you consider this a-a miracle?” Rannie stammered.

  “What else would you call it?” Daisy asked querulously.

  “I don’t know.” Miracles were so un-Jewish. The only miracle ever discussed at Anshe Chesed Fairmount Temple Sunday school in Cleveland was the one connected to the story of Hanukkah in celebration of the tiny amount of oil in the temple lamp that kept on burning for eight nights. As a child, Rannie had always found the story a little disappointing. On a miracle scale, it barely rated a two and was nothing next to walking on water or raising the dead.

  “And you still smoke?” Rannie said in wonderment.

  “Why on earth not! Saint Godelieve is protecting me. I’m cancer free. She’s also the patron saint of bad marriages. But I got her too late to help out there. After I’m back from Florida, you must come over to see her, Rannie.”

  Rannie was nodding and saying that, yes, she’d like to when Mary pointed out that they’d just walked right past the entrance to Charlotte Cummings’s Fifth Avenue mansion. So Rannie maneuvered the ladies into an about-face.

  Two weeks ago she’d accompanied Tim on a walking tour of Upper Fifth Avenue mansions. The guide had paraded them past the former residences of Andrew Carnegie, Henry Frick, and other robber barons, which were all museums or schools now. Only one remained a private home, the Palladian-style villa where Charlotte Cummings currently resided.

  Now, bathing in the glow of street-level spotlights trained on its pale stone façade, the building had a ghostly beauty: to Rannie it truly seemed like an apparition from a bygone era. She wished Tim could be here until she remembered she was annoyed at him, so she revised her wish—if only he could see her waltzing into a Manhattan mansion, an honest-to-goodness mansion with no denigrating “Mc” prefix.

  The waltzing had to wait until Daisy remembered the entry code on the security panel by the door; they listened for the answering you-got-it-right buzz and gained entrance.

  Rannie blinked. She found herself inside a rotunda all in marble, yet not one square inch was in classic Carrara white: the different marbles made for a riotous eyeful of color—the intricate geometric floor and the circle of gilt-topped pilasters and columns were all in sumptuous shades of apricot, rose, rust, ocher, and olive green.

  “Daisy! You’re a love to come.”

  A tall blonde who could have been on either side of fifty had materialized and strode toward them, arms outstretched. She was dressed simply but chicly in black velvet slacks, a black cashmere V-neck, chunky gold jewelry, and—in lieu of a belt—a hot pink silk scarf jauntily knotted around her waist. On her feet were black velvet Belgian loafers. She exuded a high-energy confidence that brought to mind legions of lean girl jocks from Rannie’s class at Yale, the ones who wore gold signet rings from boarding schools on their pinkie fingers and whose natural habitat was a hockey field. Even now, twenty-odd years later, the type still intimidated and intrigued Rannie.

  “And Mary. May-ree. It’s been ages!” The woman spoke in a loud ringing tone, although as soon as Rannie introduced herself she realized that all the marble was amplifying sound, sending every word reverberating off the walls.

  “Rannie Bookman?” the granddaughter asked. Her broad smile had vanished, replaced by an expression that wavered from “Do I know you?” to “What are you doing here?”

  “The ladies insisted on walking over from Mary’s, so I served as escort,” Rannie explained quickly and nervously. “I used to be married to Mary’s son, Peter.”

  The smile returned, although its wattage was lower. Rannie took no offense. Charlotte’s granddaughter had every right to seem perturbed by the intrusion of a total stranger. “I’ll be leaving now.”

  “Oh, no, don’t. Stay a bit. I’m Barbara Gaines. But call me Bibi,” she instructed. “Everybody does except Grammy and Daisy.”

  “Then Bibi it is,” Rannie obliged.

  After disposing of everyone’s coats, she motioned for Daisy and Mary to come along and wrapping an arm around Rannie, almost conspiratorially, as if they were old chums, said, “Grammy’s just waking up from a little snooze. Lord! She gave us a scare before.” Bibi patted her heart with her free hand and, yes, she had classic boarding-school fingernails, unpolished yet baby pink with perfect white half-moons.

  A small elevator tucked behind the marble stairway in the rotunda disgorged them on the second-floor landing. For Rannie it was an otherworldly sensation to walk through rooms she’d been reading about not even an hour earlier—the library and its Tiffany glass ceiling, the music room with a harps
ichord that Mozart had played on. In a gargantuan salon whose walls were lined in bottle-green velvet, Rannie caught a fleeting glimpse of a world-famous altarpiece depicting the Crucifixion. It was by a fifteenth-century Flemish artist known as the Master of the Agony.

  “I wrote a paper on that painting for an art history course in college,” Rannie told Bibi.

  “Really! I’ll show it to you later. Personally I find it sickening.”

  Rannie smiled and wondered what would be her Yale professor’s reaction to this blunt critique. An entire lecture had been devoted to the “brutal, frenzied genius” of the crucifixion scene.

  “Here we are—Grammy’s suite,” Bibi announced, opening a door into a sitting room with feminine furniture à la Marie Antoinette, everything in pale tones of blue and yellow watermarked silk.

  “I’ll duck in and see if Grammy’s ready for visitors. The nurse was just getting her in her evening gown.”

  “Evening gown!” Daisy huffed under her breath. “I ask you!”

  Morbid as it might be, Rannie was yearning for a face-to-face with the real, just-barely-alive Charlotte Cummings. A moment later, after a stout woman in full Nurse Ratched regalia exited the bedroom, Rannie found out.

  In the center of a canopy bed worthy of Sleeping Beauty lay a tiny form, eyes closed. A faint, soggy-diaper smell lingered in the room that mammoth arrangements of yellow roses couldn’t mask entirely.

  “Grammy, you have visitors,” Bibi murmured softly, bending over the bed.

  Rannie was mesmerized.

  Oxygen tubes were affixed to tiny nostrils. And evidently a heart was still beating under the gauzy layer of yellow chiffon; otherwise there was no sign of life. Not even a tic of an eyelid.

  “Yellow is Grammy’s signature color,” Bibi said as if an explanation was in order.

  Drenched in diamonds, dazzling canary-yellow ones, Charlotte was certainly all dolled up, as if ready for a night on the town. Yet, Rannie thought, if this frail, humanlike object was chauffeured anywhere, the most fitting destination would be Madame Tussauds in Times Square.

  Bibi motioned to a loveseat, on which Daisy and Mary arranged themselves, frozen smiles on their faces.

  “Daisy is here, Grammy. And Mary Lorimer. And Mary’s daughter-in-law. You’ve never met her. But you remember Mary, don’t you?”

  Did Bibi actually expect her grandmother to reply? Like Daisy, Rannie was put off by the creepy charade and hard pressed to imagine the purpose of it.

  “Why don’t we let Daisy and Mary spend a little time alone with Grammy. Come with me. Would you like to see the altarpiece?”

  “Absolutely!” Rannie replied far too loudly in her eagerness to escape the confines of this weirdo boudoir, and then, because it seemed rude not to, she waggled tentative fingers, murmuring “Bye” to the wizened little odalisque in bed.

  “I’m on an early flight to Florida. We can’t stay long, Barbara,” Daisy trumpeted an imperious warning as Rannie was led past the sitting room where the nurse was stationed with a book of KenKen puzzles.

  “I’m so grateful to Daisy. I know she dreads coming,” Bibi said in a confidential tone as she and Rannie walked down the hallway. “When Grammy first began to fail, all her friends would drop by. Then, of course, as time passed, far less of them.”

  Rannie held her tongue while the grammar cop chided, No, no, no. “Less” is an adverb, not an adjective. Far fewer friends visited, and they came less often.

  “I know it’s wretched for Daisy seeing Grammy the way she is now.” Then Bibi smiled ruefully. “You should have seen her in her prime. . . . And by prime, I mean late eighties. She was still going to opening-night everything.”

  Rannie nodded in reply but again found herself wondering if the bling and designer duds truly made it easier for Bibi to cope with her grandmother’s snail’s-pace march to the grave?

  “Here we are,” Bibi said shortly and with a flourish of her hand motioned Rannie into the green velvet expanses of the salon where the Master of the Agony altarpiece took pride of place. “Supposedly the artist went mad, completely bonkers while painting it, and hung himself before the paint was even dry.”

  Only half listening, Rannie approached the three hinged panels that ran at least twelve feet across the wall facing them. Until this moment, Rannie had only seen it miniaturized in the pages of art history books. In reality, all the main figures—Christ on the Cross, the Virgin Mother, John the Baptist in animal pelts, a frizzy-haired Mary Magdalene—were larger-than-life, NBA-size giants, arranged in a horrifying and yet mesmerizing death-scene tableau.

  “When I was a little girl, I never came in here. The painting scared me silly.”

  Rannie could understand why. She was staring at the crucifixion scene now. This was no patiently suffering Christ biding his time on the cross, stoic in the knowledge that soon the bad stuff would be over and he’d be on his way to heaven. Here was a naked, earthly man being tortured to death.

  “Those are the donors.” Bibi was pointing at a man and woman depicted on the narrower side panels. “Jan and Berthe Meister. He was a jeweler from Bruges. She was his second wife.”

  “You seem to know a lot about the painting.”

  “Only because so many curators and art historians ask to come see it. For years I’ve had to listen to them going into absolute fits of rapture over it. Funny, but the more I look at Jan Meister, the more I see how much he looks like Silas. I wonder if Silas noticed that too.”

  Bibi told Rannie that Jan Meister had commissioned the altarpiece to prove what a good Catholic he was. “There were rumors he was Jewish, and you can understand why. Just look at his nose.” Then Bibi touched her own, straight and thin, a plastic surgeon’s dream.

  Rannie felt herself stiffen. Was it an offhand remark? Or anti-Semitic? Or offhand and anti-Semitic? Even after all these years among Wasps, even being married to one for eleven years, Rannie was still never sure when she was being hypersensitive versus picking up on subtle, ingrained prejudice. She was, after all, her father’s child. Besides owning a good-size schnoz himself, he was a man who always had his radar out, scanning for any and all possible slights to his people. In a show of loyalty, Rannie decided to dispel, right here and now, any misconceptions Bibi might harbor as to Rannie’s own forebears.

  “You know, he actually bears a resemblance to my dad.” Rannie paused, adding, “Irving Bookman.”

  Not even the slightest “oops” flinch crossed Bibi’s face, which made Rannie decide she had been in defensive-Jew mode.

  “As soon as Grammy dies, the altarpiece gets packed up and carted over to the Met. Along with all the paintings of saints in here.” Bibi waved an arm around the room. “They’ll all be exhibited in a special gallery. But I’ll let you in on a little secret,” she said, again speaking with a just entre nous intimacy. “The altarpiece is the only thing the museum wants. They could care less about the rest of the paintings. In fact, no one would mind if they fell off the back of the truck.”

  “Really?” From Ret’s manuscript, Rannie had learned that the other paintings, all from the 1400s and 1500s, were gruesome depictions of martyred saints. Still, they must have considerable value. “May I take a look?”

  “Be my guest. I hope you have a strong stomach.” Bibi crooked her arm through Rannie’s and walked her around the room. On one side of a mammoth fireplace, big enough to roast a bull or burn a heretic, was a painting of a golden-haired maiden in a bloodied bodice holding a silver tray upon which lay her breasts, like twin mounds of pink jelly topped by nipples instead of cherries.

  “That’s Saint Barbara. My namesake.”

  By the time she’d viewed about five paintings of martyred saints, each one more “ewwww yuck” than the one before, Rannie’d had her fill. St. Lawrence roasting on a spit, St. Bartholomew being flayed alive, St. George crushed between two wheels, St. Somebody having his nails pulled out by an oddly cheerful medieval manicurist.

  “Daisy was telling me before th
at your grandmother gave her a painting of a saint. Saint—” The name was escaping Rannie. “She’s the patron saint of sore throats. Was she in here too?”

  “Yes, St. Godelieve. Silas’s tastes were—shall we say—eccentric. After dinner parties, Silas would serve brandy here. He enjoyed watching his guests squirm,” Bibi went on. “From the day Silas died—oh, that has to be thirty years ago—Grammy never stepped foot in here again. I can’t tell you how many times I tried convincing her to put the art in storage or to let the museum have the whole kit and caboodle now.” Bibi paused for a moment and glanced at all the paneling and gloomy furniture. “It could be such a handsome room. But Grammy was unmovable. She’d always say, ‘Silas insisted everything should stay here, just as it is, until it goes to the Met. I’d never dream of going against Silas’s wishes.’ ” Bibi shrugged and shook her head. “I guess I understand. Otherwise, I certainly wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

  “It’s not my idea to dress up my grandmother. I assure you of that.”

  “No?”

  “My grandmother spelled out her wants—to the letter—when she was still sharp as a tack. At six o’clock every evening she is to be dressed as if for a black-tie affair. There are written instructions for what jewels and which handbags go with each gown. She said, ‘Barbara, even if I’m a vegetable, you cannot let anyone visit and find me in a nightgown. I want to look gorgeous.’ ”

  “No! Honestly?” Rannie wondered how many people besides Daisy Satterthwaite were giving Bibi a bum rap.

  “I loved my grandmother dearly. I lived with her after my mother died. So how can I not do what she asked?”

  The question was rhetorical. And even if it hadn’t been, Daisy—with Mary in tow—suddenly appeared at the arched entrance to the salon.